The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Preliminary note: In his lecture, E.A.K. Stockmeyer had spoken, among other things, of warmth corresponding to will, light to imagination, chemistry to feeling, which feels the external within. The lecture was not written down; the stenographer merely recorded the following scheme written on the blackboard: “Life forces / chemical forces / light / warmth / gases / fluids / solids”.

Question: Conventional mathematics encompasses solids, liquids and gases in terms of shape, surface and direction of force. How do you imagine a mathematics of the thermal, chemical and life spheres?

Rudolf Steiner: Well, the first thing to do is to extend the field of mathematics in a way that is appropriate to the subject if we want to encompass higher fields, or I should say, even if we only want to encompass them in an analogous mathematical way.

If we consider that in the 19th century there arose the need to extend mathematics itself – I will mention only what has already been mentioned on other occasions, I believe only yesterday, that there arose the need to add to Euclidean non-Euclidean geometry, — when one considers that at that time the need arose to carry out calculations for higher manifolds than we usually do, then we already have a hint at extensions of mathematics. And we may say: When we consider ordinary ponderable matter, we do not come to use any appropriate application of other manifolds than that of the ordinary three-dimensional manifold.

But today there is still so little inclination to enter into an appropriate view of the fields of heat, chemical and life elements that the continuation of mathematical thinking into these fields is still very problematic today.

For example, there is absolutely no contradiction between the failure to recognize the essence of mass, as propagated by physicists, and the failure to consider the essence of the image of light as presented by Goethe. A reasonable physicist will of course reject the idea of considering the essence of things. However, this immediately leads to the dilemma: the physicist may refuse to go into the essence of things; but anyone who then, from the conventional physical, physical point of view, brews up a philosophy no longer just refuses to do so, but declares: one cannot penetrate into the essence of things at all.

And so we have [today a very one-sided view of the] earth, since in physics we are never concerned with mere geology, but with what results as a conclusion from such a single field for overall knowledge. Thus we are already dealing with harmful consequences of what has gradually emerged over time for physics, not mathematically, but as a mechanistic world view.

What Goethe means when he says that one should not actually speak of the essence of light, but should try to get to know the facts, the deeds and sufferings of light - for these, after all, give a complete description of the essence of light - is not at all identical with the rejection of the question as to the nature of the light, but precisely the indication that a correct, a real phenomenology - which is arranged in the sense that it was discussed here yesterday - ultimately gives a picture of the essence that is being considered. Insofar as it is and wants to be phenomenology and is correct phenomenology, insofar as it concerns the mechanistic field, it gives us a picture of the essence, namely of the essence of the phenomena.

And so one can indeed say: when it is not a matter of mechanical phenomena or of that which is merely mechanical in physical phenomena, when it is a matter of other areas than the mechanical, then the mechanistic view of these other areas of phenomena hinders any advance towards an actual essence of things that can be recognized by the human being. And in this respect it is necessary to emphasize the radical difference between such a phenomenology, as Goethe means and as it can be cultivated in Goetheanism, and what basically wants to dispense with delving into the essence of things.

This has nothing to do with any supposed advantage of the mechanistic method for the drive to dominate over nature. For, ladies and gentlemen, it is self-evident that in the very field in which there have been great triumphs in recent centuries, namely in the technical-mechanical field, the mechanistic part of knowledge of nature could provide a certain satisfaction of the urge to dominate nature. But just ask to what extent this urge to dominate nature has been left behind in other areas precisely because it has been rejected to penetrate to an equally profound level of knowledge as has been striven for in the mechanistic field.

The difference between the mechanistic field and those fields that start with the physical and then go up through the chemical to the organic and so on is not that in these higher fields one is dealing only with qualitative properties or the like, but the difference lies in the fact that what relates to the mechanistic field, to mechanistic physics, is simple, it can be observed, it is the most elementary. Therefore, we have also achieved a certain satisfaction of the instinct to dominate nature in this most elementary field.

But then the question arises: how do we satisfy this urge to dominate when we move into the higher realms that no longer follow mechanistic [laws]? And here we must certainly expect that there will also come times when our domination of nature extends a little beyond the merely mechanistic realm.

In the mechanistic field it is extremely easy, through lack of control, lack of control in the cognitive sense, to bring about, I would say, revenge of nature, revenge of reality. If someone builds a bridge for the railroad without proper knowledge of the mechanistic laws, then at some appropriate opportunity the bridge will collapse and the train will rush down the embankment. In this case, the reaction will immediately manifest itself in the form of an improper control of the cognitive drive. If the control has to relate to somewhat more complicated areas, which, however, must be taken not from the quantitative or the mechanistic, but must be taken precisely from the procedure of actually working out a phenomenology, then this proof is perhaps not always so easy. It can be said with a fair degree of certainty that a bridge built with a deficient cognitive drive will collapse after the third train has crossed it. But today it is not easy for a doctor to immediately recognize the connection between the cognitive drive and the domination of nature when a patient dies. It is less said that the doctor has cured someone to death than that someone has built a bad bridge.

In short, one should be a little more sparing with this emphasis on the urge to dominate nature, purely on the basis of the well-known fact that it is only in the field of mechanistic technology that such a satisfaction of the urge to dominate has become possible through the mechanistic view of nature. Other views of nature will be able to give a completely different satisfaction of the urge to dominate. For example, I will just point out – I already pointed this out from a different point of view yesterday – that one can never build a bridge from the mechanistic world view to the human being, but that the bridge is immediately built when a correct phenomenology is applied.

In Goethe's Theory of Colors, you not only have the presentation of physiological phenomena, the presentation of physical phenomena, but you have the whole field transferred to the sensual-moral effect of colors, where the phenomenon, the whole field, is immediately brought to the human being. And from this area, to which Goethe is still pointing – the sensual-moral effect of colors – one comes, if one continues to work spiritually, to the complete area of human knowledge and thus again to the complete area of knowledge of nature.

And in a way it would perhaps be good if attention were drawn to the fact that a large part of what humanity experiences today as decadent phenomena within European culture is connected with the fact that we have only brought it to a satisfaction of the urge to dominate on one side, on the mechanistic side. We have indeed come a long way in this respect; not only have we built railways and created telegraphs and telephones, until we came to wireless telegraphy, but we have even gone so far in satisfying the urge to dominate that we have destroyed large parts of Europe by concreting them over. We have taken it as far as destruction by thoroughly satisfying the urge to dominate.

It is now as follows: this satisfaction of the urge to dominate nature, which has led to destruction, was basically a straightforward continuation of the purely technical urge to dominate; it lay in the straightforward continuation. These things also belong to those which must now be thoroughly eradicated if the unhealthy expansion of the mechanistic view to encompass all physical phenomena is to be replaced by something that does not simply eliminate the truly specific nature of physical , but when one actually moves away from the mechanization of ideas, which, in their field, give a very good physics, to that which is specific to physical phenomena.

And here it must be pointed out that precisely this approach, which of course cannot be taken to its ultimate conclusions in one hour, that this approach will lead to an expansion of the mathematical field itself, out of the corresponding reality. We must realize that it is precisely out of the mechanistic confusion that such things have become possible, that over the last thirty, forty, fifty years all sorts of views have been put forward about the so-called ether. It was Planck, the physicist mentioned earlier in relation to another field, who finally came to the conclusion: If one wants to talk about the ether in physics at all, then one must not ascribe any material properties to it. One must not think of it materially. So physics has been pushed to the point of not ascribing any material properties to the ether.

What, then, are the actual errors in the ether ideas, in the ether concepts? Well, my dear audience, they did not consist at all in the fact that too little mathematics were done or something like that, but in the fact that one - because one was only inspired by the tendency to extend the mathematical over the specific extended to the specific physical, that one used wrong mathematics in formulas in which the effects of the ether also played a part, that one used the quantities in the same way as one uses them for ponderable matter. The moment we realize that the possibility of inserting ordinary quantities into mathematical formulas ceases when we enter the etheric realm, the impulse will arise to seek a real extension of mathematics itself. You see, one only needs to point out the twofold aspect. The physicist Planck says: If one wants to talk about the ether at all in physics, then in any case one must not ascribe any material properties to it. And in Einstein's theory of relativity, or in relativity theory in general, one found it necessary to eliminate the ether altogether.

Now, the ether cannot be canceled! This is something that I can only hint at now. Rather, the point is that the moment we move from the ether to our physical formulas, that is, to the mathematical formulas that are applied to physics, we are forced to insert negative quantities into the formulas.

We have to insert these quantities negatively - just as we also move from positive to negative quantities in formal physics - simply because, by advancing from positive matters to zero, we have in the ether neither a nothing - what Einstein means - nor a pure negative that must be thought of as a something - as Planck says - but because the ether must be thought of as something that is endowed with properties that are as opposed to the properties of matter as negative numbers are to positive ones. And here, even before we come to realize the character of the negative itself, the pure extension of the mathematical [into the negative] – one may now dispute what a negative quantity is – gains a certain significance for reality, even before we come to realize the character of the negative itself, the extension of the numerical line into the negative gains a certain significance for reality.

Of course, I am well aware that in the 19th century there was a significant dispute in the field of mathematics between those who saw something qualitative in the positive and negative signs, while others saw only a subtrahend in the negative signs, for whom the negative minuend is missing. But that is not the point. The point is that we may indeed be obliged to follow the same path in physics itself that we follow in formal mathematics from the positive to the negative, by moving from ponderable effects to ethereal effects. Then we have to see what will come out of the formulas if we decide to treat the quantities in this way.

And then it will come about, despite the fact that much solid work has been and can be done in formal mathematics, that we are simply obliged to use imaginary quantities in physics as well, for the positive and negative quantities. But in this way we come to a mediation with the quantities in nature.

I am well aware that this has only been very briefly outlined, summarized in just a few words. But I must nevertheless draw attention to the fact that in progressing from ponderable matter up to where one comes to the life forces, one is compelled everywhere to insert negative quantities into the formulas, precisely for the reversal of the material quantitative in general, and that then, as soon as one goes beyond life, one is compelled to move from mere negative quantities to imaginary quantities. But then you don't just have formal quantities, but quantities that now have the property that they no longer refer to the [positive or negative] material, but to the substantial, which thus qualitatively-internally relates to both the ethereal as well as to the ponderable, just as the imaginary number line relates to the positive and negative numbers, to the real number line - so that one can indeed connect what one has in formal mathematics with certain areas of reality.

It would be very unfortunate if attempts to approximate human ideas to reality, to bring human ideas to submerge into reality, were to fail because of the trivial notion that what truly rational physics has to offer would satisfy human instinct for domination of nature to a lesser extent. It would satisfy him more than the so glorified application of the mechanistic world view to mechanistic technology. This mechanistic technology has certainly brought great things to humanity in the development of culture. But those who are always talking about how calculating physics – that is, physics calculated in the way that physics has calculated up to now – how physics has brought glorious progress in the field of natural science and in the technical field, they should consider that other fields may have suffered greatly from this mere focusing of attention on the purely technical field. And to escape from the plight, from the decadence into which mere technical control and its foundations, mere mechanistic knowledge, has brought us, to escape from this plight, from this decadence, we would be in great need of a leaning towards a physics that really cannot speak in the same way of a rejection of the knowledge of the essence, as it must indeed apply to the mechanical field, which is accessible to mechanistic knowledge.

Yes, you see, it is so easy for the mechanical field to dispense with essence because this essence, I would say, is so obvious, because it is spread out in space. And it is somewhat more difficult to achieve the same in the field of physics as in the field of the mechanistic. Hence all the talk of not getting into the essence. It is easy for the physicist to simply refuse to recognize the essential if he only wants to think in mechanistic terms. Because behind what today's formulas, as they are used today to express this [mechanistic] mathematically, there is no essence. The essence only begins where one no longer just applies these formulas, but where one penetrates into the mathematical essence itself.

That was just to answer the question of how one might think of the mathematical in an extended way beyond the imponderable.

Preliminary remark: A question was asked about the field of electrical forces. The stenographer did not note down the wording of the question.

Rudolf Steiner: This is a question about which one should actually give not just one lecture but a whole series — quite apart from the fact that the question is not related to the topic of this evening.

What was presented yesterday [in Mr. Stockmeyer's lecture] tried to point out how we have to distinguish, so to speak, in the field of the imponderable - in contrast to the field of the ponderable: a field of light, a chemical field and a field of life. Descending from the imponderable to the ponderable, we come to the region of heat, which to some extent is common to both, then to the region of air, then to the region of liquid and solid bodies. Within these regions, nothing can be found, especially for those who are able to consider things phenomenologically, that belongs to the region of electrical forces. The question here was only about electrical forces. And to arrive at an answer to this question, which, I would like to say, is not in any way lay, is only possible if one relates the whole field of phenomena, the whole field of what is empirically given to man in his environment, to man himself. I do not want to say that there cannot also be a way of looking at it that, as it were, disregards the human being and only considers what, in natural phenomena, well, to put it bluntly, is not the concern of human beings. But one comes to an understanding from different points of view, and one of the points of view should be characterized here, at least in terms of its significance.

If you consider everything that belongs to the realm of the ponderable, that is, everything solid, liquid, expandable, expandable, gaseous, you will find, starting from this realm, such effects that also have more or less material parallels in the human organism. But the closer you approach the realm of the imponderable, the more you will find that the parallel phenomena, at least initially given for consciousness, can be attributed to the soul. Those who are not satisfied with all kinds of word definitions or coinages, but who want to get to the bottom of things, will find that even the explanation and experience of warmth rises into the soul.

When we then come to the area of light effects, we have first given the light area as our light field, as something that lies in the area of sensory eye perceptions, and with that these take on a character of the soul. Allow me the expression: we have filtered the scope of eye perceptions into a certain sum of ideas.

If we now proceed to the field of the so-called chemical effects, it might seem doubtful or debatable, according to the usual discussions of today's chemistry, to say that we are also dealing with an ascent to the soul when we speak of the effect of the chemical field on the human being. However, one need only look at what the physiological-psychological study of the visual process has already provided today, and one will find that much of the kind that relates to chemical effects is already mixed into it. It has indeed become necessary, and rightly so, to speak of a kind of chemism if one wants to describe the processes that take place inside the eye during the visual process.

Of course, experiments in this area are thoroughly tainted by current material conceptions; but at this point even contemporary science is to a certain extent, I might say, brought to see, at least in a certain area, the very first, most elementary beginnings of the right way. And when we speak of chemistry in our external life, in so far as it relates to our consciousness of ideas through the process of seeing, we actually speak in a similar way to how we speak when we simply look at the shaped body, that is, the mere surface structure and what we make of the surface structure as an inner image of some solid body. Anyone who, as a proper psychologist, can analyze the relationships between the idea of a shaped, solid body and the exterior that gives rise to this idea will find that this analysis must be fairly parallel to that which relates to what goes on below the surface, so to speak, below the shaped surface of the outer body, as a chemical process, and what is then, through the process of seeing, the inner, soul-like property of the human being.

Something very similar applies to the phenomena of life. Thus, advancing from the ponderable to the imponderable, we come to the conclusion that, in the case of parallel experiences within the human being, we have to assume processes of consciousness that are strongly reminiscent of the imaginative. We can therefore say: if we ascend – if we remember yesterday's scheme [of Mr. Stockmeyer] – from the solid to the liquid, to the gaseous, to the heat-loving, light-loving, to the chemical element – if we ascend here, we come to areas that have their correlate in the human being through the imaginative.

[We ascend] from the ponderable to the imponderable in nature and from the processes that take place in the organism inside the human being - which certainly also underlie consciousness, but which do not enter into consciousness as such - up to the conceptual. Now, however, psychology does not yet have an appropriate method for, I would say, really presenting this whole range of a person's inner experience to human attention in an orderly way.

Today, people tend to avoid talking about the actual affects of the soul, about imagination, feeling, will, and so on. Psychology, too, has suffered from the materialistic world view, and it has suffered from this materialistic world view in that it is unable to find any proper ideas about the soul-related. Anyone who wants to find such proper ideas about the soul-related must, of course, completely abandon the ideas of Wundt or the like, which are still regarded as very scientific by so many today. All this talk is basically nothing that even remotely touches the matter. Anyone who studies Wundt's many books will find that it has indeed had a very strong influence, because Wundt came from materialistic physiology into the field of psychology and then even into the field of philosophy. One will find that there is absolutely no possibility of arriving at an appropriate view of the nature of representation and the nature of will. I could mention many other names, not only Wundt's, about whom the same could be said. If one can arrive at such an objective view of the nature of representations, one sees that just as one must raise the correlate of the ponderable to the correlate of the imponderable – see the following diagram – and thereby find the representational in man, so one must go below the correlate of the ponderable in man in order to advance. And there we come to the correlate of something which I would initially like to describe as X. Let us look for it in the human being itself. We find it in the will element of the human being. To deal with what lies between the two and how it lies between the two would be taking things too far today.

We come to the will element of the human being and must then ask: What is the relationship between this will element of the human being and its relationship to external nature? What is this X? What is the correlate of the will, just as the perceptions are the given of the affects in the imponderable? Then one must say to oneself, in spiritual scientific terms: this correlate in nature is the electrical and also the magnetic phenomena – processes, I could say better. And just as in the subjective-objective there is a relationship between the conceptual and the realm of the imponderable, as I called it yesterday, so there is a relationship between the volitional element in man and the electrical, electromagnetic and magnetic realm in non-human nature. If today, when, I would like to say, empiricism is subjugating the reluctant materialistic minds, if today you are again looking for something that can lead you to, well, I would like to say at least make the first step of materialism towards these things, you will find that physics has been forced in recent years to abandon the old concept of matter and to recognize in the electron and ion theory a certain identity between what, if I may express myself trivially, flies through space as free electricity space and what flies through space as electricity bound to so-called matter; in any case, it has been forced to recognize that which flies through space as electricity and represents a certain speed in flying through space. This speed, when expressed in mathematical formulas, now shows exactly the same properties as matter itself. As a result, the concept of matter merged with the concept of electrical effects.

If you consider this, you will say to yourself: There is no reason to speak of an electromagnetic or other light theory, but what is present is that when we look at the outside world, where we do not perceive the electrical directly through the senses, we must somehow suspect it in what is now usually called the material. It lies further from us than what is perceptible through the senses; and this more distant element expresses itself precisely by being related to what lies further from the subjective consciousness of the human being than his world of ideas, namely his world of will. When you descend into the region of the human being that I have designated as the middle region, and then descend further, you will find this descent to be very much the same as descending into the nature of the will. You only need to see how man, although he lives with his soul in the world of his ideas, does not have the actual entity of the will present in his consciousness, but rather deeply buried in the unconscious.

In spiritual scientific terms, this would have to be expressed as follows: In the life of ideas we are actually only awake, in the life of the will we sleep, even when we are awake. We only have perceptions in our life of will. But what this element of the will itself is like, when I just stretch out a hand, eludes ordinary consciousness. It eludes us inwardly as a correlate, just as the electrical eludes us outwardly in the material, in the direct perception that one has of it, for example, in relation to color or to what is visible at all.

And so, if we are looking for a path for the fields of luminosity, chemism and so on, we come from the ponderable into the imponderable by moving upwards. But then, by moving downwards, we come to the realm that lies below the ponderable, as it were. And we will then penetrate into the realm of electrical and magnetic phenomena. Anyone who wants to see with open eyes how, for example, the earth itself has a magnetic effect, how the earth as such is the carrier of electrical effects, will see a fruitful path opened up in this observation, which is of course nothing more than a continuation of phenomenology, in order to really penetrate not only the field of [extra-terrestrial] electrical phenomena, but also, let us say, the electrical phenomena bound to the earth's planets. And an immensely fruitful field is opening up for the study of telluric and extratelluric electrical phenomena, so that one can almost, or not only almost, say in all fields: If we do not close the door to the essential nature of things by stating from the outset what may be thought about these phenomena of the external world and their connection with man - for example, what can be expressed mathematically - but if we have the will to enter into the real phenomena, then the phenomena actually begin to speak their own language.

And it is simply a misunderstood Kantianism, which is also a misunderstanding of the world view, when it is constantly being said that one cannot penetrate from the outside world of phenomena into the essence of things. Whoever can somehow logically approach such thoughts, whoever has logic, has knowledge in his soul, so that he can approach such things, he realizes that this talk of phenomena and of what stands behind it as the “thing in itself” means no more than if I say: here I have written down S and O, I do not see the other, I cannot get from the $S and O to the thing in itself, that tells me nothing, that is a theory-appearance. But if I don't just look at the $ and O, but if I am able to read further and to read the phenomena, but here in this case the letters, not just look at them in such a way that I say: there I have the phenomenon; I cannot get behind this phenomenon, I do not enter into the “thing in itself,” but when I look at the phenomena, as they mutually illuminate each other, just as darkness is illuminated, then the reading of the phenomena becomes speech and expresses that which is alive in the essence of things. It is mere verbiage to speak of the opposition of phenomena and of the essence of things; it is like philosophizing about the letter-logic in Goethe's “Faust” and the meaning of Goethe's “Faust”: if one has successively let all the letters that belong to “Faust” speak, then the essence of “Faust” is revealed. In a real phenomenology, phenomena are not such that they are of the same kind or stand side by side; they relate to one another, mutually elucidate one another, and the like. The one who practices real phenomenology comes to the essence of things precisely by practicing real phenomenology.

It would really be a matter of the Kantian inert mind of philosophy finally breaking free from the inertia of accumulating the “opposites in themselves” and the “thing in itself”, which have now confused minds and spirits long enough to really be able to look at the tremendous progress that has also been made in the epistemological relationship through Goetheanism.

This is precisely what is so important for anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, that attention is drawn to such things and that they can indeed be used to fertilize what in turn leads to an inner relationship between the human being and the spiritual substance in the world - while one has artificially put on, let's say, a suede skin, these forms of all kinds of criticism-of-practical-and-theoretical-reason-blinkers, through which one cannot see through. These are the things that are at stake today.

Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science should certainly not be somehow sectarian; it should certainly not consist merely of explaining to people in some closed circles over tea that the human being consists is composed of a physical body, an etheric body, an astral body and an ego. This, of course, is the kind of stuff that is taught in seance circles over a cup of tea, and it is easy to make fun of those who gain some outer, but also misunderstood, knowledge from such quackery. But spiritual science – one can feel this when one really familiarizes oneself with it – spiritual science is actually capable of stimulating many things anew that really need to be stimulated if we want to make progress. The decadence, the destruction and the social chaos that we are experiencing today have not arisen merely from the sphere of the outer life of our time, but also from the inner human powers of destruction; and these inner human powers of destruction have truly not come from the least of what people have thought through long periods of time.

In this time it is not at all surprising that people arise who find it appropriate to compare Goethe's memories of an old mystic, which he expresses in his saying:

If the eye were not sunlike
How could we behold the light?
If the power of God does not live in us,
How can we be delighted with the divine?

to encounter with the saying: “If the eye were not ink-like, how could we see the writing...”

Indeed, esteemed attendees, I could talk at length about the application of Goethe's saying today, but that would take until tomorrow. So, in conclusion, I would like to summarize what I said about Goetheanism and the present time in something similar to a saying that ties in with what I just mentioned. It is indeed true that the present time, with all that is chaotic in it, could not be as it is if the views of people like Ostwald and similar ones did not haunt it.

If the present world were not so Ostwald-like, how could it see all the external effects of nature so wrongly? If there were not so much of Ostwald's power in present-day people, how could they achieve so much in all kinds of materialistic-physical and similar things, which now truly do not work to a high degree for the true progress of science, but rather against it.

Roman Boos: How can the principle of establishing legal norms through codification develop in the future? How can the legal effect be exercised from the parliamentary centers without the codification principle being paralyzed or dying, as is the case today?

Rudolf Steiner: The vitalization of the legal life, of which Dr. Boos spoke, will, it seems to me, be brought about in a very natural way in the threefold social organism. How should we think of this formation of the threefold social organism in concrete terms? Truly in a similar way - it is not intended to express a mere analogy - truly in a similar way as one has to think of the organic threefoldness in the natural human organism.

The view, which Dr. Boos also criticized today, that the heart is a kind of pump that drives blood to all possible parts of the organism, this view must be overcome for physiology. It must be recognized that the activity of the heart is the result of the balanced interaction of the other two activities of the human organism: metabolic activity and nerve-sense activity. If a physiologist who is grounded in reality now wants to describe this human organism and its functioning, then in general it is only necessary to describe the metabolic activity on the one hand and the nerve-sense activity on the other in a truly objective way, for it is through their polar interaction and interpenetration that the balancing rhythmic activity arises; this is already formally present. This is something that must be taken into account if we want to imagine life in the threefolded social organism. This life in the threefolded social organism can only be truly imagined if one still has a sense of the practice of life.

When I had published a few things and spoken about threefolding in a variety of ways, I was met with the objection that it is indeed difficult to imagine how the law can acquire content when it is to be separated in life from the spiritual part of the social organism on the one hand and the economic part on the other. Especially people like Stammler, for example, who has been mentioned often today, they understand the law in such a way that they only recognize a kind of formalism on the one hand. On the other hand, they believe that this [formal system] acquires its material content from the economic needs of the social organism. On the basis of such views, I was told that law cannot be separated from economic life for the simple reason that the forces of economic life must produce the legal statutes by themselves. When one includes something in one's concepts, one constantly thinks of something inanimate, of something that just amounts to making statements, for example, from economic forces, which are then codified and can be used as a guide. One mainly thinks of the fact that such codified statements exist and that one can look them up.

In the natural, living threefold organism, we are dealing, I might say, with two polar opposites: on the one hand, with spiritual life and, on the other, with economic life. Spiritual life, which arises when people are born and develop into existence through their own actions, represents a reality through its own content. The fruitful side of intellectual life will develop if no restrictions are imposed by any standards that limit what one can do. The fruitful side will develop quite naturally simply because it is in the interest of people that those who can do more and have greater abilities can also achieve more. It will be a matter of course that, let us say, a person is taken on as a teacher for a number of children, and those who are looking for a teacher can be sure that he can achieve the desired results in his sphere. If intellectual life is truly free, the whole structure of intellectual life arises out of the nature of the matter itself; the people who are part of it work in this intellectual life. On the other hand, we have the economic part of the threefold social organism. Here the structure of economic life arises out of the needs of consumption and the possibilities of production, out of the various interrelations, out of the relationships that arise. Of course, I can only briefly hint at this in this answer to the question. But the various relationships that can play between people and people or between groups of people and individuals or between different groups of people also play a role. All of this will move economic life. And in these two areas, what is called “law” is actually out of the question, insofar as these two areas take care of their own affairs. If we think in real terms – of course people today do not think in real terms but in theoretical terms, proceeding from what already exists, and so they confuse the legal ideas that the spiritual realm already has with the legal ideas of the economic realm – if we think in real, practical terms, then in the free spiritual life we do not consider legal impulses at all, but we consider impulses of trust, impulses of ability. It is simply absurd to speak in the free spiritual life of the fact that someone who is able has a right to work. There can be no question of speaking of such a right, but one must speak of the fact that one needs him, that he should work. The one who can teach children will naturally be taught, and there will be no question of whether or not there is an entitlement; it is not somehow a question of right as such. It is the same in economic life. Written or oral contracts will play a part, and confidence in the observance of contracts will have to play a part. If economic life is left to its own devices, the fact that contracts are being observed will be seen in the simple fact that economic life cannot function if contracts are not observed.

I am well aware that when such practical matters are discussed today, they are considered by some to be highly impractical because they bring in highly impractical matters from all sides and then believe that what they have brought in and what is supposed to have an effect is practical, whereas what has been described here is impractical. But now we must bear in mind that in these two spheres, in these organs, in the economic sphere and in the spiritual sphere of the threefolded social organism, these things live side by side. If we now honestly consider how this coexistence can be organized democratically, with people living side by side in the two areas - in the economic structure and in the spiritual structure - then the necessity arises for the relationships to be defined from person to person. Here the living necessity simply arises that the one who, let us say, stands at some post of spiritual life, has to establish his relationship to many other personalities and so on. These living relationships must arise between all mature people, and the relationships between mature people and non-mature people arise precisely from the relationship of trust in the field of spiritual life. But all the relationships that arise from the living forces on the one hand of economic life and on the other of spiritual life, all these relationships require that, to a certain extent, people who have come of age begin to define their relationships in their spheres of life among themselves. And this gives rise to a living interaction, which will, however, have the peculiarity that these determinations - because life is alive and cannot be constrained by norms - must be flexible.

An absolutely codified law would appear to be something that contradicts development. If you had a rigidly codified law, it would be basically the same as having a seven-year-old child whose organic life forces you would now determine and, when the child has reached the age of forty, would demand that it still live by them. The same applies to the social organism, which is indeed a living organism and will not be the same in 1940 as it was in 1920. For example, in the case of land, it is not a matter of laying down such codified law, but rather it is a living interrelationship between the soil and the personalities who stand in the other two characterized areas - the spiritual and the economic - and work in such a way that everything can be kept in flux, in order to be able to also change and metamorphose the true democratic soil on which all people live their present relationships. This is what needs to be said with regard to the establishment of public legal relationships. Criminal relationships arise only as a secondary matter when individual personalities act in an anti-social way against what has been established as the right relationship between people who have come of age. However, when considering criminal law in the context of the threefold social organism, it becomes clear that it is necessary to take a closer look at the justification of punishment in a more practical and realistic way. I must say that the much-vaunted legal science has not even managed to develop a clear legal concept in this area. There is a now rather old work, “Das Recht in der Strafe” (The Right to Punish) by Ludwig Laistner. In it, the introduction presents a history of all theories about the right to punish: deterrence impulses, educational impulses, and all the rest. Laistner shows, above all, that these theories are actually quite fragile, and then he comes to his own theory, which consists in the fact that one can only derive a right to punish from the fact that the criminal has entered the sphere of the other person through his own free will. Let us assume, then, that one person has created some circle of life for himself, and that is also hypothetical; the other person enters this circle of life by entering his house or his thoughts, for example, and robbing him. Now Ludwig Laistner says: “He has entered my sphere of life, and that is why I have power over him; just as I have power over my money or my own thoughts, so I now also have power over the criminal because he has entered my sphere. This power over him is conceded to me by the criminal himself by entering my sphere. I can now realize this power by punishing him. The punishment is only the equivalent for him entering my circle. That is the only thing that can be found in legal thinking about the justification of punishing a criminal. Whether this happens directly or in a figurative sense, by having it carried out by the state, are secondary questions. But why are these things actually unclear? Why is there something that constantly prevents us from having really clear-cut concepts? Because these concepts are taken out of social conditions that are already full of ambiguities. It presupposes that there is an organism present and that through the organism there is living movement and thus circulation – just as the heart presupposes that other organs are present in order for it to function. The legal institution is, in a sense, the heart of the social organism and presupposes that other things will unfold; it presupposes that other forces are already present. And if there is any lack of clarity in these other circumstances, then it is also quite natural that there can be no clearly defined legal system. But a clearly defined legal system will come about precisely because the other forces that are inherent to the other members of the social organism are allowed to develop in this three-part social organism. Only in this way can the foundations be laid for the development of a true legal system.

Above all, we have not even clearly raised the question today: What is the actual content of the legal system? Yes, you see, in a certain sense, a legal science must be very similar to mathematics, to a living mathematics. But what would we do with all our mathematics if we could not realize it in life? We must be able to apply it. If mathematics were not a living thing and we could not apply it in reality, then all our mathematics would be no science at all. Mathematics as such is, first of all, a formal science. In a certain sense, a properly elaborated jurisprudence would also be a formal science first of all. But this formal science must be such that the object of its application is encountered in reality. And this object of its application in reality is the relationships of people who have come of age and live side by side, who not only seek a balance between their spheres of life here, but are also still within the spiritual and economic links of the social organism.

Thus, only this threefold structure of the social organism will really make it possible for public thought to be formed, and a right that is not publicly thought is not a naturally established right. This would make it possible for such legal concepts to be formed publicly, which would then be flexible, as has rightly been demanded today. Therefore, I believe that it was a good thing that Dr. Boos called for the reform of legal life precisely from the realization of the threefold social organism.

Roman Boos: Dear attendees! The aim of these lectures was to attempt to show, from the perspective of specialized science, how anthroposophically oriented spiritual science could lead to the fertilization and further development of the individual specialized scientific fields. The visitors will have had the thoroughly consistent impression throughout the whole event that something is not being hatched in a narrow circle, but that from a central point a real spiritual fertilization into the individual subject areas can take place. Even if not everyone was able to recognize this at the very beginning of their efforts, surely everyone who looked, as it were, at the driving forces present here, who looked at the fertilizing forces that radiate out and not on the value of the first formulated formulations, could be convinced that here is something in relation to our spiritual life, which deserves attention and, as far as possible, also cooperation and goodwill from wide circles – especially here in Switzerland. This is so because it is precisely here that a spiritual force is struggling to the light that can actually claim to have a spiritually fertilizing effect on the social community.

There will be an opportunity for discussion following Dr. Steiner's lecture on “Hygiene as a Social Question.

Rudolf Steiner: Dearly beloved! That the social question is one of the most pressing issues of our time is not doubted in the broadest circles. And wherever there is even a modicum of concern for the issues arising from the development of human history in the present day, wherever there are threatening or unresolved impulses for the future, all of this can be summarized under the heading of the social question. But we must admit that the consideration and treatment of this social question in the present suffers from the fundamental defect that afflicts so much of our intellectual and moral life, and indeed of our whole civilized life, namely, the intellectualism of our time. It suffers from the fact that its problems are so often viewed only from the standpoint of an intellectualistic consideration. The social question is discussed more from the point of view of the right or the left. The intellectualism of these discussions is shown by the fact that they start from certain theories, from the assumption that this or that must be so or so, that this or that must be abolished. In doing so, little consideration is given to the human being himself. One treats people as if there were something general like “the human being”, as if there were not something that is individually developed in a particular way in each person. One does not turn one's attention to the uniqueness and peculiarity of the individual human being. Therefore, our whole consideration of the social question also takes on something abstract, something that today so rarely translates into social feelings, into the attitudes that play between person and person. The defect in our social thinking is most clearly seen when we focus on a specific area, one that is perhaps more suitable than many others for social reflection, for example, the area of hygiene, insofar as hygiene is a public matter that concerns not the individual but the human community.

Of course, we are not lacking in hygienic instructions, treatises and writings on health care as a public matter. But one must ask: how do these instructions, these considerations of hygiene, fit into social life? And here one must say: they are so introduced that individual discussions about proper health care are published as the result of medical, physiological, and scientific knowledge, whereby the trust that one has in a field whose inner essence one is not able to test is supposed to form the basis for the acceptance of such rules. On the basis of authority alone, the broadest sections of the population can accept the rules on hygiene that emerge from the study chambers and examination rooms, the medical laboratories, and are then made public.

If one is convinced, however, that in the course of modern history, in the course of the last four centuries, a yearning for a democratic order in all matters has arisen in humanity, then, even if it seems grotesque to many today, one is confronted with the undemocratic nature of the pure belief in authority that is demanded in the field of hygiene. The undemocratic nature of this blind faith in authority is juxtaposed with the yearning for democracy, as it has often - albeit, one might say, in a very paradoxical way - culminated in the present day.

I know very well that the sentence I have just uttered is perceived by many as paradoxical, because one simply does not combine the way someone receives health care-related information with the democratic demand that the community of emancipated people should judge public affairs that concern every emancipated person, whether directly or through their representatives. Of course it must be said that something like a hygienic view, a hygienic cultivation of public life, cannot be fully realized in a democratic way, because it depends on the judgment of the person seeking knowledge in a particular field. But on the other hand, the question must arise: should we not be striving for a greater democratization in such a field as this, which concerns every single person and thus the human community as closely, as infinitely closely as public health care does? Today, we are certainly told a great deal about the way in which man should live in terms of air and light, in terms of nutrition, in terms of the disposal of waste products produced either by man himself or by his environment, and so on and so forth. But the rules governing these things that are thrown upon humanity are mostly unworkable for the people to whom they are supposed to apply.

Now I do not wish to be misunderstood; I do not wish to be misunderstood as taking a particular stand on anything in this lecture, which is supposed to be dedicated to the topic “Hygiene as a social issue”. I do not wish to deal one-sidedly with what today tends to be treated one-sidedly from the point of view of a party or of a certain scientific conviction. I would like – perhaps you will permit this small apparent departure from the role in the introduction – I would like neither to take any party for the old superstition that devils and demons go around and move in and out of people as diseases, nor would I like to take sides for the modern superstition that the bacilli and bacteria move in and out of people and cause the diseases. Whether one is dealing with a spiritualist, spiritual superstition of old or with a materialistic superstition, that may concern us less today. But I would like to touch on something that permeates our entire education, especially insofar as this education depends on the fundamental scientific beliefs of our time.

Even if it is asserted from many sides today that scientifically materialism, as it asserted itself in the middle and still in the last third of the 19th century, has been overcome, this assertion cannot apply to the one who really sees through the essence of materialism and its opposite , because this materialism has been overcome at most for some people who see that today's scientific facts no longer allow us to declare in a sweeping way that everything that exists is just some mechanical, physical or chemical process taking place in the material world. It is not enough that, forced by the power of facts, some people have come to this conviction. For in the face of this conviction stands the other fact that now, despite this conviction, those who have it - and the others even more so - when it comes to explaining something specifically, to forming an opinion about something specific, then they do include the materialistic direction in their way of thinking. It is also said that atoms and molecules are harmless accounting coins, of which one does not want to claim anything other than that they are thought-things. But the consideration has therefore remained an atomistic, a molecularistic one. We explain the phenomena of the world in terms of the behavior and the mutual relationship of atoms or molecular processes, and it does not matter whether we now imagine that any thought, feeling or other process is only related to the material processes of atoms and molecules, but rather it depends on the direction of our entire state of mind, the direction of our spirit, when it takes as a basis for its explanations only what is thought in terms of atoms, what emerges from the smallest, the contrived smallest. What matters is not whether one has the conviction, literally or mentally, that there is something other than atomistic effects, than material atomic effects, but what matters is whether one has the possibility of making other explanations of the world the guiding principle of one's mind than deriving phenomena from the atomic. It is not what we believe, but how we explain, how we behave in our souls, that matters. And here, at this point, it must be stated with conviction that only genuine spiritual science, anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, can help us to overcome the evil that can be characterized in this way, as I have just done.

I would like to prove that this can now be the case in concrete terms. There is hardly anything that confronts us with more confusion than the differences that are often asserted today between the human body and the human soul or the human spirit, between what are physical illnesses and what are so-called mental or spiritual illnesses. It is precisely the appropriate distinction and the appropriate interrelationship of such facts of human life as those of the sick body or the seemingly sick soul that suffer in terms of understanding under the materialistic-atomistic way of thinking. For what, then, is actually the essence of the materialism that has gradually emerged as the newer world view of many people and that has by no means been overcome, but is in fact in its heyday today? What is its essence? The essence of materialism is not that one looks at material processes, that one looks at the material processes that take place in the human body and that one devotedly studies the miracle-working and miracle-working of the human nervous system and the other human organs or the nervous system of animals or the organs of other living beings; it is not that studying these things makes one a materialist, but it is abandoning the spirit in the study of material processes that makes one a materialist, that one looks into the world of matter and sees only matter and material processes.

But this is what spiritual science must assert - today I can only speak about this point in summary - that wherever material processes appear to us externally for the senses, those processes which today's science alone wants to accept as observable and exact, that wherever these material processes are only the external appearance, the external manifestation of spiritual forces and powers at work behind and within them. It is not the hallmark of spiritual science to look at a person and say: Oh, there is the body; this body is a sum of material processes, but within it the person cannot exist alone, he has his immortal soul independently of it ; and the fact that one is now beginning to develop all kinds of abstract theories and views about this immortal soul, which is independent of the body, in a rather mystical way, does not characterize a spiritual worldview at all. One can certainly say: Man has, in addition to his body, which consists of material processes, an immortal soul that is taken to some spiritual realm after death. One is therefore not yet a spiritual scientist in the sense of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science.

One is only a spiritual scientist when one realizes that this material body with its material processes is a creature of the soul, when one understands in detail how the soul, which was there before birth or, let us say, before conception of the human being, works, how this soul forms, how it sculpts the structure, indeed the substantiation of the human body. If we can truly see the direct unity of this body and the soul everywhere, and if we can see how the soul's activity in the body wears out this body as such, how this body partially dies every minute, and how then, in the moment of death, I would say, the radical realization of what what happens to the body every moment through the influence of the soul and spirit, if one sees through this living interplay, this constant working of the soul in the body, in the individual concrete case, if one strives to say: the soul breaks down into very concrete processes, then it passes over into the processes of liver activity, then it passes over into the processes of breathing, then into the processes of heart activity, then into the processes of brain activity – in short, if one is able to present the physical body as the result of a spiritual one when describing the material in the human being, then one is a spiritual scientist. Spiritual science comes to a true appreciation of the material precisely because it does not see only what today's science sees in the individual concrete material process, what the eye ascertains or what is then recorded as the result of external observation in abstract terms. Rather, spiritual science is spiritual science solely because it shows everywhere how the spirit works in the material, how it looks devotedly at the material effects of the spirit.

That is the one thing that matters. On the other hand, it is important that one is thereby saved from all the abstract, chatty talk about a soul independent of the [physical] human being, about which, as far as life between birth and death is concerned, one can only fantasize. For between birth and death, with the exception of sleep, the soul and spirit are so devoted to the bodily effects that they live in them, through them, and present themselves in them. One must come to the point of being able to study the soul and spirit outside of the human life cycle and to accept the human life cycle between birth and death as a result of the soul and spirit. Then one looks at the real, concrete unity of the spiritual-soul with the physical-bodily. Then one does anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, because then one has the prospect that this human being, with all his individual structures, stands before one as a result of the spiritual-soul, also for knowledge. The mystical theosophical view, which puts forward beautiful theories about all kinds of body-free spiritualities, cannot serve the concrete sciences of life, it cannot serve life at all, it can only serve intellectualistic or soul-based lust, which wants to get rid of life, of the outer life, as quickly as possible and then, in order to have an inner satisfaction, to be able to indulge in an inner lust, weaves all kinds of fantasies about the spiritual and soul.

Here in this anthroposophically oriented spiritual movement, it is a matter of working very seriously, of cultivating a spiritual science that is able to enliven physics, mathematics, chemistry, physiology, biology and anthropology, so that it is not a matter of stating religiously or philosophically on the one hand that the human being an immortal soul, and then to pursue anthropology, biology, physics and chemistry as if one were only dealing with material processes, but rather it is a matter here of applying what can be gained in knowledge about the soul and spirit to the details of life, of looking into the miracle of the body itself. It may well be said, even if it sounds paradoxical to some: there are those who want to be good mystics or good theosophists and want to talk about everything under the sun, how the human being consists of a physical body, etheric body, astral body, I and so on, but they don't even have a clue about what expression of the soul it is when you sneeze, for example. It depends on seeing matter, not as matter, but as the manifestation of the spirit. Then one also receives sound, content-filled views about the spirit, but then one also receives a spiritual science that can be fruitful for the science of life.

But something else is also achieved with this. It achieves the ability to overcome what, in recent times, precisely because of the materialization of scientific knowledge, has driven us into specialization. I certainly do not want to deliver a diatribe against specialization, because I am well aware of its justification. I know that certain things today must be practiced by specialists simply because a specialized technique is needed for them. But the point is that if someone clings to the material, he can never become a specialist and gain a world view that can be applied in life, because material processes are an infinite field. They are an infinite field out in nature, and they are an infinite field within the human being. If you just study the human nervous system based on what is currently known, you can spend a long time on it, at least as much time as specialists are usually willing to spend on their studies. But if one has only what the material processes are in what happens in the nervous system, only what is expressed in the abstract terms that are the subject of science today, then nothing leads one to anything universal that can become the basis of a worldview. The moment you begin to observe spiritually, let us say, the human nervous system, you cannot observe this nervous system without what you find active in it as spirit leading you immediately to what underlies the muscular system, the bone system, the sense of the nervous system as something spiritual, because the spiritual is not something that can be broken down into individual parts like the material. Rather, the spiritual is something that – and this is only the most basic way of characterizing it – spreads out like a limb or an organism. And just as I cannot look at a person by merely looking at his five fingers and otherwise covering him, so too in spiritual science I cannot look at a single detail without what I perceive in this detail as spiritual-soul leading me to a totality. If we are led to such a totality — even if it is perhaps only a specialist in brain or nerve research — then we will be able to get an overall picture of the human being from the observation of this individual link in the human organism; then we will be led into the position to arrive at something truly universal for a world view, and then the peculiar thing is that we can begin to speak of something that can be understood by all people who have common sense and sound understanding.

That is the great difference between how spiritual science can speak about man and how specialized, materialistic science must speak about man. You see, let us take the simple case of how specialized, materialistic science is presented to you in any of the textbooks in use today. If you, as an ordinary person who has not learned much about the nervous system, take a manual about the nervous system in your hand – well, you will probably soon stop reading or, in any case, you will not gain very much that can give you a basis for looking at the human being as a real human being in his value, in his dignity. But if we listen to what spiritual science has to say about the human nervous system, then what leads to the whole human being follows everywhere. It provides such enlightenment about the whole human being that the idea that arises in one's mind presents something of the value, essence and dignity of the human being with whom one is dealing. And this applies even more when we look at the human being not just in terms of one of his or her many parts, but it applies especially when we look at the sick person, this sick person with his or her many deviations from the so-called normal, especially when we are able to look at the whole person, when he or she is under the influence of this or that disease. What nature presents to our soul in the sick person is apt to lead us deep into the world's interconnections, to show us how this person is organized and how, because of his organization, the atmospheric and even extraterrestrial influences can affect this person, how this human organization is connected to these or those substances of nature, which then turn out to be healing agents, and so on.

We are led into broad contexts, and it may be said that if we supplement what can be recognized in this way about the healthy human being with what can be recognized through the sick human being, then a deep insight into the whole context and the deeper meaning of life will open up. But everything that comes to light in this way is the basis for a knowledge of human nature, and can be expressed in such a way that it can be spoken to all people. Of course, we have not yet reached this point, because spiritual science, in the sense in which it is meant here, has only been working for a short time. Therefore, as Dr. Boos said in his introductory words just now, the lectures given here can often only be seen as a beginning. But the tendency of this spiritual science is to work out what is present in the individual sciences in such a way that what every human being should know about the human being can actually be brought to every human being.

And now imagine if spiritual science first has such a transforming effect on science and if spiritual science then succeeds in developing forms of knowledge for the healthy and sick human being that can be made accessible to general human consciousness If this succeeds, how different human beings will be in social life, how differently understanding one person will be confronted with another than today, when everyone passes by the other and has no understanding for the special individuality of this other person. The social question will only be taken out of its intellectualism when it will emerge from the most diverse areas of life based on factual knowledge, when it is based on the concrete experiences of life. This is particularly evident in the field of health care. Just imagine the social impact of fostering an understanding of what is healthy and what is sick in other people; just imagine what it means when health care is taken into the hands of all of humanity with understanding. Of course, the aim is not to cultivate scientific or medical dilettantism – that must be avoided – but imagine, it simply awakens sympathy, not just feeling, but understanding for the healthy and the sick in our fellow human beings, understanding based on an insight into the human being. Imagine the social effect of such a thing, and you will have to say to yourself: There you can see that social reform, the social reconstruction, must arise out of specialized knowledge in the individual fields, not out of general theories, whether they be Marxist, be they Oppenheim theories, be they theories of any kind that look beyond the human being and want to shape the world out of abstract concepts. Salvation cannot come from this, but from the dedicated study of the individual fields. And health care, hygiene, is such a very special field, because it leads us, I would say, closest to everything that our fellow human being experiences in terms of joy through his healthy, normal way of life or in terms of pain and suffering, of restrictions due to what lies within him as more or less sick.

This is something that immediately points us to the special social way in which spiritual science can achieve results in the field of hygiene. For if in such a way the cultivator of the knowledge of humanity, the cultivator of the knowledge of the healthy and the sick human being, is also the one who specializes as a doctor, with such knowledge in human society, then he will be able to create enlightenment within this human society, because he will be understood. And not only will the doctor develop a relationship with the community in which, if they are not a friend or relative, they will send for the doctor when they have a pain or have broken a leg, but the relationship with the doctor will develop in such a way that the doctor is the constant teacher and instructor of prophylactic health care, that in fact a constant intervention of the doctor is available not only to heal the person when the illness goes so far that he notices it, but also to keep people healthy as far as possible. A lively social activity will take place between the physician and all the rest of humanity. But then health itself will radiate from such knowledge, for it is precisely because materialism has extended to the medical view of life that we have truly come up against strange conceptions.

On the one hand, we have physical illnesses. They are studied by finding degenerations of the organs or whatever else is supposed to be physically perceptible or physically imagined within the human body's skin, and attention is drawn to the fact that any damage found can be repaired. In this direction, thoughts now turn quite materialistically to the physical body of the human being in its normal and abnormal states. Alongside this, the so-called soul or spiritual illnesses arise. These soul or spiritual illnesses have now been reduced, on the one hand, to mere brain illnesses or to illnesses of the nervous system because of materialistic thinking, and the foundations for this have also been sought in the other organ systems of the human being. But because they did not develop any kind of conception about the way in which spirit and soul work in the human body, they could not gain any conception of the relationship between mental illnesses, the so-called mental illnesses, and what the human being otherwise is. And so, I would like to say, mental illnesses stand on one side, even today they are grasped by a strange hybrid science, psychoanalysis, which thinks in a materialistic way but does not understand the materialistic at all; they stand there, these mental and soul illnesses, without being able to be brought together in any reasonable way with what actually happens in the human organism.

Spiritual science can now show – and I have drawn attention to this – that what I am saying here is not just a program, but that it is being pursued in detail – precisely on the occasion of the course for physicians that has been taking place here during these weeks. Spiritual science can indeed show in detail how all so-called mental and soul diseases are based on organ disorders, on organ degeneration, organ enlargement, organ reduction in the human organism. Somewhere in the heart, in the liver, in the lungs, something is not right if at the same time or later something occurs that is a so-called mental illness. A spiritual science that penetrates to recognize the spirit in the normal heart in its effectiveness is also capable of - and need not be ashamed of - seeking a cause for the so-called sick mind or soul in the degeneration of the heart, in the failings of the heart.

The main mistake of materialism is not that it denies the spirit - in which case religion could still ensure that the spirit is recognized - the main mistake of materialism is that it does not recognize matter, because it only observes its exterior. This is precisely the defect of materialism, that it gains no insight into matter, for example in the purely psychoanalytic treatment, in the mere observation of something that has taken place in the soul, which psychoanalysis calls islands of the soul, and thus an abstraction. Rather, one must follow how certain impressions of the soul, which a person receives at this or that time in his life and which are normally bound to the normal organism, impinge on defective organs - instead of, for example, on a healthy liver, on a diseased one; such an impingement may perhaps show itself at a completely different time than when the defect has become organically noticeable.

Spiritual science need not shy away from showing how so-called mental or psychological illnesses are always connected with something in the human body. Spiritual science must strictly point out that if one merely studies the soul, the psychological complex, the deviations of the soul from the so-called normal psychological life, one has at most a one-sided diagnosis. Therefore, psychoanalysis can never be anything more than diagnostic; it can never lead to real therapy in this field. For this reason, because therapy for mental illnesses must begin with the physical examination, we must know the ramifications of the spiritual in matter down to the individual parts if we want to know where to start in the material body – which is, however, spiritualized – to cure that which only shows symptoms in abnormal mental conditions. Spiritual science must most decidedly emphasize that the so-called mental and soul diseases must be traced back to the organology of the human being. However, one can only see into the abnormal organology of the human being if one can follow the spirit into the smallest parts of matter.

And the other way around: what appear to be merely soul phenomena or phenomena that act in the soul, let us say what emerges in the temperaments and in the activity of the human temperaments , in the whole way in which a person plays as a small child, how he walks, what he does, all this, which today is only understood in a mental-spiritual sense, also has its physical side. And a failure in relation to some aspects of a child's education can appear later in a very ordinary physical illness. Indeed, in certain cases, when one is dealing with mental illnesses, one is led to look at the physical aspects in order to explore what is important, and in the case of physical illnesses, to look at the spiritual aspects and explore what is important. For that is the essential thing in spiritual science, that it does not speak in abstractions of a nebulous spiritual, as mystics and one-sided theosophists do, but that it follows the spirit into its material effects, that it nowhere grasps the material as as it is grasped by today's external science, but everywhere, in the contemplation of the material, it penetrates to the spirit and can thus also observe where an abnormal soul life must express itself in that an abnormal bodily life is present, even if it is perhaps hidden externally.

In the broadest circles today, people have completely false ideas about seriously anthroposophically oriented spiritual science – perhaps sometimes rightly so, when one hears those who do not truly want to go into what it is actually about, and only talk about abstract theories, that man consists of this and that, and that there are repeated earth lives and so on. These things are, of course, extremely important and very nice. But when it comes to working very seriously in this spiritual-scientific movement, then the individual chapters, the individual areas of this life, must be dealt with. And in the broadest sense, this in turn leads to a socially minded gathering of people. For when one sees how the soul, appearing sick, radiates its impulses into the organism, when one can feel this connection between the organism and the soul that appears to be sick - feel with understanding - and when, on the other hand, one knows how the institutions of life also affect the physical human being's physical health, how the spiritual, which apparently only exists externally in social institutions, has an effect on the physical health of the human being, if one has an overview of all this, then one is involved in human society in a completely different way. You begin to gain a real understanding of people, and you treat others quite differently; you pursue their character quite differently. You know that certain qualities are connected to this or that, you know how to behave towards these qualities, you know how to place people's temperaments in human society in the right way, and especially how to develop them in the right way, especially when you have associated tasks with them.

One social area in particular will need to be intensively influenced in terms of hygiene by a knowledge of human nature gained in this way: the area of education. Without really knowing people very well, it is impossible to appreciate what it means when children sit in school with stooped backs, causing their breathing to become irregular, or when they are not encouraged to speak loudly and distinctly, clearly vocalizing and clearly consonanting. The whole of later life depends essentially on whether the child breathes correctly at school and whether he is encouraged to speak loudly and distinctly and with articulation.

In such matters – I am only giving examples here, as the same could be said for other areas – the specialization of overall hygiene in the school system is evident, and this in particular shows the full social significance of hygiene. It also shows, however, how life demands that we do not further specialize, but that we bring together the specialized into an overall view. We need not only the knowledge that enables a teacher to educate a child in a particular way according to certain pedagogical norms, but we also need the knowledge that enables a teacher to judge what it means when he or that sentence of the child's clearly articulated utterances or when he lets the child, after saying half a sentence, lets out another breath and so on and does not ensure that the air is used up while the sentence is being spoken. Of course, there are many clues and rules about this too, but the right way of mutual recognition and the right application of these things only enter our hearts when we grasp the full significance for human life and for social health, for only then does the matter become a social impulse.

These considerations were the basis for the pedagogical-didactic course I gave to the teachers at the Stuttgart Waldorf School, which was the starting point for the founding of the school. Teachers are needed who can work from the full depth of a humanistic worldview for the education and teaching of children. Everything that has been incorporated into the sentences that have been expressed as a pedagogical-didactic art strives to turn the children who are being educated and taught into people who, later on, by being encouraged to perform the functions of life in the right way as a child, will have lungs and liver and heart and stomach in order because the soul has been worked on in the right way.

This world view will never interpret the old saying, “A healthy soul lives in a healthy body,” in a materialistic way.

A materialistic interpretation would say that if you have a healthy body, if you have made it healthy with all possible physical means, then it will automatically become the bearer of a healthy soul. That is nonsense. It makes sense if you proceed in the following way, that is, if you say to yourself: “There is a healthy body in front of me, which shows me that the power of a healthy soul has built it up, shaped it, and made it healthy.” I recognize from this body that an autonomous healthy soul has worked in it. That is the meaning of the saying. But only in this way can this saying also be the basis for healthy hygiene. In other words, we do not need a school doctor who visits the school once a fortnight, if that, and doesn't know what to do with himself, in addition to teachers who only work from an abstract pedagogical science. No, we need a living connection between medical science and the art of teaching. We need a pedagogical art that educates and teaches children in a hygienically correct way in all its measures. That is what makes hygiene a social issue, because the social issue is essentially an educational issue, and the educational issue is essentially a medical issue, but only a question of that medicine that is spiritually fruitful, of a hygiene that is spiritually fruitful.

These things then point to something else that is extraordinarily significant, especially with regard to the topic of “hygiene as a social question”. Because, my dear attendees, when spiritual science is cultivated and when spiritual science is something concrete for the human being, then he knows that in what he receives in spiritual science there is something that differs from what he receives in mere intellectualism and in the natural science of the present, too, is mere intellectualism. He knows that what he has in mere intellectualism or in the merely intellectualistically developed natural science or in the merely intellectualistically developed history or jurisprudence of today is different from what he has in mere intellectualism. All of today's sciences are intellectualistic; if they claim to be empirical sciences, it is only because they interpret the empirically observed results of experience in an intellectualistic way. What is given in the humanities differs quite essentially from these natural science or other results interpreted in an intellectualistic way. It would even be quite sad if that which lives in our intellectualistic culture were not merely an image, but a real power that has a deeper effect on people. Anything intellectualistic remains only on the surface of the human being. This sentence is meant to be very comprehensive.

Those who pursue spiritual science only intellectually, that is, who only make notes: there is a physical body, an etheric body, an astral body, an ego, repeated earthly lives, karma, and so on and who notes these down in the same way as in natural science or in today's social science, is not seriously engaged in spiritual science, for he merely transfers the way of thinking he otherwise has to what confronts him in spiritual science. But the essential thing about spiritual science is that it must be thought in a different way, felt in a different way, and experienced in a very different way than the intellectualistic way. Therefore spiritual science is something that, through its very nature, maintains a living relationship to the healthy and the sick person, albeit in a somewhat different way than one might often dream of. People will surely have become sufficiently convinced of how powerless one is with what one, whether as admonishment or as encouragement, begins in the purely intellectualistic culture in relation to the so-called mentally ill. The mentally ill person claims that voices are speaking to him; you tell him all kinds of things that you find based on your intellectual reason – in vain, because he has all kinds of objections for you. This alone could indicate that we are not dealing with an illness of the conscious or even the subconscious soul life, but with an illness of the organism. Spiritual science teaches us to recognize that one cannot, however, use such methods, which are supposed to be so-called spiritual ones, in which, for example, one resorts to hypnosis and suggestion, to treat so-called mental or soul diseases, but that one must treat them in so-called physical ways, that is, by healing the organs, for which, however, one really needs spiritual knowledge of the human being. Spiritual knowledge knows that it should not actually intervene at all in the field of so-called mental illnesses with mere spiritual or psychological procedures, because the mental illness consists precisely in the fact that the spiritual element of the human being is suppressed, as it is otherwise only in sleep, and is weak in this suppression, but that one must cure the organ so that it in turn takes back the soul and the spirit in a healthy way. On the other hand, that which does not arise from the intellect, from the head, but from the whole human being as a spiritual-scientific result, when it appears as imagination, inspiration, intuition, and when it is taken up by the human being, engages the whole organism. It really engages the physical organization of the human being in a healing way, which is what spiritual science really is.

On the other hand, there is no proof that some spiritual scientists feel ill within spiritual science or show the opposite of what I have just said. There are so many who are not spiritual scientists, but who are intellectualistic collectors of notes on spiritual-scientific results. But to spread spiritual science in its true substance is itself a social hygiene, for it affects the whole human being, it normalizes his organology when it threatens to develop this or that tendency towards deviation into the abnormal after dreams or after another side. This is the tremendous difference between what is given in spiritual science and what occurs in mere intellectual science: that the concepts emerging in the field of intellectualism are much too weak because they are merely pictorial to intervene in the human being, to be able to have a healing effect on him. The concepts of spiritual science, on the other hand, are such that they are drawn from the whole human being. In the formation of spiritual-scientific concepts, it is truly not only the brain that has been involved, but also the lungs and liver and heart and the whole human being. And if one imbues oneself with these spiritual-scientific concepts, if one assimilates them through healthy human understanding, they in turn have a hygienic effect on the whole human being. This is what, starting from spiritual science, can intervene in a directive way in hygiene as a social matter.

But in many other ways too — I can only give a few examples — spiritual science will intervene in a guiding way in the whole of humanity's health life, when this spiritual science really takes root among humanity in its full seriousness. I will point out just one example. The relationship between the awake human being and the sleeping human being is one of the chapters that must be studied again and again through spiritual science. The same applies to the enormous difference that exists between the human organization in waking and in sleeping. How spirit and soul behave when we are awake, when the physical and spiritual and soul aspects of the human being interpenetrate each other, and how they behave when they are temporarily separated from each other, as in sleep – this is carefully studied through spiritual science.

Now I can only give a certain sentence, but it is a very certain result of spiritual science. We see so-called epidemic diseases occur in life, diseases that affect whole crowds of people, which are therefore also a social matter at the same time. Ordinary materialistic science studies them in terms of the human physical organism. It knows nothing of the tremendous significance for epidemics and for the predispositions for epidemic diseases that lies in the abnormal behavior of humans in terms of waking and sleeping. What happens in the human organism during sleep is something that, when it happens in abundance, for example, predisposes to a high degree for so-called epidemic diseases. People who, by sleeping too long, set processes in motion in the human organism that should not be there because sleep should not interrupt waking life for so long are predisposed to epidemic diseases in a completely different way and they also engage with epidemics in a completely different way.

Now you can see for yourself what it means to educate people about the correct distribution of sleep and wakefulness. You cannot do that by means of regulations. At best you can order people not to send their children to school when they have scarlet fever; you cannot give lectures when there is an outbreak of influenza: people do not respond to that - because today man tends towards freedom, I mean, because the sense of authority is not as great as in former times - people do not respond to that. I am not saying that they are not right to do so, I am not saying anything against what happens in this way, but you cannot possibly tell people in the same way: you must sleep seven hours. Nevertheless, it is more important than the other rules that people who need it sleep seven hours, the others who do not need it may sleep much shorter and so on. But such things, which are so intimately connected with the most personal aspects of a person's life, have a social effect in a magnificent way. It actually depends on the most intimate aspects of a person how the social effects occur, whether, for example, a larger or smaller number of people are withdrawn from this or that occupation or not, which may have an effect in a completely different place under certain circumstances. Hygiene really does have a tremendous impact on social life. Quite apart from what one thinks about contagion or non-contagion, this element intervenes in social life during epidemics. You cannot work through external regulations, you can only work if you bring a lay audience into human society, but one that has an understanding of people that stands in contrast to the physician's educational prophylaxis, wherever a lively interaction between the expert physician and the layman can occur to maintain health.

If we take all these things into consideration, we can say: Here we have described one side of hygiene as a social question, which in the most eminent sense depends on our having a free spiritual life, on our actually having a spiritual life in which, within the spiritual realm, those who are engaged in the cultivation of the spiritual life, including its practical aspects such as hygiene, are completely independent of everything else that does not give pure knowledge, that does not cultivate the spiritual life itself. What each individual can do for the good of his fellow human beings must arise entirely from his abilities. There must be no state standards for this, nor must there be any dependence on economic powers. This must be placed in the personal sphere of dependence of the individual human being and must continue to be placed in the understanding trust that others who need the application of his abilities can place in the capable person.

What is needed is a spiritual life that is completely independent of all authority, of the state and of the economy, and that works purely from within its own spiritual forces in an expert manner.

If you think about what hygiene can really achieve, which is closely connected with insightful human knowledge and insightful social behavior, and if you look at the individual branch of hygiene with expert insight , then you will come to the conclusion - and this is precisely what the individual, concrete subject area demands, and it could be demonstrated for other areas as well as for hygiene - that the spirit must be taken into administration by those who are involved in its cultivation. No matter what abstract theories may say against the independent position of intellectual life, the individual concrete subject demands that the administrators of intellectual life are not merely experts who work for the ministries, but that those who are active in intellectual life must also be the administrators of that intellectual life, and indeed the sole administrators of that intellectual life. Then, when social insight arising out of a free spiritual life has created a hygiene that really exists as a social institution, it will be possible to work economically for this hygiene in a completely different way, precisely in an independent economic life, in an economic life that is structured as I have described in my “Key Points of the Social Question”, as it has been repeatedly described in the journals that serve this idea of the threefold social organism, for example in the Swiss “Social Future”, which is published by Dr. Boos.

If the forces for the cultivation of hygiene that lie dormant in the bosom of human society are received by society with understanding, if this is accepted with human understanding by society, if this becomes general order, then everything that can be carried out of this independent economic life, without regard to any dependence on impulses of gain or state impulses, everything that can be worked out of this independent economic life purely, can be carried into economic life, into independent economic life, everything that can work purely out of this independent economic life, without any consideration of any dependence on profit impulses or on state impulses, can be carried into economic life, and that which must be cultivated in the service of genuine, true hygiene. But then, and only then, will it be possible for that high spirit to enter into economic life, which is necessary in order for hygiene to be cultivated in human life. If the mere acquisitiveness of our economic life is dominant, which has an ever-increasing tendency to be incorporated into the unified state, and if the general opinion is that one must produce that which earns the most, then the self-contained impulses of a free spiritual life cultivated in this field of hygiene cannot assert themselves; then this spiritual life becomes dependent on the extra-spiritual, on the state or economic, then the economic becomes master over the spiritual. The economic must not become master over the spiritual. This is best seen when one is to produce what is required by the spirit in economic life, when one is to serve a genuine, true hygiene.

The forces of economic life, of free economic life, will be added in the threefold social organism to the insight that becomes a public matter and to the understanding of the human being that becomes a public matter. And when, on the one hand, people are immersed in a free spiritual life in which a hygiene truly based on objective ground can be cultivated, and when, on the other hand, people develop that high spirit through which everyone in economic life will in turn approach production with understanding – but with such understanding does not arise merely from the sense of acquisition, but from the insights that arise in free spiritual activity - then, once this insightful social understanding of people will be there, then people will be able to come together democratically in parliaments or otherwise, because then the insight into the necessity of hygiene as a social phenomenon will be shaped from the free spiritual life. And what is necessary for the maintenance of hygiene will be shaped by the economic life, which is based on practical and professional considerations, through the high spirit that will be developed in it. Then people, having come of age, will be able to negotiate on the basis of the legal system, on the one hand from their insight and understanding of human nature, and on the other hand from their relations with the economic system that serves hygiene. Then people will be able to negotiate as equals on the basis of state or legal life about the measures that can be taken with regard to hygiene and public health care. Then, of course, it will not be laymen, dilettantes, who will be healing, but the person who has come of age will face the expert as an equal with understanding when the expert tells him this or that. But the layman's understanding of human nature makes it possible for him, in the context of what is cultivated together with the physician in social life, to approach specialized knowledge with understanding in such a way that he can say “yes” in a democratically conceived parliament not merely on the basis of authority but on the basis of a certain understanding. If we take a close look at such a specialized field and see how the three members of the social organism interact, then, my dear audience, we find the full justification of this idea of the threefold social organism. One can only fight this idea of the threefold social organism if one has first grasped it only in the abstract.

Today, I could not give you more than a sketchy indication of what follows from the threefold social order in a specific area, the area of hygiene, if one thinks correctly about it. But if the paths I have only been able to hint at today are pursued further, it will be seen that although those who approach the impulse of the threefold social organism with a few abstract concepts may, to a certain extent, oppose it – as a rule, they present reasons that one has long since accepted as objections oneself. But anyone who approaches the individual areas of life with full inner understanding and the living out of these individual areas with all that they bring into human life - that is what social life is about - anyone who really understands something in a specific area of life, who makes an effort to understand something of true life practice in any field, will be led more and more into the direction indicated by the idea of the threefold social organism.

This idea did not arise out of a reverie, out of abstract idealism; it arose as a social demand of the present and the near future precisely from the concrete, appropriate consideration of the individual areas of life. And again, when one penetrates these individual areas of life with what emerges from the impulse of the threefold social organism, then one finds for all these areas that which, it seems to me, is needed for them today. And I just wanted to give you a few brief indications this evening of how the field in which blind submission to authority is still accepted today, can be enriched by the spiritual science that follows from the threefold social organism. For this reason it may be said here: Through this enrichment, which the field of hygiene can receive from a spiritually expanded medicine, hygiene can become a social, a truly social matter, and it can also be cultivated in the most genuine sense in a highly democratic way as a general matter of the people.

Following his lecture, Rudolf Steiner answers a series of questions submitted in writing.

Dear attendees! With regard to the matters discussed today, it is important to first address the whole spirit of what has been said. It is sometimes difficult to answer questions that are formulated from the present way of thinking and feeling without reformulating them or at least without explaining them properly. This first question, which probably seems terribly simple to you or many of you, so that it could be answered in a few sentences or with one sentence, is:

How do you get rid of sleeping too long?

Well, to answer this question, I would have to give an even longer lecture than the one I have already given, because I would first have to gather the various elements in order to answer this question properly. But perhaps the following can be said: Today, there is an intellectualistic state of mind in almost all people. Those who believe that they judge or live from their feelings, or who believe that they are not intellectualistic because of some other reason, are intellectualistic all the more. Now the basic character of intellectualistic soul life is that our instincts are ruined by it. Man's right instincts are ruined. It is actually the case that if you want to point to instincts that have not been completely ruined, you either have to point to primitive man or even to the animal kingdom.

For you see, on another occasion these days I was able to point to an example that says a great deal. There are birds that, out of their greed, eat insects, for example, cross spiders. But they fall into convulsions, into spasms, from eating these cross spiders, which are poisonous to them; they must die miserably very soon after swallowing the cross spider. But if henbane is nearby, the bird flies to it, sucks out the healing juice and saves its life with it. Now think about how something has developed that in us humans has shrunk to the few reflex instincts we have. For example, when a fly lands on our nose, we make a movement to get rid of it without first pondering the situation. A defensive instinct takes effect on the insult stimulus. In the bird that eats the cross spider, the effect that the cross spider has on its organism is followed by such an instinctive defense that it drives it to do something quite reasonable. We can still find such instincts in people who lived in the dim and distant past, if we understand their history correctly. But in our time, we have different experiences. I have always found it extremely painful when I came to someone who sat down at the lunch table and had a scale next to their plate. A scale, you really do experience something like that – I was otherwise accustomed to knife and fork and similar implements lying next to the plate – a scale, and with that he weighed the piece of meat, because only then did he know how much meat he should eat according to his organism, when he had weighed it. Just imagine how far removed from all real, original instincts a humanity has now become, to which something like this has to be prescribed.

It is therefore important not to stop at intellectualism, but to ascend to spiritual-scientific knowledge. You will now believe that I speak pro domo, even if it is pro domo of this great house, but I do not speak pro domo, but I actually express what I believe to have recognized as truth, quite apart from the fact that I myself represent this truth. One can see that if one penetrates not only into the merely intellectual, but into that which is to be grasped spiritually, and which therefore comes before humanity more in a pictorial sense, one you realize that by grasping such knowledge, which is not accessible to the mere intellect, you are led back to healthy instincts, not in individual cases, but more in the things that lie in the depths of life. He who spends at least some time, even if it be ever so little, on developing the quite different frame of mind that is needed to really understand spiritual science, will be led back to sound instincts in such matters as, for instance, the need for sleep. The animal does not sleep too much in normal living conditions. Primitive man did not sleep too much either. One need only educate oneself to healthy instincts, which are being unlearned in today's so intellectualized culture, so that one can say: A really effective way to get rid of sleeping too long is to be able to absorb spiritual truths without falling asleep in the process. If you fall asleep at once when you hear spiritual truths, then you will indeed not be able to get rid of sleeping too long. But if you succeed in really taking an inner human interest in the spiritual truths you are learning, then this inner human interest is activated in such a way that you can actually find out what bedtime is for your organism.

On the other hand, it is extremely difficult to give intellectualized rules, for example, to say that a person who has this or that about his liver or kidneys, which does not exactly make him ill in the usual sense, but which is there nonetheless, must sleep for such and such a length of time. As a rule, this does not lead to anything special. And artificially inducing sleep is not the same as when the body, out of its need for sleep, only denies the mind entry for as long as it needs to. So one can say: Proper hygiene, which follows directly from spiritual science, will also lead people to measure their sleep in the right way. Therefore, the other question that has been asked here cannot be answered so easily:

How can you know how much sleep you need?

I would like to say that you don't need to know this through discursive thought, it's not necessary at all, but you do need to acquire such instincts, which you acquire not by collecting notes from the humanities, but by the way you understand humanities when you take it in with full participation. Once you have developed this instinct, you can then measure the right amount of sleep for you individually. That is what is usually said about it. As I said, I can only give you a guide to answering this question, not what is perhaps expected. But what is expected is not always the right thing.

Is sleeping with the window open healthy?

It is not always possible to give a general answer to such questions. It is quite possible that for one person sleeping with the window open is very healthy, depending on the particular structure of their respiratory organs, but that for another person, for example, a room that is well ventilated before sleeping but then has the windows closed while they sleep is better. It is actually a matter of gaining an understanding of the relationship between the human being and the extra-human environment, in order to be able to judge in individual cases on the basis of this understanding.

How do you explain the occurrence of mental disorders caused by crimes committed from a spiritual point of view, that is, how can the physical illness that underlies the mental disorders be recognized here?

Well, here it would be necessary to go into the whole criminal and, basically, psychiatric anthropology if the question is to be dealt with exhaustively. I would just like to say the following: Firstly, when considering such things, it is important to assume that there are abnormalities among the organ dispositions of a person who becomes a criminal. You only have to follow the studies of Moriz Benedikt, the first important criminal anthropologist, who was really quite objective in his research in this direction, and you will see how, through pathological examination, the forms of individual human organs can indeed be linked to a disposition to commit crimes. So there is an abnormality inherent in it, although, of course, materialistic thinkers like Moriz Benedikt draw false conclusions from it, because someone who shows such signs in this direction is by no means a born criminal from the outset. The point is that one can work on the existing defects in the organism - these are organ defects, not the already existing mental illness - precisely through education and later through appropriate spiritual means, that is, in a spiritual-mental way, if only the facts are examined in a spiritual-scientific way. So the conclusions that Benedikt draws from the pathological investigations are not correct. One can indeed point to such organ defects, but then one must be clear about the fact that in ordinary human life, those things that are not intellectual but are emotional or affective do have an effect. These have an effect, to be sure, first on the glandular activity or the like, on the secretory activity, but in turn also on the organs. In this regard, I advise you to read, for example, an interesting booklet written by a Danish physician about the mechanics of emotional movements. There are many useful things in it in this regard. And now imagine the bodily disposition that can be traced in every person who comes into question as a criminal, and add to this everything that follows for the caught criminal in terms of emotional upheaval and what as a continuation of these mental shocks now in turn affects the organs, then you have the way to look for the defective organs for what produced a mental illness as a consequence, which can occur when a crime is committed. In this way, one must gain an understanding of such connections.

How does Theosophy relate to Anthroposophy? Is the former Theosophy no longer fully recognized here?

In answer to this I would simply say: Nothing but anthroposophically oriented spiritual science has ever been advocated here, and what is advocated here today has always been advocated here, and if this has been identified with what is advocated on many sides as so-called Theosophy, then that is simply due to a misunderstanding. This misunderstanding will also remain a misunderstanding because anthroposophically oriented spiritual science has, within certain limits, been within the framework of the Theosophical Society for some time; but even within the framework of this Theosophical Society, the representatives of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science at that time advocated nothing other than what I advocate here today. They just watched for a long time, as long as it didn't look too heretical. But when they realized that anthroposophy is something quite different from the abstract mysticism that often claims to be theosophy, they threw out the anthroposophists. This procedure has been adopted from the other side, while what is represented here has never had any other form than the one it has today.

Of course, those who deal with things only superficially or who have gained their knowledge only from those members of the Society who themselves have only dealt with it superficially – for one does not always have to stand outside in order to have a superficial understanding of anthroposophy or to confuse anthroposophy with theosophy, one can also stand inside with it in society - those who only acquire knowledge in the way of such superficially grasped activity come to such confusions. But here that is represented, which I have today characterized for a particular area, and never has anything else been represented here, even if, of course, work is constantly being done and certain things today can be characterized more precisely, more fully, more intensely than they could have been fifteen, ten or five years ago. That is precisely the nature of the work: that one progresses, that one progresses in particular in the formulation of making oneself understood in something as difficult as spiritual science. One really need not concern oneself with those people who, out of ill will, have twisted the fact that what was previously expressed in an imperfect way is later expressed more perfectly, and who derive all kinds of transformations of world views from it. For spiritual science, as it is meant here, is something living and not something dead, and the one who believes that it cannot progress, who wants to nail it down to where it once stood, in a way that often happens, does not believe in the living, but wants to make it into something dead.

Would you please explain how an epidemic like the flu or scarlet fever comes about if not through the transmission of germs. For many diseases, the pathogen has been scientifically identified. What is your position on this?

Well, if I were to discuss this question, which I have indicated that I do not want to take sides on, then I would have to give a whole lecture. However, I would like to draw attention to the following. The person who, through his knowledge, is compelled to point out that for illnesses accompanied by the appearance of bacilli or bacteria, there are deeper causes as primary causes than just the appearance of the bacilli, does not yet claim that the bacilli are not there. It is quite another thing to claim that the bacilli are there and that they appear in the wake of the illness than to look for the primary cause in the bacilli. What needs to be said in this regard has just been developed in detail in this course for physicians, which is now being held. But it takes time. This also applies to certain elements that need to be dealt with first. This cannot be quickly settled in a question and answer session. Nevertheless, I would like to point out the following. The human constitution is not as simple as one often imagines. Man is a many-sided being. In my book 'Riddles of the Soul' I show at the beginning that man is a threefold being, a being that can be called, firstly, the nerve-sense human being, secondly, the rhythmic human being, and thirdly, the metabolic human being. That is what man is. And these three aspects of human nature interact with each other; and if the human being is to be healthy, they must not interact in any other way than that there is a certain degree of separation between the areas. For example, the nerve-sense human being, who is more than what today's physiology imagines, cannot simply transfer his effects on the metabolic human being in a different way than that these effects are mediated by the rhythmic movements of the circulation and breathing processes, which extend to the outermost periphery of the organism. But this interaction can be interrupted in a certain way.

Now, this interaction brings about something very specific. For example, when such questions are asked, you will forgive me for having to answer them appropriately. I will be as discreet as possible, but it is necessary to say some words that have to be heard appropriately. For example, it is quite true that processes take place in the human abdomen that are integrated into the whole organism. If they are integrated into the whole organism, then they work in the right way. If they are either directly increased in the abdomen, so that they become more active there, or if the corresponding processes in the human head or in the human lungs become less intense, then something very peculiar occurs. Then it becomes apparent that the human organism, in order to live normally, must develop processes within itself that are only allowed to develop to a certain extent so that they take up the whole person. If the process is increased, then it localizes itself, and then, for example, a process occurs in the human abdomen whereby what takes place in the human head or in the lungs and what corresponds to certain processes in the abdomen is not properly separated. The processes always correspond in such a way that they run parallel to each other. But as a result, what may only be present in man to a certain extent in order to maintain his vitality, the vitality carried by spirit and soul, is, so to speak, raised above a certain level. Then, I would say, it becomes the atmosphere for all kinds of lower organisms, for all kinds of small organisms, and these small organisms can then develop there. That which is the creative element of the small organisms is always present in the human being, it is only extended throughout the whole organism. When it is concentrated, it provides a breeding ground for small organisms, microbes; they find a home in it. But the reason why they can thrive there is to be found in extremely fine processes in the organism, which then turn out to be the primary ones.

I am not speaking out of antipathy to the germ theory; I fully understand the reasons that people have for believing in germs. Believe me, if I did not have to speak as I am speaking now for factual reasons, I would recognize these reasons, but here it is the realization that necessarily leads to the recognition of something else and that then forces one to say it. [For example, I can say:] I see a certain landscape, there are many extraordinarily beautiful cattle, well cared for. I now ask: Why are these living conditions in the area? They come from the beautiful cattle. I explain the living conditions of this area by explaining that beautiful cattle have moved in from somewhere; they have spread there. I will not do that, but I will examine the primary causes, the diligence and understanding of the people, and that will explain to me why these beautiful cattle are developing on this land. But I would be making a superficial explanation if I just said: It's beautiful here, life is good here because beautiful cattle have moved in.

The same logic basically applies if I find the typhoid bacillus and then declare that one has typhoid fever because the typhoid bacillus has moved in. Much more is needed to explain typhoid fever than simply to refer to the typhoid bacillus. But one is misled in a completely different way if one succumbs to such false logic. Certainly, the primary processes, which provide the typhoid bacillus with the basis for its existence, are in turn the basis for all kinds of other things that are not primary. And it is very easy to either completely confuse or conflate what is secondary with the actual original clinical picture. These are the things that lead to the right point here, or show how what is justified in a certain sense can be shown to have its limits.

Perhaps you can see from the way I have given this answer – although I can only sketch it out and am therefore easily misunderstood – that this is really not about the all-too-popular ranting against the germ theory, but that it is really about examining things very seriously.

Could you give us some examples of how physical organic disorders can cause mental and spiritual suffering?

Well, if it were to be answered in detail, that too would, of course, be taking us much too far today. But I would like to point out just one thing. You see, the development of medical thought in the history of medicine is not as it is presented today, with Hippocrates as the beginning of medicine and Hippocraticism as its further development. As far as we can trace it, we know that Hippocrates was much more the last outpost of an old instinct-based medicine than merely the beginning of today's intellectual medicine. But we find something else as well. You see, in this old instinctive medicine, as long as it was still in force, people did not speak, for example, of a certain kind of mental depression, which is a very abstract way of expressing it, but rather of hypochondria - abdominal cartilaginousness. So they knew that hypochondria is a disorder of the abdomen, a hardening of the abdomen. We cannot say that the ancients were more mystical than we are.

Likewise, it is easy to show how certain chronic lung defects are definitely connected with what could be called a false mystical sense in people. And so we could point out all sorts of things, quite apart from the fact that – again, in line with a correct instinct – the ancients definitely pointed to something organic when it came to the temperaments. They derived the choleric temperament from bile, from white bile, the melancholic from black bile and all that black bile causes in the abdomen. They then derived the sanguine temperament from blood and the phlegmatic temperament from what they called mucus. But then, when they saw degenerations of the temperaments, they were absolutely things that indicated the degenerations of the organic matter concerned. How this was done in instinctive medicine and in instinctive hygiene can certainly be taken up in a strictly scientific way into the state of mind and, from the point of view of our present knowledge, cultivated.

Here is a question that could lead to further misunderstanding: Do you recognize eye diagnosis? Do you accept it as a science?

Now, it is generally true that in the case of an organism, and especially in the case of the complicated human organism, if you look at it in the right way, you can draw conclusions about the whole from all the possible individual parts. And again, the way these individual parts are arranged in the human organism has a great significance. In a sense, what the eye diagnostician examines in the iris is, on the one hand, so very isolated from the rest of the human organism, and on the other hand, it is so peculiarly integrated into the rest of the organism that it is indeed an expressive organ. But precisely with such things, one must not schematize; and the mistake with such things is that one does just that. For example, it is quite true that people of a different mental and physical constitution show different characteristics in their irises than other people. If one wants to apply something like this, one needs such intimate knowledge of what happens in the human organism that, if one has this intimate knowledge, one actually no longer needs to search from a single organ. And if you are instructed to adhere to some intellectualized rules and to do such things schematically, then not much of value will come of it.

What relation do diseases have to the progress of world history, especially the newly emerging diseases?

A chapter of an entire cultural history! Well, I will just note the following. When studying history, one must have a sense for practicing symptomatology, that is, to understand much of what is taken as history today only as a symptom for much that lies much deeper behind it, which is really the spiritual current that only carries these symptoms. And so that which is in the depths of human development does indeed appear symptomatically in these or those diseases of the time. It is interesting to study the relationships between what prevails in the depths of human development and what takes place in the symptoms of this or that disease. One can also conclude from the presence of certain diseases that impulses are at work in historical development that cannot escape a symptomatology of this kind. But the question could then also point to something else that is not insignificant when pursuing the historical development of humanity. This is this: Diseases, whether they occur in individual human beings or take the form of an epidemic in human society, are often also reactions to other degenerations, which may be regarded as less serious from a health point of view, but which must nevertheless be regarded as very serious from a moral or spiritual point of view. What is said here must not be applied to medicine or hygiene – that would be quite wrong. Diseases must be cured. In hygiene, one must work to benefit people. One cannot say, “First I will check whether it is perhaps your karma to have this illness; then I will let you have it, if not, I can cure you.” These views do not apply when it comes to healing. But what does not apply to us humans in our intervention in nature does, therefore, objectively apply in the outside world. And there one must say that, for example, many things that exist as a predisposition to moral excesses are so deeply ingrained in the human organization that reactions occur which then appear in certain illnesses, and that the illness is the suppression of a moral excess.

In the case of the individual, it is not even of such great importance to follow these things, because they should be left to one's individual destiny and one should not interfere in them any more than one interferes with the secrecy of other people's letters - unless one is guided by the view that is so prevalent at the moment: “opened by the authorities under the laws of war”. Just as little as one should interfere with a person's letter secrets, so little should one interfere with his individual karma. But in world history, that is again something else. There it is important because in world history, the individual human being plays only a, I would say statistical role in its laws. It must always be pointed out that statistics provide a good basis for life insurance companies to assess mortality rates, on which their premiums are based. The matter is quite accurate and the calculation is quite correct, it is all quite scientific. But now – one does not have to die at the very moment that has been calculated by the life insurance statistics, nor does one have to live as long as has been calculated. When the individual comes into consideration, other things occur. But when groups of people or even the whole development of humanity comes into consideration, then it may very well be that one is not a superstitious person, but very much a scientific person, when one examines the extent to which symptoms of illness, illnesses that occur are corrective of other excesses, so that one can indeed see a certain reaction of the disease or at least a disease caused by something that, if the disease had not come, would have developed in a completely different form. These are just a few points on how what is touched upon by this question can be considered.

But now our time is so far advanced that we too will now follow the others who have already left in such large numbers.

Preliminary remark: Paula Matthes' lecture was not written down. The question she or one of the audience members asked about the relationship between imagination, inspiration and intuition and ordinary consciousness was also not recorded by the stenographer.

Rudolf Steiner: The best way to solve this, as I understand it, is to think of the scale of imagination, inspiration and intuition not being built in such a way that they stand above one another; rather, it must actually be built in such a way:

And if we were to imagine our ordinary consciousness wandering around there, if we develop in this way, then we have imagination, inspiration and intuition. We then have an ascent to intuition, but when we rise to this height, which really takes place in the spiritual world, we also have a kind of projection of it into our ordinary life - for those abilities of ordinary consciousness that play into the ethical realm. In the ethical realm, the ordinary consciousness is, I would say, instinctively intuitive. This is also what causes the word “intuition” to be used in a popular sense. Today, the word “inspiration” is sharply rejected because inspiration, in a certain sense, goes back a little further, but the word “intuition” is accepted because the moral consciousness that arises in ordinary consciousness already has something akin to intuition, but precisely because it is instinctive. Thus the word intuition occurs very frequently and is sometimes used with some justification. And so, if one proceeds in a straightforward way, as I have done in “The Philosophy of Freedom”, from thinking to enter the realm of living morality, if one wants to speak of intuition by skipping imagination and inspiration, one can have a point of reference in ordinary moral consciousness.

I may then perhaps add a few words at this point - not, of course, to say anything about the lecture by Miss Matthes, which was completely self-contained and very beautiful in itself. She presented a thoroughly self-contained picture that is likely to shed light on the relationship - which would be desirable today - between the general consciousness of the times and what one could get from philosophy. Now, of course, it is a matter of the most diverse circumstances interacting to produce the present situation, which Miss Matthes has so aptly characterized.

You see, it is quite true that in recent years, brought about by the tragic world situation in our Europe, something has emerged that is an increased interest in philosophy among young people. But perhaps we will only be able to fully assess this interest psychologically if we follow how, over time, throughout the entire 19th century and also at the beginning of the 20th century, where there was an opportunity, the interest of young people in philosophy did flare up after all. I would like to cite a few facts in support of this. For example, in Vienna in the 1860s and 1870s, the generally prevailing philosophical view was that of the Herbartian school. The main representative of this Herbartian school in Vienna at the time was Robert Zimmermann. Robert Zimmermann had a very strange situation in his lectureship when he taught practical philosophy, which was even a compulsory course. In the first two or three lectures, he usually had one of the largest audiences of the University of Vienna; it was all full, overcrowded. But then the audience decreased very quickly, and there were usually only seven or eight who stuck with the course, out of the several hundred who had actually remained. Robert Zimmermann himself, who spoke very beautifully and measuredly, often said of his lectures on practical philosophy: at the beginning the whole lecture hall is full, a large class, then it becomes a thinner thread, and finally, when the test comes, when people need the signatures, then they all come again. - This was not only due to the students and their lack of interest. In 1874 Franz Brentano was called to Vienna, who had an extraordinarily loyal audience. Brentano's lectures in Vienna, as in Würzburg, were very well attended. It cannot be said that this was due to the students only for the reason that it was also a compulsory course, but the lectures were still well attended even when Brentano, who had first been appointed as a full professor in Vienna, became a private lecturer again because of his private circumstances – he had married as a former Catholic priest and therefore had to resign the Vienna professorship. He always hoped that he would be called again, but that could not happen, even though his lecture hall was always overcrowded and the lectures of the other professors, who then had to take the exam, were just as empty as Zimmermann's. Brentano was repeatedly proposed by his colleagues for the full professorship in the first places, but there was always the obstacle that he was excommunicated as a clergyman because he had married, and a Jewish woman at that; the church claims to have authority over those whom it has excommunicated. And when the then emperor, to whom the matter was repeatedly brought, heard that Brentano, as a former clergyman, had married a Jewish woman, he said to the Minister for Education and Worship, who had brought the matter before him and who himself had advocated that Brentano should again have a full professorship: “Is she at least clean, the Jewish woman?” And when they couldn't say that with a clear conscience – she was, incidentally, the daughter of Professor von Lieben in Vienna – the Emperor said, “No, it's no use.” And this went on until Brentano left the professorship as a private lecturer in the 1890s.

So you could see that when really stimulating things were discussed, the students were interested. Brentano had also had a full college in Würzburg in the Auditorium maximum, where, when he first entered it, the students' verdict on his predecessor was written: “sulfur hut”! It had been completely empty before that. The same Auditorium maximum on which the students had written “sulfur hut” was filled by Brentano because he was, after all, a very stimulating personality, regardless of what one thinks of his philosophy.

It is the case that the intellectual development of the 19th and early 20th century actually increasingly suppressed the active pursuit of intellectual life, which emerged from ideas and the like. This suppression of actual intellectual production became more and more pronounced. And of course the spread of the natural sciences is entirely to blame for this. Now a kind of impossible situation has actually arisen from all this. And from this impossible situation, in turn, individual directions have emerged that have at least tried to become philosophically active again.

Now, Miss Matthes has presented the German schools in an excellent way here. For Switzerland, I have the feeling that these four German schools initially have less significance. Here, in broader circles, the Bergsonian school has gained a certain influence. And only to a lesser extent have these four German schools penetrated into the philosophical life of Switzerland. In Switzerland, too, it is probably not possible to perceive the same thing as is said to have been the case at German universities in recent years. In a sense, the emptiness that arose in the souls was already there before the war, where someone like Eucken in Jena, to whom the students trotted, was stimulating, albeit in a, I would say, more talkative way. Eucken's lectures were not very strong, but they were at least attended. And then came the war, with its devastating effects, also in the moral life, in the whole way of life, which nevertheless led to a certain longing in people to somehow hear something about that which is now the determining factor in life, that which holds it together.

Now, these four directions, which have been characterized by Miss Matthes, they all actually already existed before the war, and it is precisely in them that perhaps the bleakness of the intellectual substance of our present can be seen so clearly. The Marburg School has been rightly mentioned, which is based primarily on the very astute thinking of Cohen. Cohen has probably had the most significant influence in the Marburg School, and a great deal can be traced back to his astute thinking. One could also say that at a time when perhaps only Otto Liebmann was a truly astute thinker in German philosophy, except for the Marburg thinker, that the Marburg School actually had a disciplining effect and was educational for the development of a certain astute thinking. This Marburg School is actually quite dependent on a certain one-sided training of Kantianism. One would like to say that it was precisely through Cohen that the Marburg School came to the conclusion that thinking as such should not be regarded merely in its passivity, but that it must be taken in its activity. And of course the age was not at all suited to perceive the inner validity of thinking as something extra-human, as Fichte did, for example, but rather thinking has been thought of, or I should say worked out, more or less as subjective by the moderns, too, albeit with the claim of objective validity, as subjective at least. And it is this active aspect of thinking that was discovered. This was at a time when it was impossible to understand the objective structure of the world process, when it was almost impossible to look at anything other than this activity of thinking.

I would like to ask all philosophers who think along the lines of the Marburg School — and I am only saying a few aphoristic remarks here — how they can see a real being in thinking when the thinking subject, that is, the human being, has this activity of thinking interrupted every time from falling asleep to waking up? This is a crucial question that should be posed to the entire Marburg School. The point is that the Marburg School is basically a consistent elaboration of Descartes's phrase “I think, therefore I am,” but this is only based on a particular judgment about thinking in the present. For there is no denying that we are also then, when we are not thinking in our ordinary consciousness between falling asleep and waking up. And when we think backwards, our retrospective is divided into those currents in which we think and those currents in which we do not think, then think again and so on, and in the meantime we are without thinking. This is the cardinal problem, and it is the source of failure not only for the Marburg School but also for Bergson and certain American schools, which are noteworthy in their own way. First of all, we must overcome the influence of Descartes' “I think, therefore I am”.

It is therefore necessary to get into the scope of human consciousness what encompasses, on the one hand, the activity of thinking and, on the other, the discontinuity of thinking. This is what must be raised as a problem in relation to this school, and it is a problem that has not even been touched upon by this Marburg school. There is not even an awareness that this problem exists, just as little as, for example, in Bergson and in the current epistemological direction; I do not mean James – he develops pragmatism – but I mean some other American directions. The problem is actually not touched upon, and when it is raised, there is no awareness of how to deal with it, not even epistemologically.

Then, of course, there is the direction of Husserl, but it is not given much consideration. My feeling is that he is a disciple of Franz Brentano. In Franz Brentano, the fact that he is a sharply trained Aristotelian and a sharply trained Thomist is evident everywhere, a good, thorough connoisseur of Thomism, so that some of both Aristotelianism and Thomism has been transferred to Husserl. Of course, a modern philosopher like Husserl cannot readily admit this, but it can be seen in his psychology and in everything that comes to light in him.

Now, I don't know what Miss Matthes thinks about this – I must confess that when I wrote my “Riddles of Philosophy” in the new edition and tried to incorporate some of these newer directions, I was repeatedly faced with the question: What should one actually do with Husserl? No matter how hard you try to get at it, to somehow get hold of it, to grasp it, you can't do it; nothing special comes of it. It struck me so strongly how Husserl basically rummages in words, how, despite all his insight into the essence of things and so on, he is completely dependent on the secondary content of words and how he cannot come to a real insight into even the simplest facts of consciousness. It seems, for example, to be impossible for Husserl to grasp the difference between the image of Cologne Cathedral that I have only in my memory, but noted in my consciousness down to the last detail, and the image that I have before me when I actually stand in front of Cologne Cathedral and really look at it. I don't see how, in the whole structure of Husserl's philosophy, a difference between these two images could be found as essentially real. And if I am not mistaken, Husserl himself once used this image of Cologne Cathedral in these two relationships, I believe for the sake of illustration. One does not actually come out of his confusion through all possible discussions to something tangible.

I also have this feeling when I consider Scheler's sometimes quite beautiful treatises. Scheler is a talented person, but I always ask myself why Scheler – who, for example, has written beautiful treatises on the direct perception of feeling, that is, on the direct experience of compassion – why he does not manage to somehow really gain an independent worldview? Why does he so terribly proselytize? Why does he seek the support of old Catholicism? This is something that shows me that these philosophers are disciples of Brentano.

Brentano has only [...] gap in the stenographer's notes] of his philosophy because he could not merge into a real spiritual science. He did not want to, nor could he. And it is not true, for Brentano was so strong that he did not turn to Catholicism, but his students are terribly Catholic in their efforts to find a connection for their world view.

As for the people of Baden – Windelband, Rickert and some others – it seems to me that the whole matter rests on an appalling one-sidedness in their conception of reality. It is not true that these people no longer know what to do with philosophy and want to save themselves by even excluding the value problem. They separate it out in such a way that they then have no need to make any kind of statements about the relationship of value to themselves. They crystallize the value problem out of the scope of the world problems, so to speak, and refer to John Mackay without feeling any obligation to somehow integrate value into the currents of being. This will also be completely impossible as long as we do not overcome the law of the conservation of energy and matter in the near future. For one must realize that with value something is given that is germinal for future values, that is there when the present has decayed. One must therefore come to think of matter and force as transitory and to see the fruits, the germs that they have in them, as values. Only then will one be able to gain a further insight into these problems, into value problems. Today, there is a lack of courage for that. Of course, people completely lack the courage to somehow attack the law of the conservation of energy and matter. There are a few tentative attempts – Drews occasionally points out, after all, that the law of the conservation of matter and energy is only a kind of empirical problem and the like – but one will hardly find any far-reaching insight in this field.

With regard to Nelson and his direction, one should perhaps not overlook the fact that the people started from Hegel and the Fries, which he regarded as the “father of all shallowness”, because the people were all Friesians at first, weren't they? It was a Fries School at first. And now we must not forget that what I have emphasized time and again comes into play here: you can be an extraordinarily astute logician – there is no doubt about that in Nelson's case – but for real life problems, it is not enough. I must say that when he spoke at the Bologna Congress in 1911, among all the various illustrious philosophers, including Bergson, he was actually the very best in terms of dialectical power and solid craftsmanship in the use of thought. But then, especially when I saw Nelson again recently in Bern, I got the feeling that it is not at all sufficient for real life problems, that it leads to an abstractness - which is actually quite dreadful, but which was excellently characterized by Ms. Matthes - in that he tries to gain an ethic in three volumes from an abstract sentence. You see, you can be an excellent dialectician without having the slightest sense of reality. This can also be seen from the way Nelson treats the problem of knowledge. It is ultimately all the same to him whether the problem of knowledge is treated in the way of the many neo-Kantians who actually start from quite secondary things.

You see, it was perhaps in 1888 that I once sat in Berlin with Eduard von Hartmann, and the conversation revolved almost entirely around the fundamental questions of epistemology. Well, Eduard von Hartmann really could not be approached in this direction. So I expressed the opinion that when one speaks of the idea, one can initially say, for my sake, that the idea is something subjective, but that it is not possible to stick to it when one moves on to considerations. I recently compared it to this: if someone takes a letter, E or something else, they cannot raise the abstract question of what this individual letter means in itself. But if you have letters that then combine into words and the words combine into sentences, then the whole thing comes together. And so you can say: Certainly, if you just take a small thing from phenomenology, the problem of how this individual thing relates to the thing in itself and so on becomes a kind of life problem again and again. But if you connect the phenomena with each other, a certain structure arises, and you can no longer think the same about a certain sphere of phenomena in relation to reality as you can about an individual. Non-epistemologists like Nelson completely ignore such things. It really does not matter whether, on the one hand, it is said against epistemology, as Hegel said: you can't recognize without recognizing, because that would be the same as wanting to learn to swim without getting into the water - or whether on the other hand you say: in order to pose a problem of recognition, there would have to be a recognition already. - What is really at issue here is to realize that the problem of recognition could still be a completely valid problem, even though it presupposes a certain recognition. One could practise recognition first, and then afterwards one could observe it, and afterwards one could critically determine - or whatever you want to call it - whether the recognition is valid or not. So an epistemology could never be eliminated by Nelson's arguments.

So these things are there. Other images could be given, some noteworthy philosophical directions could be mentioned. I will only mention that, for example, pragmatism also has a great many followers in Germany, and that neo-Thomism also has a certain significance in the present, especially among Catholic philosophers, even if it is not noticed because of the divisions that exist and because people do not care what some produce when they live in the circle of others.

But all these schools of thought are actually faced with the necessity of finding a transition to a reality, of getting out of the mere formal. When one hears or reads Eucken – every book by Eucken says roughly the same thing – it really is as if someone were not standing on the ground, but were constantly floating in the air, pulling himself up by his hair. It is a lot of beating about the bush for no reason. This is especially striking in Eucken's work. And one must say, when one looks at what is there and what cannot be connected to reality, one can understand that young people, who really have the tendency to absorb something about the world, cannot get their rights and must ultimately be truly disappointed and must become desolate. It is really quite sad when one sees how little that which has been brought to the surface from the last moments of development is inclined to meet this longing of youth. Not true, the students might like to hear something, but what they can hear is really not worth listening to. And what happens next is basically terrible.

At a German university, they tried to interest a man who is actually well-intentioned but who came from the old system in the GDR in the threefold order. At the time, he had resolved, in order to get to know the threefold order, to give a student who wanted to take his exam with him a dissertation on the threefold order, because this would save him from having to read the “key points” himself. He then corrected the dissertation and believed that by becoming acquainted with the ideas of the “key points” in the course of his official duties, he was in this way getting to know the threefold order; because otherwise, directly, he does not do it. This reminds me vividly of how a student once asked his professor about Soloviev at a university. Well, the professor hardly knew the name, but he said to himself: There is the best opportunity for me to get to know him too. [And to the student he said:] Do a dissertation on it. — So it is at a German university when a dissertation is to be done on Soloviev. At the moment he gave the dissertation, the professor had no idea about Soloviev – nor did he later, he didn't know more than what he had taken from the dissertation itself.

It is almost impossible to describe the state we gradually entered into. And the subordination of the spiritual realm to the state structure is closely related to these conditions. And the only thing that can help is a truly emancipated, free spiritual life. Only on the basis of a free spiritual life can anything of what the students are actually looking for succeed today, when the need is so great. Here in Switzerland, people do not know; they do not know the hardship. It is really much more difficult, much worse than one thinks. And that is what I always try to explain to our friends, also in my anthroposophical reflections: that it is much worse than one thinks. If we could somehow manage to reach a sufficiently large number of people with ideas from spiritual science, on the one hand, and with the ideas of the threefold social order, on the other, which are necessary for the public introduction of spiritual science, we would be able to take a significant step forward.

What Ms. Matthes presented today can also fully prove to you that a completely new approach is necessary, that we cannot continue to muddle through in what has developed. We need a new approach in our public life; without it, we will not get anywhere.

The break [in spiritual life] actually happened relatively early on. You see, it may perhaps be pointed out after all that the great philosophers have no longer found great disciples. Take all of Hegel's disciples – the Hennings and Marheinekes and so on, Michelet is the name of one of them – take them all, they can be found first among those who published the Hegelian estate, and then take what actually emerged, the reactionary course of these sages, or take Immanuel Hermann Fichte, and then in philosophy take all those who were philosophers like Carriere and so on, even Friedrich Theodor Vischer, who was a daredevil in many respects, one must still say: there was a major break in intellectual life as such in the mid-19th century. And instead of there being, in the second half of the nineteenth century, in Germany, where it would have been natural for there to be a real deepening of intellectual life, there was, in particular, a flood in German philosophy of everything that was less than German philosophy. There was actually a spirit; what was missing was a sense of reality.

You see, I knew a philosopher who actually didn't play a role at all, but who was truly smarter than many who did play a role. His name was Gregor Itelson. As a dialectician, he actually outwitted everyone, and you can be sure that he would easily outwit Nelson in a discussion as well. Gregor Itelson, if he wanted to, could brilliantly refute someone who spoke in such a way as Father Wasman, for example. When he had appeared in Berlin – it was on the occasion of this Life-Jesus movement, in 1905 or so, at the beginning of the 20th century in any case – Gregor Itelson gave a brilliant speech against the Jesuit Father Wasman. But just recently I have again heard it said that Gregor Itelson, when a monist was defending his world view, did everything in the most brilliant way to bring the monist in question to his knees. But I never heard Gregor Itelson put forward any of his own positive thoughts. A brilliant dialectician – but no positive thoughts whatsoever! I once had a discussion with him, perhaps in 1901 or 1902. I said something like: What you said again today is nice, but why have you never said anything that is your own view? Yes, he said, that's what I'm working on; I've been working on a revision of logic since my youth, but I'm not finished yet. If you listen to people talking today, everywhere, whether they are natural scientists or theologians and so on – he was right, you can prove logical errors everywhere. And he said: We don't need a revolution in logic, we just need a revision of logic. Then he said, as we talked a little further: But this revision of logic, it is actually not that difficult, you can write it on two quart pages. I said: Yes, why don't you finally write these two quart pages? Why does it have to be two quart pages? But he still hasn't written them, at least I haven't seen them in front of me.

It is not a lack of logic or dialectics. During the time I knew Itelson, he got up at 10 o'clock in the morning, then went to the coffeehouse, read his newspapers; then he went to lunch, then he went back to the coffeehouse, and if you came to the coffeehouse after some lecture, you would meet him there as well. He was a dawdler, but he could still be extraordinarily stimulating, even at midnight, for example, talking about the impossibility of Maeterlinck's ideas. And a person like Nelson differs from dialecticians like Itelson only in that he is more brazen, that he relies more on his legs, is more brazen in his appearance, is not a drifter, is a hard-working person, an intellectual giant. Nelson has a brutal, not very wide-meshed [way of thinking], not the slightest finesse in his thinking. It is actually sad, basically, that a whole number of young people today let themselves be taken in tow by Nelson.

These also include people like Mühlestein, who appeared in Basel in the discussion after a lecture and said that threefolding was not possible after all, that everything had to be united into one unit. I replied that the right also has its place in the life of the spirit and in economic life; I said: Yes, the unit is, for example, a farming family, which includes the farmer, the farmer's wife, the children, the farmhands and also the cows. If the cows give plenty of milk, the whole family will have milk. Therefore, it is not necessary to demand that all members of the family give milk. And so it is in the social threefold order: if only the political state provides the law, then economic life and spiritual life will also have the law. Just as the farmer's wife or the farmer himself do not have to provide milk for the family to be supplied with milk, economic life and spiritual life do not have to produce law. Thoughts such as these, when they are examined with a sense of reality, are very easy to unhinge. And so it is with Nelson, especially in his ethical and political views.

What all such considerations point to, however, is that today, above all, we need the courage to leap the river and really penetrate into spiritual science. Then, as Miss Matthes quite rightly said, philosophy too will be able to become something very fruitful again. Without spiritual science, philosophy will always remain something that cannot be put into practice in life and that cannot prove that it has a solid foundation. Today, philosophy without spiritual science only leads to an empty formalism, not to content.

That is what I might add to what Miss Matthes said. We can certainly be very grateful to Miss Matthes for raising this topic in such an excellent and vivid way before us today.

Preliminary note: During the first three-week “Anthroposophical College Course” (September 26 to October 16, 1920 in Dornach), at which 30 representatives of various disciplines gave lectures in addition to Rudolf Steiner, Three evenings of conversation also took place, on October 4, 6 and 15, 1920. During these so-called “Conversations on Spiritual Science,” questions on any topic could be asked, to which Rudolf Steiner then responded in more or less detail. The stenographers did not record the conversation evenings in their entirety, and there are gaps in some of them.

Rudolf Steiner: Dearly beloved! I imagine that today, in a kind of conversation, we will discuss all kinds of questions and the like that arise in one or other of the honored listeners in connection with what has been developed here in recent days as anthroposophy. Although, as I have endeavored to arrange, you will be offered a hundred lectures during these three weeks, it is not possible to do more than touch on individual topics in outline. What can be given to you here can only be suggestions at first, but these suggestions may perhaps show that the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science meant here is no less well founded

Asa is more firmly grounded than that which is taken from the external life of today's strict science, yes, that it absorbs all the methodical discipline of this science and also perceives that which stands as a great demand of the time, the demand for further development. This demand for further development arises from the fact that those impulses of scientific life, in particular, which have produced great things in the past epoch, are now in the process of dying out and would have to lead to the decline of our civilization if a new impetus were not to come.

The suggestions that have now been made for such a new impact can certainly be expanded in a variety of directions in the context of a discussion such as the one taking place today, and I would now like to ask you to contribute to this expansion. Please ask questions, express your wishes and in general put forward anything you wish to say. The questions can best be put in writing, and I ask you to make good use of this opportunity.

Mr. Conrad: The question I have to ask relates to a therapeutic area. In his lectures, Dr. Steiner pointed to certain illnesses that are currently occurring very frequently. There are certain mental disorders in this regard for which I would be grateful for an answer about the deeper causes. These are mainly speech disorders. I would like to point out that I am not motivated by personal interests, but am only asking to the extent that pedagogical interests are involved. Teachers have often asked me what to do about speech disorders. However, since this question touches on the field of therapy, I do not want to encourage questions that only concern illnesses. I would be very grateful for an answer because this question seems to be very pressing at the moment.

Rudolf Steiner: Perhaps we can start by answering this question. When something specific like this comes up, we must of course bear in mind that such specific disturbances in the human organism can have the most diverse causes and that it is extremely difficult to talk about these things in general if we want to get to the real cause. In all such matters, my esteemed audience, it is actually a matter of using spiritual science to enable one to assess the individual case in the right way. And here I would like to say something that perhaps has a much more general significance than this question requires.

You see, we live in an age of abstraction, in an age when people love to reduce the manifold world, the multiform world, to a few formulas, when people love to establish abstract laws that encompass vast areas of existence. They can only do so in an abstract way, ignoring the individual. Spiritual science will have to bring about a significant change in this direction in particular. It will indulge less in simplifying the manifold existence and will bring insights about the concrete spiritual. But by approaching the concrete spiritual, one's soul is stimulated in such a way that the ability to observe and judge is strengthened and invigorated. This will become apparent in people's general social interaction. A large part of the social question today actually lies in the fact that we no longer have any inclination to really get to know the person we pass by, because our inner being does not have the kind of stimuli that enable us to properly grasp the individual, the particular. Here spiritual science will achieve something different. Spiritual science will enrich our inner life again, enabling it to grasp the particular. And so our powers of observation and discrimination and all that will be particularly developed. Therefore, we will have less desire for abstract generalizations, but more desire for the particular, the individual. In a sense, we will adhere more to the exemplary than to the abstract. And especially when dealing with something like physical disorders, with speech disorders, one must say: almost every single case is different – it is of course a slight exaggeration, but still generally valid – almost every single case is different, and at least one must distinguish typical ones.

We must be clear about the fact that some of the things that cause speech disorders are, of course, organically determined, that is, in a certain way, based on the inadequate development of this or that organ. But a whole series of such disorders in the present day are due to the fact that the human being's spiritual and soul forces are not being developed in the right way. And it may even be said that if a proper development of the spiritual and mental abilities of the human being can be achieved through education in childhood, at a time when the human organism is still pliable, then organic disorders can also be overcome to a certain extent; they can be overcome more easily than at a later age, when the body is more solidified. Our entire education system has gradually become more and more abstract. Our pedagogy does not suffer from bad principles. In general, if we look at the abstract treatment of pedagogical principles, we can see that we had great and significant achievements in the 19th century. And if you look at today's abstract way of applying how to do this or that in school, you have to say that 19th-century pedagogy really means something quite tremendous. But the art of responding to the individual child, of noticing the particular development of the individual child, is something that has been lost in modern times through the rush towards intellectuality and abstraction. To a certain extent, we are no longer able to strengthen the child's soul and spirit in the right way through abstract education. Do not think that when such a demand is made, it is only to point to a one-sided, unworldly education of soul and spirit – oh no. It may seem paradoxical today, but it is actually the case that materialism has had the tragic fate of being unable to cope with material phenomena. The best example of this is that we have such psychological theories as psycho-physical parallelism. On the one hand, we have human corporeality, which is only known from the point of view of anatomy, which only learns from the corpse; on the other hand, we have theories about the soul and spirit that are imagined up or even only live in words , and then one reflects on how this soul-spiritual, which bears no resemblance to the physical body, how this soul-spiritual is to affect the physical body. Spiritual science will lead precisely to the fact that one will be able to deal with the physical in a concrete way, that one will know such things as those which I already hinted at yesterday in the lecture and whose importance I would like to mention again here: From birth until the second set of teeth has come through, something is at work in us as human beings that we can call a sum of equilibrium forces that organize us thoroughly, and something that is mobile forces, that are life forces. This is particularly strong in our organism within this human age. What is at work in the human being is what really, I would say, pushes out the second teeth, what finds its conclusion in the pushing out of the second teeth, what, for its effectiveness in the organism, comes to a certain degree - it continues, of course - but comes to a certain degree to a conclusion with the appearance of the second teeth. It then transforms into what we can call mathematical, geometric thinking, what we can call thinking about the equilibrium conditions in space, thinking about the conditions of movement in space, what we can call finding oneself in the conditions of life in space and in time. We study what emerges from this, what passes, as it were, from a state of latency into a state of freedom, when it has just been released. There it is, as spiritual soul, as a very concrete spiritual soul, as we see it growing up in the child, when the change of teeth begins and continues into the later years of life. And now we look at this and see: what is spiritual and soul-like has an organizing effect in the body during the first seven years of life. And again, we study the connection between the spiritual and soul-like and the physical organization when we consider what the human being can then experience - albeit consciously only in inspiration - that is, what he experiences with ordinary consciousness, but still unconsciously, in the period from the change of teeth to sexual maturity. It is more of an immersion into physical corporeality, where in its course, first of all, as the most important phenomenon – but there are others as well – it awakens the love instinct, where it marks the end, for example, with the change of voice in the male sex, and with somewhat broader effects in the female sex. What we recognize when we observe the development of the emotional world, and when we observe, for example, something like the development of the sense of music, especially at the time when the emotional world is developing, we study this again as the connection between the soul and spiritual life and the physical organization from the seventh to the fourteenth or fifteenth year.

In short, spiritual science does not ask the abstract question: How does the soul affect the body?, but rather it studies the concrete soul, it knows that one must look at the concrete soul at certain ages and how it affects the body in other ages. Thus it transforms the abstract and therefore so unsatisfactory method of treatment of today's psychology and physiology into very concrete methods. And in the further course, one then comes to the point where one can not only determine in general through spiritual science: in the first seven years of life, equilibrium, movement, and life force are at work; but one can also specialize in how this spiritual force expresses itself in the organs, how it works in the lungs, heart, liver, and so on; one has the opportunity to really look into the human body in a living way. In this way, the knowledge of the material turns out to be quite different from what materialism can [recognize]. The peculiar thing about materialism is that it devotes itself to a false, namely an abstract, a deducted spirituality. The peculiar thing about spiritual science is that it is precisely able to assess the material in the right way. Of course, it also goes in the right way to the spiritual on the other side. More and more clearly should we fight the opinion, which starts from nebulous mystics, that spiritual science is something that deals with phantasms in general talk. No, spiritual science deals precisely with the concrete and wants to provide a view of how the spiritual and soul life works down into the individual organs. For it is only by getting to know the workings of the spiritual in a concrete way in the material existence that one recognizes the material existence. But through such a concrete penetration into the human organism, one gradually acquires — through a kind of imagination, inspiration and so on — an ability, I would say a gift, to really see the individual and then to be able to judge where any particular fault lies, for example, when speech disorders are present. At a certain childlike age, it will be possible to influence the development of the speech organs through special speech exercises. The important thing is to be able to observe what physical disorders may be present at the right age. And although all kinds of obstacles are present simply due to external circumstances – after all, today only that which is officially certified in this direction is recognized and allowed to be practiced in any way – although all kinds of obstacles are present, we can still say that, for example, some beautiful results have been achieved in the case of speech disorders simply by rhythmic speech exercises were carried out, that the particular defect was recognized, and that the person with the defective speech organism was then allowed to recite things in this or that speech rhythm, always repeating them, and that he was then instructed to place himself in the rhythmic process of these or those tones, feeling them particularly. In this direction one can achieve very significant improvements or at least relief from such disorders. But something else is also possible. For example, in the case of speech disorders, one can work particularly on regulating the respiratory process, a regulation of the respiratory process that must, however, be completely individual. This regulation of the breathing process can be achieved by letting the person you are treating develop a feeling between the internal repetition, or perhaps just thinking, but broad thinking, slow thinking of certain word connections [and the breathing process]. The peculiar thing is that if you form such word connections in the right way, then, by surrendering to such a rhythm of thought or inner rhythm of words, you convey a feeling to the person being treated: With this word and its course, its slow or fast course, you notice it in your breathing, it changes in this or that way, and you follow that. In a certain way, you make him aware of what arises as a parallel phenomenon to breathing for speech. You make him aware of it. And when he can then tell you something about it, you try to help him further, so that once he has become aware of the breathing process, he gradually reaches the point where he can consciously snap into it himself, I would even say in word contexts that he forms during this breathing process, which he can now consciously follow in a certain way, in an appropriate manner.

So you have to think of it this way: by first giving rhythms, which, depending on how the matter lies, are to be thought inwardly, murmured, whispered or recited aloud, you cause the person in question to notice a change in breathing. Now he knows that the breath changes in this way. And now he is, in a sense, forbidden from using the very word or thought material that has been given to him. He is made aware that he is now forming something similar within himself, and then he comes up with the idea of consciously paralleling this entire inner process of thinking or speaking or inwardly hearing words with the breathing process, so that a certain breathing always snaps into an inner imagining or inner hearing of words. In this way, a great deal of what I would call a poor association between the processes that are more mental, more soul-like, in speaking, and those processes that take place in the organism as more material, as physical processes, is balanced out. All of this has a particularly favorable effect when applied in the right childhood period. And it can be said that if our teachers were better psychologists, if they really had a concrete knowledge of the human body from the spirit, they would be able to work with speech disorders in a completely different way, especially in a pedagogical way.

Now, what I have mentioned can also be developed into a certain therapy, and it can also be used to achieve many favorable results for later stages of life. But it seems to me to be of particular importance – and here we could already point to certain successes that have been achieved in this direction – that such things can be cured by a particularly rational application of the principle of imitation. But then one must have a much more intimate, I might say subjective-objective knowledge of the whole human organism and its parts.

You see, people speak to each other in life; but they are hardly aware of the, I would say imponderable, effects that are exerted from person to person when speaking. But these effects are there nevertheless. We have become so abstract today that we actually only listen to the other person's intellectual content. Very few people today have a sense of what is actually meant when a person with a little more psychic-organic compassion feels, after speaking to another, how he consciously carries the other person's speech to a high degree in his own speech organism. Very few people today have any sense of what is experienced in this respect when one has to speak in succession with four, five or six people, one of whom is coughing, the second hoarse, the third shouting, the fourth speaking quite unintelligibly, and so on, because one's own organism is also involved; it vibrates along with everything, it experiences it all. And if you develop this feeling of experiencing speech, you certainly acquire a strong feeling, I might say, for defense mechanisms too. The peculiar thing is that it is precisely in the case of such things, which are so closely connected with the subjectivity of the human being as speech disorders, that one then finds out how one has to speak to someone who suffers from speech disorders, how one has to speak to him so that he can achieve something through imitation. I have met stutterers; if you have been able to empathize with their stuttering and then spoken to them rhythmically by name, then you could get them to really achieve something like forgetting their stuttering, by running after what is spoken to them, so to speak. However, you then have to be able to develop human compassion to the point where it is organic. In therapy, an enormous amount depends on the ability to make the patient forget the subjective experience associated with some objective process. And in particular, for example, a real remedy for speech disorders is, if the time between the ages of seven and fourteen is used correctly, by lovingly encouraging those with speech disorders to engage in the kind of imitation just described. It is often the case that one experiences that stutterers sometimes cannot pronounce three words properly without stumbling, cannot say three words

properly one after the other. If you give them a poem to recite that they can become completely absorbed in, that they can love, and if you stand behind it as it were as an attentive listener, then they can say whole long series of verses without stuttering. Creating such opportunities for them to do something like this is something that is a particularly good therapeutic tool from a psychological point of view. It is a bad thing to point out such defects to people, no matter what the reason. I had a poet friend who always lost his temper when someone tactless pointed out his stammering. When someone tactfully asked him, “Doctor, do you always stammer like that?” he replied, “No, only when I am confronted with someone who is thoroughly unpleasant to me.” Of course, I would have had to stutter terribly now if I had really wanted to imitate the way this answer was given.

But then, little by little, one will recognize what a significant remedy can be found in eurythmy for such and similar defects in the human organism. Eurythmy can be studied from two sides, as it were. I always draw attention to this in the introductions to the performances. I show how the speech organism and its movement tendencies can be perceived through sensory and supersensory observation of the human being today, and how these are then transferred to the whole human organism. However, the reverse approach is no less important. For, as has been very well presented to you today from a different point of view by Dr. Treichler, in the development of speech, a primeval eurythmy of human beings undoubtedly and most certainly plays a very significant role. Things do not have the sound within them, as it were, in the sense that the bim-bam theory asserts, but there is a relationship between all things, between the whole macrocosm and the human organization, this microcosm, and basically everything that happens externally in the world can also be reproduced in a certain way in movement by the human organization. And so, basically, we constantly tend to recreate all phenomena through our own organism. We do this not only with the physical organism, but also with the etheric organism. The etheric organism is in a state of perpetual eurythmy. Primitive man was much more mobile than he is today. You know, this development from mobility to stillness is still reflected in the fact that in certain circles it is considered a sign of education to behave as phlegmatically as possible when speaking and to accompany one's speech with as few gestures as possible. It is “considered” a mark of certain speakers that they always keep their hands in their trouser pockets, so that they do not make any gestures with their arms, because it is considered an expression of particularly good speech delivery when one stands still like a block. But what is caricatured here only corresponds to humanity's progression from mobility to stillness. We have to recognize a transition from a gestural language, from a kind of eurythmy, to phonetic language at the very bottom of human development in primeval times. That which has come to rest in the organism has specialized in the organs of speech, and has naturally first actually developed the organs of speech. Just as the eye is formed by light, so the speech organ is formed by a language that is initially soundless. And if we are aware of all these connections, we will gradually be able to use eurythmy particularly well by introducing it properly into the didactic process, in order to counteract anything that could interfere with speech. And in this direction, if there is even a little leisure time, it will be a very appealing task to develop our current, more artistic and pedagogically trained eurythmy more and more towards the therapeutic side and to create a kind of eurythmy therapy that will then extend in particular to such therapeutic demands as the one we have been talking about here. I am not sure whether what I have said is already exhaustive, but I wanted to address it briefly. Of course, as questions accumulate, the level of detail in the answers will have to decrease.

A participant asks how the movement of eurythmy is meant in relation to the ether body, and whether, according to spiritual scientific research, it has the same form as the body. Is the ether body localized at the larynx?

Did the Hungarians, who were recently observed by Dr. Steiner playing cards in a Hungarian border town, themselves fall under the tables or only their etheric bodies? Was this a process that could only be observed in the etheric body?

Rudolf Steiner: Please understand me correctly. Eurythmy is such that it can be performed in the physical body and through the physical body, which otherwise only the etheric body of the human being can perform. The fact that a person as a eurythmist performs the movements studied in the ether body with his physical body does not mean that the person who stands there doing eurythmy when he has some horrible thought is not carrying out this horrible thought with his ether body. He can perform the most beautiful movements with his outer, physical body, and then the etheric body, following his emotions, may dance in a rather caricature-like manner. But those people I characterized the other day as being at the Hungarian border playing cards were, of course, characterized entirely on the basis of their physical behavior. I only said that one could study these passions in the soul and spirit, the passions that led them to do such things above and below the table, and that one could study these passions in the soul and spirit.

I would like to say the following. It is generally the case, when you look at a person at rest, that the etheric body is calm and only slightly larger than the physical body. But this is only because, schematically speaking, the physical body has a dilating effect on the etheric body of the human being in all directions. If the etheric body were not held in its form by the physical body, if it were not banished from the physical body, then it would be a very mobile being. The etheric body has the inherent possibility of moving in all directions, and in addition, in an awakened state, it is under the constant influence of the mobile astral, which follows everything of a spiritual nature. The etheric body in itself is therefore something thoroughly mobile. As a painter, for example, one has the difficulty when one wants to paint something ethereal, that one must paint, I would say, as if one could paint lightning. One must translate the moving into stillness. So at the moment when you step out of the physical world, at that moment the concept of distance also ceases to apply, along with all the things that actually only relate to resting space; all that ceases, and a completely different kind of imagining begins. A form of imagining begins that can actually only be characterized by saying that it relates to the ordinary imagining of spatial things as a suction effect relates to a pressure effect. One is drawn into the matter instead of touching it and so on. This is how it is with the relationship between the etheric body and the physical body.

A participant (also speaking for others): Dear attendees, prompted by discussions with many friends, I would like to ask a few questions that may express some of what has been going through many minds and hearts over the past week. We have heard that young students in particular can hear and learn many things here that need to be carried out into our people to build a new culture. Now, in the midst of all the problems that are being discussed here, the question of the fate of our German people often arises. How must our youth place themselves in the context of the fate of our German people if they want to fulfill their inner duties in the right way and of their own free will? Just as Fichte brought forth great and powerful thoughts a hundred years ago, so too are we receiving powerful thoughts today, the realization of which we long for. In wide circles, at least in those circles that are close to the threefold order, the view prevails today that this threefold order will also be realized without intensive work, that it can thus come about all by itself, so to speak, even if people contribute nothing to it.

Now I would like to raise the question: What will actually be the fate of our nation if this fatalistic attitude prevails in our circles – which is, of course, very easily explained from our overall cultural development – and if it is not replaced by the courageous will that is wanted from here? Today one often hears that it is possible that Bolshevism will spread even further, that it is possible that anarchic conditions in Germany will continue to spread. How should we position ourselves in the face of these questions, when this fatalistic element, which I have tried to describe, is confronted with the courageous, forward-storming will?

A second question: we are talking here about anthroposophy, about human wisdom. Now the question has been repeatedly asked in recent days: what would the whole world view actually look like if one did not start from the point of view of the anthroposophist, but if one started from the point of view of some other consciousness? We know from Dr. Steiner's lectures, but also from other lectures, that the three lower realms, that is, the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms, are actually the brothers of man who have remained behind. How would this now present itself if we were to relate man again to the higher hierarchy, for example to the angelic beings? Is it conceivable that what is presented from a human point of view today as anthroposophy might be presented from the point of view of a higher consciousness, that is, from the point of view of an angelic consciousness - one could perhaps speak of an angeloisophy in this context - and how would the problems appear from this point of view? I ask this question because it has repeatedly come up in our conversations in recent days.

A third question: From the previous remarks by Dr. Steiner, it is clear that eurythmy is extremely important from a therapeutic point of view. Now I would like to point out that if we observe certain things today, things that appear to be trivial, we can see how absolutely necessary eurythmy is from a different point of view. Even in certain children's toys, we can see how certain forces appropriate to the present time want to come out, push towards manifestation. [There follows a reference to diabolo games and toys that were introduced by French and American soldiers in particular.] Do such toys not show certain forces that pull downwards? Is there not something in them that expresses forces that are polar to human nature, perhaps a hint of the devilish? And so I wanted to raise the question: Is it not possible that the harmful aspects of these or other materialistic games given to children today could be overcome through eurythmy? Just yesterday in children's eurythmy we had a living example of how children can respond to eurythmy in an ingenious way and then reject everything that is contained in such games.

Rudolf Steiner: I will try to answer the questions briefly, although each one would require a lecture in itself. However, I would ask you to bear in mind that if one says something in a brief answer to a question, it is of course easy for some inaccuracies or misunderstandings to arise.

First of all, the question of the fate of the German people: it is true that today an enormous sense of fatalism is emerging within broad sections of the German people. This fatalistic mood can be observed on a large scale and in detail. And this fatalistic mood was also, I might say tragically there when we began in April of last year in Stuttgart to seek understanding for the threefold social organism and for the upliftment of what lies in such a terrible way, that comes from this understanding. But on the other hand, it must be said that we have arrived at a very special point in the development of humanity. I must frankly admit that when I was invited by the Anthroposophical student group in Stuttgart to give a lecture for the students of the Technical University in their assembly hall, I was still under the impression of Spengler's book “The Decline of the West”. Yes, my dear audience, we have come to the point where today we can prove the decline in a strictly methodical way. Now, Spengler's book is by no means a talentless book. On the contrary, in many respects it is extraordinarily ingenious. What is presented there testifies to nothing other than this: if only the forces of which Spengler is aware were to be effective in the future – he is not aware of anthroposophy, but, as can be seen from some of his writing, he would probably turn red with rage just hearing about it — if only what Spengler knows remains effective, then the downfall of Western civilization would be absolutely certain well into the second millennium. Just let everything that has developed in humanity be effective — the downfall is certain. Just as a human being ages when he has reached a certain number of years and is heading towards death, so this culture is heading towards death. What people like Spengler do not know is what has developed in the successive cultural periods, which you will find described in my “Occult Science”.

In the first cultural period — I have called it the primeval Indian period — there was a primeval culture based on the wisdom of the time. Some of this has already been characterized in these lectures. From this there was an inheritance in the next age, in the ancient Persian, in the Zarathustra culture; from there, in turn, diluted into that age, what can be called the Egyptian-Chaldean culture, the third period, which closes approximately in the 8th century BC before the Mystery of Golgotha. Then very little goes into the fourth period, where Plato still lets his teaching and his writings be steeped in ancient mystery wisdom, but where naturalism and intellectualism already begin with Aristotle. During this period, in which human original wisdom is already beginning to decline, Christianity is founded. The Mystery of Golgotha is still understood with the last original wisdom. But as this ancient wisdom itself fades, it finally becomes modern theology, which either degenerates into a material dogmatism and church belief or into a description of Jesus as a simple man from Nazareth, in whom the Christ, the Christ-being, has been completely lost. But of course a new understanding of Christianity itself must come. The origin of Christianity extends into this fourth period, and from the point of view of Primordial Wisdom, it extends a little into our fifth period. The fifth period is the one in which Primordial Wisdom disappears, is paralyzed, and in which man must find a new spirituality from within himself. All talk about this spirituality coming from outside is in vain for the future. In the future, the gods must speak through the human soul. Today, the question is not addressed to any other power of the soul than to our will alone. That is to say, today it is a matter for all mankind to thoroughly overcome fatalism and consciously absorb spirituality into the will. This mission has already fallen to the German people to a very considerable extent. Anyone who studies this in more detail, by looking at the great figures of the German people, will notice how this people in particular has the mission to reshape its world, I would say its social world, out of its will, despite all the hardship and all the terrible things that are now unfolding within this people. Only for the time being there is no awareness of the actual facts and the great world-historical context.

I would like to do as I sometimes like to do, not just give my own opinion, but refer to the opinion of someone else, Herman Grimm, who certainly cannot be said to have been a Bolshevik or anything of the sort. As early as the 1880s, Herman Grimm wrote that the greatness of the German people is not based on its princes or its governments, but on its intellectual giants. But it may also be said that this is precisely what has been most misunderstood and most forgotten. Today there is a significant fact that one must only properly observe. Take the general intellectual life, untouched by a real spiritual upsurge. Study it as it lives itself out in popular literature, be it in Berlin, Vienna or elsewhere – I am not just talking about after the war here, but long before the war. study how it is lived out in Berlin, Vienna, Munich, Cologne, Hamburg, Bremen and so on, study it in popular literature, especially in newspaper literature, which can be said to represent the opinions of a very large number of people. Yes, especially during the war, it turned out that sometimes people also remembered that there was a Goethe, that there was a Schiller, that there was a Fichte – yes, even Fichte's sayings were quoted. But the fact of the matter is this: anyone today who has a feeling, a real receptivity for the inner structure, for the direction, for the whole signature of intellectual life, knows that what was written in the 20th century in Vienna, Berlin, Munich, Hamburg, Dresden, Leipzig was more similar to what was written in Paris, Chicago, New York, and London than to what a Herder, a Goethe, or a Fichte felt vibrating through their souls.

This fact is widely misunderstood. What Central Europe's greatness is actually based on has been forgotten. Once we describe figures like Frederick the Great according to the truth, not according to legend, then some of it will melt away in the face of the real intellectual greatness in Central Europe. And this must come. We must learn again, not just to quote the words of Fichte, not just to quote the words of Goethe, but to be able to live again in what lived at the turn of the 18th to the 19th century. And we must become aware that only through the individual shaping of the peoples differentiated across the earth can something of what is to be achieved be achieved – not, however, by some unified culture emanating from some side, which is a Western culture, and one that is justified only for the West, has flooded Central Europe, not through the fault of the West alone, but above all because Central Europe allowed itself to be flooded and accepted everything. And this awareness of what is at stake is what must be spread today by those who mean well.

Dear attendees, I knew an Austrian poet; I met him when he was already very old: his name is Fercher von Steinwand. He wrote many important works that unfortunately have remained unknown.

I will just add what I wrote in my booklet [1895] about Nietzsche, a fighter against his time. Right at the beginning, I quoted a saying of Nietzsche that actually deserves to be better known: the saying that Nietzsche wrote down when he served in the Franco-Prussian War, albeit as a military hospital attendant. There he wrote [about the terrible, dangerous consequences of the victorious war and called it a delusion that German culture had also triumphed; this delusion posed the danger of transforming victory into complete defeat,] yes, into the extirpation of the German spirit in favor of the German Reich. In recent decades, when people spoke of the extirpation of the spirit, they understood little of this, if they spoke of the will to let this spirit flow in again.

And when all this is taken into account, it is necessary to recall what Fichte felt and what he expressed so magnificently in his “Addresses to the German Nation”: that the gods serve the will of men, that they work through the will of self-aware men.

And after Herder, Goethe, Schiller, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel and others, it is precisely this German nation that should be aware that the will must arise, but that will must be imbued with spirituality. What strange mental wanderings this German nation has gone through. There are many things that can be recalled that are only rarely presented in external history.

I advise everyone to buy the Reclam booklet by Wilhelm von Humboldt: “Ideas for an Attempt to Determine the Limits of the Effectiveness of the State”. You will see how much of it is already contained in the middle part of the threefold social organism, the legal, state part. Of course, the threefolded social organism is not in it, but what can be said about the state itself is there. In this writing, Wilhelm von Humboldt attempts to protect the individual against the state, against the increasing power of the state in the intellectual and economic realms. Wilhelm von Humboldt was Prussian Minister of Education from 1809 to 1819 – one almost dare not say this in view of what happened afterwards.

And so many more examples could be given. What is necessary, above all, is that those who feel this question before their soul really let history come to life in them. My dear audience, as an Austrian, one has a very special feeling for this when one gets to know the school history books of northern Central Europe. In 1889, I came from Vienna to Weimar to work on the publication of Goethe's works at the Weimar Goethe-Schiller Archive. And since I had previously been involved in education and teaching, I was also given the friendly task of guiding the director of the Goethe-Schiller Archive's boys a little. They were then in high school, and it was only then that I got to know their history books a little – I hadn't taken that into account before – starting with the creation of the world and going up to the development of the Hohenzollern dynasty, and only then the actual world history. Several textbooks presented it this way, one being roughly the same as the other. But is it not always a mere radicalism when speaking in this way, but sometimes it is also the right love for the German nation. And the right love, if it can really come through spiritual-scientific stimulation, will in turn give rise to a culture of the will from mere fatalism, and that is what matters. Unless we grasp this either/or, either destruction or ascent through our own will, we will not escape destruction. Of course, ascent will not come, but something quite different. Well, I could say a lot more about this topic, but perhaps that's enough for now. We'll see each other more often.

Regarding the question: What would our world view look like from the standpoint of a different consciousness, for example, an angelic consciousness?

Well, in a certain sense, spiritual science describes completely different forms of consciousness, such forms of consciousness that people had in the earlier stages of development, or such forms of consciousness that one can ascend to through inspiration or imagination. So, in a certain sense, one learns through spiritual science to recognize what the world view of another consciousness is. But as far as the question of an angelic consciousness is concerned, ladies and gentlemen, it is very important that we do not choose more abstract questions than are necessary for a certain, I would say elasticity, of our conceptual ability. Because, you see, we do not have our consciousness to satisfy ourselves with all kinds of sensational news from the most diverse worlds, but so that we can go through our overall human development through its development. And the angels have their consciousness precisely so that they can undergo angelic development. And if someone were to ask what the world would look like with a different consciousness, it would be like someone asking me how a person would eat if they had a beak instead of a mouth. It is a textbook example of moving out of concreteness and into abstraction. Anthroposophy is supposed to achieve precisely that, to remain within the realm of experience and to extend it only

extended only to the spiritual world, that one is always ready to broaden one's experience, but not that one constructs all kinds of questions out of pure abstractness. It is not at all necessary for us to speculate in any way about angelic consciousness or mammalian consciousness or the like, but it is necessary for us to simply abandon ourselves to experience. It gives us the input into our consciousness that we need for our orientation and for our further development in the world. And that is what we have to learn from anthroposophy: to remain within the sphere that concerns us as human beings, because that is where we make appropriate progress.

This is connected with the question I heard here just now, which is asked incredibly often: what is the ultimate goal of human development in the first place?

What is the ultimate purpose of human life, or rather of life?

You see, it is precisely in relation to such questions that spiritual science must be approached not in an abstract but in a concrete way. If you had no possibility of getting a timetable for the journey to Rome here in Dornach, but only as far as Lugano, and you knew that you could get a further timetable in Lugano to go on to Florence, and from there on to Rome, one would do well not to refrain from the journey or to speculate about how I have to organize the journey from here to Rome, but to travel first to Lugano, and then see how things go from there. It is the same with human life, especially if one knows that there are repeated earthly lives. If I now tell you something about the goal of all human life here with the abilities that one can have in this one earth life, then it could indeed be something more perfect next time and then one could answer more completely how one gets the timetable to Rome. So one has to take into account what is immediately given in the concrete, and one must know that human life is in a state of perpetual development. So one cannot ask about its ultimate purpose, but only about the direction of development in which one is moving. If you really look into it, there is truly a lot to be done for the physical, soul and spiritual life. And this path to Lugano is not quite close – I now mean the path in the development of humanity – and how that will continue, we want to leave that to the more fully developed abilities of the future. In short, it is a matter of remaining in the concrete, bit by bit, and of getting rid of the abstractness that also gives birth to such questions. Now, something else is needed here about eurythmy:

Can eurythmy, when used correctly, bring important achievements for our folk culture to light?

Yes, dear readers. From some of the comments I have already made about eurythmy, you will be able to see that eurythmy can have a great pedagogical-didactic significance. If you are convinced of this, and if you are not not only believe it but also recognize that it can even help to alleviate disturbances in life through appropriate eurythmic didactics, then there is much more that can be brought into the right channels in social life through healthy eurythmy. But of course one thing needs to be noted in this regard. You see, we should be able to take this eurythmy into children's play. The esteemed questioner spoke of children's toys and asked whether eurythmy could not be used for a lot of things. And it was also asked whether eurythmy can have a healing effect on children aged five to seven who suffer from epilepsy.

It can certainly do so if it is applied in the right way. Admittedly, we are only just beginning with eurythmy. But the continuation of this beginning does not always depend only on the intellectual momentum. For example, we had intended to build a kind of eurythmeum in Stuttgart to begin with, because of course the Waldorf School is there, and later here in the building itself. You really need opportunities if these things are to be developed bit by bit. You cannot pursue these things without practising them, without having the necessary premises and also the necessary connection with the rest of human culture; you cannot pursue these things out of the blue. It would have been terribly expensive to build a eurythmy in Stuttgart and we only had a small sum of money together. Perhaps I may say the following about this. In the first year, through the dedicated work of our Waldorf teachers, which cannot be sufficiently recognized, we really achieved everything possible for the Waldorf School in the first year. Although, in spiritual and psychological terms, everything that could be expected has been achieved – it is fair to say this without being immodest – this year began with extraordinary worries for those who were sincere about the Waldorf School. It is a fact that the Waldorf School had to be enlarged because a large number of children came from outside; the number of children has more than doubled compared to the previous year. We were facing a very considerable deficit, and the fund that we had for a eurythmy school was first eaten up by the Waldorf School. It is only natural that the Waldorf School should take this on, but it means that we cannot build a eurythmy school. What lets us down is people's lack of understanding. Nowadays people are willing to understand anything, except for work that comes out of the truly concrete soul and spiritual life. I do not want to be polemical here, but I could tell you many things that would show you the dilettantism and the philosophical emptiness that is added to it today, as it performs a few somersaults before all possible reactionary powers in the world. We do not easily find the understanding of those who could do something on the material side to help things move forward. And anyone who wants the didactic, pedagogical, and especially the folk-pedagogical side of eurythmy and other aspects of a spiritual-scientific art of education to be further developed must ensure that understanding of what is actually intended is drawn into as many minds and as many souls as possible, with what is asserted here as anthroposophical spiritual science.

Question: It is often mentioned in spiritual science that those or those of the higher hierarchies have gone through their stage of humanity in these or other circumstances. What does stage of humanity mean in this sense, that is, the goal of human development? Is the goal set as the development of the I, of freedom, which freedom is denied to the higher hierarchies? So what is the stage of humanity?

Rudolf Steiner: Yes, I don't know who has denied the higher hierarchies the freedom in its special form of education. What is meant when I speak, for example, in 'Occult Science' or in the other writings of the human stage of other beings, is essentially characterized by degrees, by the different states of consciousness. In spiritual science, the term “stage of human development” is to be understood as follows:

Today, within human development in the broadest sense, we live in a state of consciousness when we are awake, which we can call object consciousness. This state of consciousness can be described as Dr. Stein described it to you in his lectures, according to his activity in imagination, concept, judgment. One can also add perception and the special kind of emotional effect, the volitional emotion, volitional impulses and so on. Then present-day humanity also still knows, but only in reminiscences, in chaotic images, the dream state, but this points back, it is an atavistic remnant of an earlier state of consciousness, of an ego-less image consciousness; this is therefore an underhuman consciousness. And it is preceded by two other states of consciousness, so that we can say: the present state of consciousness is the fourth in the series. It will be followed by a fifth, which we can anticipate today through imagination, inspiration and so on. We can also characterize this progression as future states of the sixth and seventh states of consciousness. The fourth, however, the one we have today, is in the narrower sense the state of consciousness of humanity as it is today. So when we speak of the human stage, we mean beings with object consciousness. Beings who do not perceive through such senses as human beings do, who have a special education, perhaps through very different senses, but who, in their inner being, depend on imagining and grasping and then, in a more or less subconscious activity, connecting perception with ideas and concepts. The higher, fifth state of consciousness would thus be one in which one consciously differentiates between the inner, spiritual realm, which one first grasps in pure thinking, as has been attempted in the Philosophy of Freedom, and then has perception as such as a phenomenon of development in its own right, into which one no longer mixes concepts and ideas, so that, as in the process of inhalation, in inhaling and exhaling, an inner interaction between perception and concept consciously takes place. That would be the next higher state of consciousness.

When we speak of other beings and say that they were at the human stage of development at different times, we mean that they had a perception of the external world in the past – regardless of which senses were involved – which they connected in a more or less conscious way with the inner soul life, so that at that time they were not yet at a stage that humanity will reach in the future, the stage of a separate experience of perception, of the spiritual soul realm, and a conscious synthesis. That is what needs to be said about this question.

Dear attendees, it is now 10 a.m., I think I will collect the questions that have yet to be asked and save them, and we can meet again in the next few days. I think we will be able to discuss the matters on the other notes better and with more focus if we don't rush through it in a few minutes, but instead come together again to answer these questions. I also think you will agree to this, after we have spent two hours having this conversation. So we will conclude today and continue in some way soon.

Rudolf Steiner: There are still a number of questions that were left over from the last time we met here. There are about twenty questions. We will have to take another opportunity to address these twenty questions, some of which are interesting. But I have been asked - and that is why we want to stay a few more minutes - to answer those of these twenty questions today that come from those present who have to leave tomorrow or in the next few days. So I would ask you to point out which questions are urgent.

Audience: I would like to hear about marriage in the light of spiritual science.

Rudolf Steiner: This question really suffers from a certain vagueness because it is not clear what the questioner would actually like to know. Marriage is certainly a phenomenon, an appearance within the whole of social life; it has developed with social life, and in the course of time it has actually taken on the most diverse forms, especially the most diverse meanings, so that one could talk about it: What is marriage in today's rationalistic social life? — or: What is marriage for Catholics? — and so on. So I don't know what the question is actually supposed to mean. Because, right, there is no need to talk about the essence of marriage as such from the point of view of spiritual science. I can't really imagine what it means. The gentleman who asked the question was surprised that nothing about marriage from a social point of view was included in our lecture programs, in our course programs. It could have been, of course, that marriage would have been touched upon in the context of the social lectures. But that is not the case. The fact is that for the time being other social questions are much more pressing than those that are usually linked to the marriage problem today.

For some time now, psychological and anthropological questions, and so on, have been linked to the marriage problem, and when one talks about such a problem at all, it is of course necessary to approach it from some particular angle. One can hardly talk about the problem of marriage without having, for my part, talked about the problem of love. When one talks about the problem of love, the problem of marriage can arise as a consequence. But it is actually hardly possible to talk about such a problem in isolation, because, firstly, what I have said comes into consideration, and, secondly, one must bear in mind that when they ask such a question, most people have something normative in mind, something standardizing, whereas since the middle of the 15th century, people have really become more and more individual beings. So for the immediate psychological understanding of the marriage problem, it is clear that marriage is initially related to the human being himself, to the human soul life, and like any other relationship from person to person, it can also take on a very individual character. And to construct general theories about things of such an individual character would lead us into an abstract discussion, which, when such intimate, individual matters are considered, would basically always miss the point, would not reflect reality.

Now, of course, the problem of marriage can also be viewed from a social point of view. I did that years ago when a member of our Anthroposophical Society organized a printed survey in which he asked people to answer the question about the marriage problem from the point of view of the state. Yes, if you start from such a point of view, then you can talk about it. Then you can state very precisely that we live in a (we do not want to say state community, but that we live in a social community, that this social community has a very definite interest in the child that comes from the marriage or the children that come from the marriage, and that actually for the social community the child problem exists as a special problem. Here one can point out that marriage must be thought of in terms of the next generation and that, in the face of this thinking of marriage in terms of the next generation, individual aspirations must indeed take a back seat, so that the person should feel that they are a member of their social community and cannot then arrange their marriage in a way that suits them personally.

These things are such that they lead into the most individual and that, when they are treated, they actually always lead into a normalizing way of looking at things, which actually destroys the realities in the process. What does one want, after all, when asking such a question? One usually wants to have instructions for life. And it is not the business of spiritual science to give such instructions for life. The task of spiritual science, ladies and gentlemen, is to fill the human being with spiritual and mental content so that he becomes a whole person. And then, when he becomes a whole person, when his soul is filled with what spiritual science can give him, when spiritual science brings from the depths of his soul to the surface all the soul abilities, power impulses in him, so that the human being is able to place himself in life and find his way in life, then that which should not be standardized, but rather what should arise between human being and human being, will also arise.

If you read my “Philosophy of Freedom”, you will find, above all, that it amounts to shaping the human being from within in such a way that he receives the necessary and right impulses for shaping his life, so that he does not want to be regulated from the outside by any dogmatic commandments. This is what must always be taken into account, even when posing such a question. It will be seen that the one who follows the path of spiritual science will find the way in the individual in the right way. To set up theories about these things in general cannot be the task of spiritual science, because that would mean forcing people into a system, into a mold. But to provide templates, general abstractions, that cannot be the task of spiritual science, because it can no longer be the task of our present life either. The task of spiritual science is to place the human being on his or her own individual ground and to make him or her resilient and full of life there.

That is what I have to say about it. It probably does not meet what you meant. But it is this question exactly the same as when someone asks how to act in the sense of spiritual science when choosing a career. Of course, one can say all sorts of nice things about choosing a career, but one cannot say it in general, because it always depends on the individual circumstances.

Audience: Where does the sensation of a sour taste come from after a harrowing experience?

Rudolf Steiner: If we consider the interactions that take place between the soul and spiritual and the physical aspects of the human being, as presented in the various lectures here, then it is indeed the case that some soul-shattering event can permeate the human organism with such intensity that it triggers physical processes that are not perceived directly in ordinary, normal life. When a shattering event occurs, it is not only that something happens in our soul, but the shock to the soul has its organic, its physical parallel manifestation, and in a very specific way. One must only be clear about how complicated this human organization actually is.

In one of my lectures, I pointed out that the sense of balance, sense of movement and sense of life emancipate themselves from within the human being, while at the same time the senses of taste, smell and touch develop, and that when the senses are penetrated, the experiences of smell, taste and touch can precede what we would experience through the senses of balance, movement and life. And I have shown that if you stop halfway, instead of penetrating to the core, you enter into a nebulous mysticism. This can admittedly be very beautiful, very significant, but essentially it is the case that in this inward journey, which stops halfway, you actually stop in the regions of taste, smell and tactile experience. One need only read the sayings, such as the sayings of the poets of the saints, of Mechthild of Magdeburg, for example, and one will be able to grasp, I would say spiritually with hands, how an inward sense of taste, smell, and touch comes about in very beautiful experiences through what I have just described. Now, when a harrowing experience occurs, it usually has to do with the fact that the spiritual-soul, which we call the I and the astral body in our way of expressing it, but which is precisely the carrier of that which has an inward effect on the human being, that this spiritual-soul, as in sleep, tears itself out of the organism. Of course, such shocks to the soul can cause a state of unconsciousness, which is simply due to the fact that the astral, the soul, does not control the etheric and physical bodies because it does not intervene in the right way. Now imagine the process as a living thing. A shock occurs; the astral body and the ego are loosened. They are loosened, but the person still holds on. That is, the astral body and the ego strive to go out, but are held back, and so a continuous swinging back and forth occurs. In this to and fro swinging, the experiences occur that take place in the area in front of the actual interior of the human being, where the senses of taste, smell and touch are located. If a taste, a taste illusion, is then also subjectively experienced, that is, an irritation of the taste organism during this to and fro swinging, then this is a completely natural phenomenon.

A participant asks about the terms salt, mercury and sulfur.

Rudolf Steiner: It has already been said quite correctly that if one wants to penetrate into such concepts as those used by Paracelsus, and also the concepts of sulfur, mercury, salt used by others, one must of course completely disregard modern chemistry. One must also bear in mind that at the time of Paracelsus, this modern chemistry as such did not actually yet exist. The whole way of thinking was different back then. It is interesting to note how modern historians, when they go back to older times, as a Nordic chemist who recently wrote the history of alchemy did, write that only the personalities of the 13th to 15th centuries could make sense of the processes described, but not the modern chemist, who cannot make sense of what is being dealt with at all. This is because the whole way of thinking was different. The thinker before the emergence of modern chemistry did not have the concept of matter at all as we have it today. He followed more the process of how one state developed into another. So he asked more about what the relationship of one state to another is in the material world. So for the external world, for the non-human world, for the outer, organic world, one would have to say the concepts of earthy, watery, airy, fiery or warm. By this one did not mean the substances as they are understood today, but one meant the state of the earthy, the liquid - water was the liquid as such - and so on. And one had a certain feeling for it, in that one distinguished the earthy, the watery, the airy, the fiery, so that the whole context, which one brought into the state of the world, related to the extra-organic, namely to the extra-human. And for the human being, it was not assumed at all that the same kind of state was present in the organism, but rather a different kind of state was assumed. According to the ideas that were held at the time, it was not easy to say how the airy or the earthy occurs in the human being. One saw the human being as a, I would say, self-constructed constitution and attributed what the human being was, for example, as a thinker, to certain conditions of his physical organism. One simply said to oneself: Something is happening physically in the human being by being a thinking being or by being in the state of thinking. This event was seen in a certain congruence or similarity to the solidification of the earthly. It was imagined that the state in which the earthly, the whole earthly, was once in times past, had not yet reached the solid state of the earth, that the solid state of the earth had, so to speak, just solidified from a less dense state. But this same process of solidification, which was thought of in terms of the non-human, was not attributed to the human as such. Instead, when the human was in a state of thinking, a process was ascribed to the human, which was described as the formation of salt, so that these were parallel processes for the external and for the internal: earthification - salt formation in man; cosmic thought formation, the emergence of the solid, that is, the earthy - planetary inner-human thought formation, the corresponding physical process, oversalting. And so everything that was understood by salt was imagined to be related to what is physically present in man when he thinks, when he reveals himself as a thinking being.

Of course, in a sense, what was initially attributed to man was transferred by analogy to the processes that were behind the actual solidification of the planet, the formation of external salt. Some of these expressions have remained to this day. They are still used, but their historical origin is no longer known.

In so far as physical processes take place in man as a sentient being, or, to sum up, if we take the sum of all those processes in man - which are manifest as physical processes - that are the bearers of emotional life, then we have the mercurial in man. And if we consider everything in man that is the bearer of the life of will, then we have the sulphurous in man.

And so such personalities thought of the human constitution, the human organism, as consisting of these three interlocking processes: the salt-like, which to a certain extent kills people, parallel to the thought process - because the fact that we are thinking beings means that we are in a state is related to that which constantly leads us to death, that is, deposition processes, salt formation processes; then the sulfur process, which is, in a sense, what awakens the human being, what constantly permeates him with a new sulfur-like element that inhibits consciousness. And that which rhythmically balances between the two is the mercurial.

When going back to earlier times, one has to simply get involved in thinking no longer with the thought forms of today's science, but with the thought forms that were present earlier, but which were actually based on a very different state of mind than ours today. We can only artificially put ourselves back into the state of mind from which such ideas arose. It is not enough to take up terms such as Mercur, Sal, Sulfur and so on from Paracelsus or Basilius Valentinus and simply look them up in our textbooks or in the encyclopedia. Rather, it is necessary to put oneself back into a completely different way of thinking. Only then can one begin to talk about these things.

Are there any more questions that need a quick answer?

Participant: Isn't the Song of Solomon a song that represents an initiation? I came up with this during my Hebrew studies by trying to approach the text based on Ritter's original texts. Theology offers various answers, but they are unsatisfactory. It seems to me that the Biblical text is deliberately confused so that the esoteric meaning is no longer apparent to the general reader. Is not the Song of Songs a work of initiation?

Rudolf Steiner: You see, in general, when dealing with such matters, one must follow the principle that I have already mentioned here on another occasion: to interpret, but not to underlay, that is, not to look for false things and the like in the texts in question. With such old works as the Song of Solomon, it really does depend on our first completely putting ourselves back into the way of thinking and the state of mind out of which something like this arose. I just mentioned the example a moment ago: If one wants to read the writings of the alchemists, one has to put oneself back into the whole state of mind out of which these people thought about matter and processes – and that is not so far back. For example, it is quite clear that what Professor Beckh said about the oriental texts here recently is true in a sense that cannot be sufficiently taken into account by the translator today. First of all, it must be clear that the abstractness, I would even say rarity of the content of our ideas is basically not that old. If you have lived in the country and know the language of the peasants, you will know that even the language of the peasants had something that did not distinguish material processes from spiritual processes, as the intellectual life of today's civilization does; things were thought more interrelated. Now that has more or less ceased, it is disappearing rapidly, giving way to a general materialism.

Just think of what today's educated person says when they say “night's sleep”. Of course, they have vague ideas, but please analyze the actual content of the ideas you have when you say “night's sleep”. You will certainly pick out one or the other from your consciousness, then glue all sorts of things together and thereby have the concept of “night's sleep” as a modern educated person. But when the farmer spoke of the night's sleep, he spoke of something very limited and specific, only it was not thought of materially or spiritually or mentally, but it was both at the same time. When he spoke of the night's sleep, he rubbed out what he had in his eyes in the morning, and he called that the night's sleep. In this material fact he had at the same time everything that he thought when he said the word “night's sleep” and what he thought of as having been, so to speak, coagulated out of what he had experienced during the night. And that he could then wipe out of his eyes. He had an idea in which the material and the soul were one.

I still remember that in my childhood, when I had such language around me, an expression was used very often when someone forgot to turn off the light in the morning and it had already become light; people would say: You're burning the day's eyes out! — There you have an idea that is given in very concrete images. You wouldn't use some abstractions for something like that: You burn out the eyes of the day. It is something where you have more of a spiritual, but characterizing, material image and have learned the use of language from it. This is something that still lives among us today.

If we go back to ancient epochs, we have to think in very different mental states. And when we now come back to the time when the Song of Solomon was written, when everything was only a derivative of the mystery culture, we have to be aware that something that is translated with our present-day means may have an erotic touch, that within the state of mind of that ancient time it was quite something else. There is no doubt that, to a certain extent, a kind of dichotomy has taken place. Certain word meanings were originally unified, encompassing the spiritual and the physical. Then the spiritual became abstract; I would say it was bifurcated on one side, the physical on the other. This is particularly the case with erotic ideas. Eroticism is basically something that, as we understand it today, makes no sense at all for the time from which the Song of Solomon originates, not the slightest sense, because the ideas on this side were not yet as well-founded as they are today. In this respect, the strangest things are happening in our time. People come and explain to you, for example, about all kinds of sexual sins of children, and when you ask them how old the child is, it turns out to be three years old. This is, of course, complete nonsense, because talking about sexuality before the change of teeth is utter nonsense. The facts are quite different, and only our present time, which, as a certain phase of analytical psychology shows, can only develop in a very one-sided way, attributes these things to everything because it cannot see the real, true conditions.

So we must be careful not to translate something like the Song of Solomon into our abstract language. We can certainly allow it its abundance, but we must be clear that the state of mind of people in those days was different, and that the state of mind of today's people, because they throw everything into one big pot in this direction, is perhaps an erotic product. The state of mind of that era led to completely different regions. In some circles, it is a popular notion to explain the whole mystery, for example, in erotic terms. Of course, this is completely unfounded, because it is completely amateurish and has no idea what the state of mind of people in earlier times was. Therefore, it must always be said: In order to understand such things, it is essential to be able to put oneself in the shoes of the corresponding epoch. This also applies, for example, to our Gospels. Because what we have in terms of translations of the gospels does not at all reflect what is in the gospels, because the translations were basically created from a completely different state of mind and because one has to go back to the state of mind from which these writings were created.

That is what I can say about it. Of course, there is no time to go into details. I will answer the remaining eighteen questions in the next few days.

Preliminary note: At the beginning of the evening's discussion, a question was asked about the third Copernican law. Rudolf Steiner's detailed answer is published in the volume “The Fourth Dimension”, GA 324a, pp. 177-189.

Rudolf Steiner: Now a series of other questions have been asked, to which I would like to refer only briefly, because some of them are nonsensical. Here, for example, this question:

What criteria can a non-clairvoyant use to distinguish whether communications from a clairvoyant originate from spiritual knowledge or from illusions?

Dear attendees, I would actually prefer to eliminate the word 'clairvoyance', which so many people use to do mischief with, like Count Keyserling recently. If such words do not give rise to mischief, then it does not matter if they appear in our literature, but with all that such people call 'clairvoyance', who would rather do anything than set out , which I also characterized in my lecture cycle on the “Limits of Knowledge”, I would rather use a different word for the real seeing of the spirit - seeing brightly, that is, seeing brightly. That is why I have tried to gradually eliminate this word everywhere in the newer editions of my books, which always causes confusion with all kinds of amateurish and charlatan-like stuff.

Now, if it is a single case of someone coming to you and saying that he is a psychic and telling you something he has seen, then you have no way of distinguishing whether he is telling you some kind of illusion or whether what he is saying is based on truth. You can't do that in an individual case; there is no universal guide for that. You can only, as a reasonable person, gain a judgment from the whole context of life, but also an almost completely certain judgment. You see, if some alleged psychic tells you all kinds of stuff and, when he talks about things of ordinary life, talks nonsense, then you can be pretty sure that what he tells you from the higher worlds is also nonsense. But if you find that a person has a healthy sense of external, physical reality, that he looks at external reality with a healthy mind, like other rational people, that he finds his way into it, that he orients himself to external reality, then when he speaks of things of the spiritual world, there is something that speaks for him, that is, not for him as a person, but for the correctness of his view. If, in addition, he presents what he says about the spiritual worlds in such a way that it is logical, then one can test the reality of the context without being clairvoyant. As I said, you cannot draw any conclusions from a single message, but from the context of a whole series of messages, you will, simply through an ability that every person has, even without being clairvoyant, come to understand what is meant by what someone says. Furthermore, a person who deserves to be called a clairvoyant today – but now in a higher sense – when a person speaks about the spiritual world as it must be done here in this place, then, my dear audience, he does not stop at telling things only from the higher worlds, but he always speaks at the same time about the things of this world, in which the higher worlds play a role. He speaks to you, for example, about how what one has experienced in the spiritual can be applied to medicine, to the kind of medicine that really needs to be studied. He does not speak of medical charlatanry, where a person is chosen by some Luciferic or Ahrimanic spirit and then dabbles and cures whatever comes to hand. It cannot be about anything like that. The only thing it can be about is the penetration of that which is physically real, but in which the spirit always lives, with the spirit. For materialism never understands the physical. And I believe that, for example, working in the social sphere could be one of the external reasons for proving the inner justification of what is being asserted here in spiritual terms.

So there is no externally abstract criterion, but only from the whole context of life can one know whether one is dealing with illusions or realities when it comes to the claims of the spiritual researcher. His spiritual research is certainly no illusion if he can descend into realities with them, if he is able to give something to the life that is allotted to man here between birth and death precisely through his spiritual science. For example, when I presented research results about higher worlds, people often objected to me, saying that I was starting from abstractions. Yes, but all that could be mere auto-suggestion, just as there are people who get a taste of lemon in their mouths just by thinking of lemonade, even if they don't get any lemonade. — I could only tell people: Of course, it is true that one can evoke all kinds of illusory hallucinations or visions through thought, but these are just illusions. You can indeed have the illusion through suggestion that you have a taste of lemonade, but whether the mere thought of lemonade will quench your thirst, I would doubt; you would still need the real lemonade for that.

Anyone who is completely involved in things, not outside of them, can distinguish between what is reality and what is merely thought, and for them it is clear that there are just as many differences in life for looking into the higher worlds as there are here in the physical world. I can even reveal to you, my dear audience, the criteria for determining whether something is a lie or the truth, which apply to the clairvoyant as well as to anyone else. The clairvoyant cannot test whether his observations are based on reality better or worse than the person to whom they are communicated, because he too must test them from the whole context of life, which one simply finds with common sense, even if one has common sense in ordinary life. Another person, if they have common sense, can always test the clairvoyant results.

We are not at all afraid of a scientific criticism of spiritual science, especially not if this scientific criticism is carried out with the utmost exactness and precision. What harms us is only the criticism of superficial people, those people with empty thoughts, with thought-shells. Such people, who are afflicted with mere thought-shells, like Count Hermann Keyserling, who has no will at all to go into the matter, then simply end up telling lies. In his latest book, Keyserling makes the very nice claim that Steiner's entire anthroposophy is actually just materialistic natural science elevated to the spiritual; this can be seen from the fact that Steiner started from Haeckel.

Now let us examine this utterly dishonest assertion in the light of what I wrote as a starting point in the introduction to Goethe's scientific writings. You see, dishonesty is actually always the height of mental dullness.

These things must be said, ladies and gentlemen. I always wait a long time before I am forced to say such a thing myself, and I actually only talk about these things when they have not been emphasized by others for a long time. Because after all, these things do not affect me at all. I cannot read Count Keyserling's books because I cannot find any thoughts in them. And I am used to people complaining. But today it is about something else. Today it is about the fact that we are indeed rapidly sailing into destruction if full clarity and courageous clarity are not established in this area. Today it is about the salvation or destruction of humanity, and today the pests must be sharply pointed out who try to drive out the necessary thoughts from people through such filth by saying that it is not necessary to undergo a spiritual development because what one can learn from something like the writing “How to Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds” is not needed by someone who is a gentleman and has a good upbringing.

Now, my dear attendees, at a time when such assertions can be made, the fire is burning, and it must be extinguished!

I would now like to quickly discuss another question:

What is anthroposophy's position on the use of hypnosis in medicine?

Well, dear attendees, all these things, hypnosis or suggestion and the like in therapy, always lead into an area that lies below that which we encompass with our ordinary day-consciousness. If I were to draw you a diagram quickly, it would look like this: (diagram missing)

If ordinary consciousness is here, the anthroposophical science in question strives upwards into a higher consciousness, into imaginative, inspired, intuitive consciousness. But one can also bring consciousness down to a lower level. This is already the case in ordinary dreaming; in deep sleep, in dreamless sleep, it is moved down even further. Now there are all kinds of intermediate states, and such a tuning down of consciousness actually transforms the human being into an Untermensch, in that his soul and spirit are so elevated that they cannot fully engage with the physical body and also cannot be conscious of themselves and the world, because the human being is not yet developed enough to have consciousness outside of the body. In this case, we are dealing with a demotion of the spiritual-mental to the etheric-physical plane, and then all the effects that can be brought about, which you are indeed familiar with, actually take place in a subhuman sphere. You downgrade the whole constitution of the person, the spiritual-soul-physical constitution of the person. And that is why such things are only to be applied when it comes to therapeutic issues. But even in the therapeutic area it is a matter of ensuring that they may only be applied by the person who understands the things – by which I do not want to claim that modern medicine, as it is practised today, is a good guide to understanding these things. But once these things are understood, they can of course be applied to the human organization in the same way as other poisons – because they are poisons.

So, in all these things, we are dealing with the fact that, therapeutically, we can resort to anything that can improve a person's state of health in a desirable way. However, we should not imagine that we are leading people into a higher sphere when we convey something to them where their consciousness, their ordinary consciousness, is completely shut out. Instead, we lead them into the subhuman, into the etheric-animalistic, not into the physical-animalistic but into the etheric-animalistic, if we put him into a state like hypnosis and if he is receptive to such a state. This lowering of consciousness is basically particularly loved today because the upward development into the spiritual worlds is perceived as something uncomfortable.

Here is another question: What is anthroposophy's position on healing magnetism?

Well, my dear audience, this can only be discussed if one can really treat things seriously. With a simple yes or no or with a simple sentence, such things cannot be treated if one has a scientific conscience. Today's healing magnetism – yes, one would not have to have learned about it in order not to know that there are a great many people working in it who have sought employment everywhere else, and when they have not found any anywhere else, they have become healing magnetizers. To demand spiritual-scientific explanations for such things is a bit much. But I would like to point out to you that these things must all be traced back to their elementary prerequisites. For example, there is the fact that for certain mental and physical conditions of the soul, the mere loving assurance contributes something to the healing process. Just think how much real therapeutic effect comes from genuine loving treatment of the sick person in one direction or another. Now imagine these things intensified, imagine loving treatment intensified to caressing treatment, and you have something that leads very strongly to what is healing magnetism. However, these are such imponderable things that they cannot be grasped in rough terms. It is entirely possible – depending on the case, it really depends on the how and not on the what – that the person who talks about these things, depending on whether he has the imponderables in mind or not, may just as well say something important or talk nonsense. So it is more important that one approaches these things only with a truly scientific conscience. And that is why I have always been careful to discuss these things publicly, for example, because some things are extremely colored when they are passed on.

Now, I would not want anything personal to come of it either, but anthroposophy must be something that really meets the necessary demands of our time, and one must not do anything that could in any way bring one into the danger of being a dilettante. It is very easy to fall into this amateurish neighborhood when dealing with these matters. One could say that healing magnetism is beneficial, depending on whether it occurs with knowledgeable, but now imponderable, genuine healers, or whether it occurs with people who are mere charlatans, who, after trying their hand at other fields, now also try their hand at the field of healing. Of course, as soon as the subject of healing magnetism was mentioned, before that it was suggestion, and now Christian Science is mentioned, which is asked about here:

How is it that Christian Science can heal if it merely suggests the mind?

Isn't it true that with Christian Science one must say approximately the same as with healing by magnetism, only in a somewhat different field. Whether a thing works or not does not depend on what we think about it. Because just imagine if you were to slap someone and you had the opinion that it was about some forces that don't even exist, the slap on the person's cheek will be exactly the same regardless of whether you have a false theory, a self-suggested theory, or something similar. When we speak of Christian Science, we are dealing with similar phenomena; you can also test these very similar phenomena in the field of education.

I have repeatedly spoken of the imponderables that operate from person to person and also applied them to the field of education. Suppose you want to explain the immortality of the soul to a child, the passing of the soul through the death of the human being, and you point to a butterfly pupa: that is, so to speak, the human body. The butterfly comes out: that is the soul. And you then apply this to the supersensible. You can now get two things. In your own state of mind, you can be a very clever, intelligent person who, of course, in this day and age does not believe that what you are describing with the butterfly chrysalis really has any other connection to immortality than as a symbol. The clever person makes it up; he does not believe in any connection himself, but says it to the child because the child is stupid and he is clever, because he makes something up that he presents as a comparison. That is one state of mind. The other state of mind is that of the spiritual researcher. He sees everywhere stages of an existence that is in polarity and intensification - words that Goethe already used. He looks at the chrysalis from which the butterfly crawls out, and he himself comes to believe that the butterfly crawling out is an image that the spiritual worlds are drawing for him. He is not a clever person in today's sense, he is not a clever person, but he is a person with a sense of reality. In reality, the deeds of the spirit are everywhere.

Now there is a difference in teaching: if you are a very clever person and want to make the child understand the matter through the invented symbol, you will generally achieve nothing. But if the picture lives in us, if we are imbued with the feeling that here the spirit of nature itself has drawn the image of the immortal soul in the emerging butterfly, then imponderables work from your soul to the soul of the child, then the child, because it receives something of life, also has something for life.

However, forces are at work from person to person that cannot be weighed with a scale or measured with a ruler, even though everything is set up according to measure, number and weight. And these things will still provide a rich contribution to what should enrich our lives, things that will be more meaningful for the salvation of humanity than some applications of science. If we look into these things, we will see that there are still quite other forces that will come to humanity precisely through the application of spiritual science. But for this to happen, on the one hand, true scientific conscientiousness must be taught, and on the other hand, the will must arise to penetrate into the spiritual worlds with this scientific conscientiousness.

I would like to conclude for today. We will then try, tomorrow, before you leave, my dear honored attendees, to present a summary in the evening, not so much in the form of questions as in the form of a lecture, as a farewell.

Without doubt, the questions raised by social problems are among the major concerns of many today. We are dealing with social issues wherever there is a genuine concern with present conditions in humanity's evolution and with the impulses that threaten the future. The contemporary way of viewing and dealing with social issues, however, suffers from a fundamental defect. This is the same defect that afflicts so much of our mental and moral life and indeed our entire civilization: the prevailing intellectualism of our age. The social problems are so often examined merely from the limited viewpoint of intellectualism. Whether the social question is approached from the "left" or from the "right," the overly intellectual aspect of each approach is revealed by the fact that certain theories become the starting point from which it is said that this or that ought to be established, that this or that ought to be abolished. Generally, little account is thereby taken of the human being himself, as if there were no individually distinctive qualities in each human being, as if there were only a generality, "man." No attention is paid to the uniqueness of the individual human being. This is why the entire consideration of social issues has become so abstract, something that rarely affects the social feelings and attitudes that are active between one person and another.

The inadequacy in our consideration of social issues is most clearly evident in the domain of health care, of hygiene. In so far as it is a public matter, concerning not the individual so much as the whole community, health care or hygiene—possibly more than any other social domain—is a subject suitable for social consideration.

It is true that there is no lack of advice, available either in talks or in the literature, concerning hygiene in public health. It should be asked, however, how does such advice about hygiene come into the social life? It must be mentioned that whenever individual rules concerning the proper care of health are promulgated as the result of medical or physiological science, it is generally the trust in a scientific field that provides the basis for accepting such rules, rules whose inner validity one is not actually in a position to test. It is purely on the basis of authority that statements about hygiene emerging from libraries, examining rooms, and research laboratories are accepted by large segments of the population. There are those who are convinced, however, that in the course of modern history over the last four centuries a longing for democratic regulation of all issues has arisen in humanity. Then they encounter this entirely undemocratic belief in authority demanded in the domain of health care or hygiene. This undemocratic attitude of belief in an authority conflicts with the longing for democracy that has reached a kind of culmination today, although often in a highly paradoxical way.

I know very well that what I have just said may seem paradoxical, because issues of health care are often simply not considered in relation to the democratic demand that matters of public interest concerning every mature citizen be judged by that community of citizens, either directly or indirectly through representation. It must certainly be said that it may not be possible for the views concerning hygiene, the hygienic care of public life, to be fully subject to democratic principles, because such matters do, in fact, depend on the judgment of specialists. On the other hand, should one not strive toward greater democratization than contemporary circumstances permit in a domain that is as close, as infinitely close, to the concerns of every individual, and thus to the whole community, as the care of public health?

We certainly hear a great deal today about the necessity for proper air, light, nourishment, sanitation, and so forth, but the regulations laid down to order these things cannot, as a rule, be tested by those to whom they apply.

Now please do not misunderstand me. I would not like to be accused of taking any particular side in this lecture. I would not like to treat in a one-sided way what today is generally treated one-sidedly, in a partisan way or from the standpoint of a certain scientific conviction. I have no desire to uphold ancient superstitions of devils and demons passing in and out of human beings in the form of disease, nor to support the modern superstitions that the bacilli and bacteria pass in and out of human beings, causing the different diseases. We need not occupy ourselves today with the question of whether we are really faced with the results of the spiritualistic superstitions of earlier times or with the materialistic superstitions prevalent today. I would prefer to consider something that permeates the whole culture in our time, especially in so far as this culture is determined by the convictions of modern science. We are assured today that the materialism of the middle and last third of the nineteenth century has been overcome, but this statement is not very convincing to those who really know the nature of materialism and its opposite. The most one can say is that materialism has been overcome by a few people here and there who realize that the facts of modern science no longer justify the general explanation that everything in existence is merely a mechanical, physical, or chemical process taking place in matter.

The fact that a few people here or there have come to this conclusion, however, does not mean that materialism has been overcome, for usually when it comes to a concrete explanation or forming a view of something concrete, even these people—and the others as a matter of course—still reveal a materialistic tendency in their way of thinking. True, it is said that atoms and molecules are merely harmless, convenient units of calculation about which nothing more is asserted than that they are abstractions; nevertheless, the considerations are atomistic and molecular in character. We are then explaining world phenomena out of the behavior or interactions of atomic and molecular processes, and the point is not whether we picture that a thought, feeling, or any other process is connected only with material processes of atoms and molecules; the point is the orientation of the entire attitude of our soul and spirit when our explanation is based only on atomic theory, the theory of smallest entities. The point is not whether verbally or in thought a person is convinced that there is something more than the influence of atoms, the material action of atoms, but whether he is able to give explanations other than those based on the atomic theory of phenomena. In short, not what we believe is essential but how we explain, how we orient our souls within. Here I must say that only a true, anthroposophically oriented spiritual science can help eliminate the defect of which I have spoken.

That this must be the case I would now like to show concretely. There is hardly anything more confusing today than the distinctions that are so often emphasized between man's bodily nature and his soul and spirit, between physical illnesses and the so-called psychological and mental illnesses.¹ This view of the relevant relationships and distinctions between such facts of human life as a diseased body and an apparently diseased soul suffers from the materialistic, atomistic way of thinking. For what is really the nature of the materialism that has gradually come to be the world view of so many of our contemporaries and that, far from being overcome, is today in its prime? What is its nature? The nature of this materialism does not lie in observing material processes, in looking into the material processes that also take place in the human corporeality, in reverently studying the marvelous structure and activity of the human nervous system and other human organs, of the nervous system of the animal or organs of other living beings. This does not make one a materialist. Rather one is made a materialist through omitting the spirit from the study of these material processes, through looking into the world of matter and seeing only matter and material processes.

What spiritual science must assert, however, is this (and today I am only able to summarize this point): wherever material processes appear outwardly to the senses—and these are the only processes that modern science will admit as observable and exact—they are but the outer manifestation, the outer revelation, of activities behind which and in which lie spiritual forces and powers. It is not characteristic of spiritual science to look at a human being and say, "There is his physical body—this body is a sum of material processes, but the human being does not consist of this alone. Independent of this he has his immortal soul." It is far from characteristic of it to speak like this and to build up all kinds of abstract and mystical theories and views about this immortal soul that is independent of the body. This does not at all characterize a spiritual world view. It can definitely be said that, in addition to his body, which consists of material processes, the human being also has an immortal soul, which then enters some kind of spiritual realm after death. This does not make one a spiritual scientist in an anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. We can be spiritual scientists in the true sense only if we realize that this material body with its material processes is a creation of the soul element. We must learn to understand, down to the smallest detail, how the soul element—which was already active before birth, or, let us say, before conception—fashioned and molded the structure and even the substantiality of the human body. We must really be able to perceive everywhere the immediate unity of this body and the soul element and how, through the working of the soul-spiritual in the body, the body as such is gradually destroyed. This body undergoes a partial death with every passing moment, but only at the moment of death is there a radical expression, you could say, of what has been happening to the body in each moment as the result of the soul-spiritual. We are not spiritual scientists in the true sense until we perceive concretely and in detail this living interplay, this continuous influence of the soul in the body, and endeavor to say: the soul element incorporates itself into the entirely concrete processes, into the functions of the liver, the process of breathing, the action of the heart, the working of the brain, and so forth. In short, when we describe the material part of the human being we must know how to portray the body as a direct result of the spiritual. Spiritual science is thereby able to place a true value on matter, because in the separate concrete, material processes it observes not merely what is confirmed by the eyes or yielded by the abstract concepts of modern science through outer observation; spiritual science is spiritual science only when it shows everywhere how the spirit works in matter, when it regards with reverence the material workings of the spirit.

Such a view guards one against all the abstract chit-chat about a soul independent of the bodily nature, for where the life between birth and death is concerned, man can only spin fantasies about this. Between birth and death (with the exception of the time of sleep), the soul-spiritual is so utterly given up to bodily activity that. it lives in it, lives through it, manifests itself in it. We must be able to study the soul-spiritual outside the course of earthly life, realizing that human existence between birth and death is but the outcome of the soul-spiritual. Then we can behold the really concrete unity of the soul-spiritual with the physical bodily element. This is an anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, for then it becomes possible to see the human being with all his individual members as an outcome of the soul-spiritual.

The mystical, theosophical views that evolve all kinds of noble-sounding, beautiful theories about a spirituality that is free of the body can never serve the concrete sciences of life, they can never serve life. They can serve only the intellectual or psychological craving to be rid of the outer life as soon as possible, and then they weave all sorts of fantasies about the soul-spiritual in order to induce a state of inner satisfaction.

In this anthroposophically oriented spiritual movement it behooves us to work earnestly and sincerely to develop a spiritual science that will be able to enliven physics, mathematics, chemistry, physiology, biology, and anthropology. No purpose is served by making religious or philosophical statements to the effect that the human being bears an immortal soul within him and then working in the different branches of science just as if we were concerned only with material processes. Knowledge of the soul-spiritual must be gained and applied to the very details of life, to the marvelous structure of the body itself. You will come across many mystics and theosophists who love to chatter about the human being as composed of physical body, etheric body, astral body, and ego, and so forth, yet they haven't the least inkling what a wonderful manifestation of the soul life it is when a person blows his nose! The point is that we must see matter not simply as matter but as the manifestation of the spirit. Then we will begin to have healthy views concerning the spirit, views that are full of content, and with them a spiritual science that may be fruitful for all the other sciences.

This in turn will make it possible to overcome the specialization in the various branches of science resulting from the materialistic trend of scientific knowledge. I have no desire whatever to deliver a diatribe against specialization, for I am well aware of its usefulness. I know that certain things must be dealt with by specialists simply because they require a specialized technique. The point I would make is that the person who holds fast to the material can never reach a view of the world that is applicable to life if he becomes a specialist in the ordinary sense. For the range of material processes is infinite, both outside in nature and within the human being.

For instance, we may devote a long time—as long, at any rate, as professional people devote to their training—to the study of the human nervous system. If material processes are all we see in the working of the nervous system, however—processes described according to the abstract concepts of modern science—we shall never be led to any universal principle upon which a world view can be based. As soon as you begin to look at the human nervous system, for example, from the viewpoint of spiritual science, you will find at once that this nervous system cannot be considered without your finding the spirit active there, which leads us inevitably to the soul-spiritual underlying the muscular, skeletal, and sensory systems, and so on. The spiritual does not separate into single parts as does the material. Characterized very briefly, the spiritual unfolds like an organism with its members. Just as I cannot truly study a human being if I look merely at his five fingers and cover the rest of him, so in spiritual science I cannot study a single detail without being led by perceiving the soul-spiritual within this detail to a whole. If I were to become a brain or nerve specialist, I would still be able, in observing this single member of the human organism, to form a picture of the human being as a whole—I would reach a universal principle in relation to a world view, and I could then begin to speak about the human being in a way comprehensible to every healthy-minded, reasonable human being.

This is the great difference between the way that spiritual science is able to speak about the human being and the way that specialized, materialistic science is bound by its very nature to speak. Take the simple case of a textbook in common use today that is based on such a specialized, materialistic science. If you do not know very much about the nervous system and try to read a textbook on the subject, you will probably lay it aside. If you do manage to get through it, you will not learn much that will help you to realize the worth and dignity of the human being. If, however, you listen to what can be said about the human nervous system on the basis of spiritual science, you will be led everywhere to the entire human being. Spiritual science so illuminates the entire human being that the idea arising within you suggests the worth, the essence, and the dignity of the human being.

The truth of this is nowhere more evident than when we observe not the healthy human being in his single parts but a person who is ill, where there are so many deviations from the so-called normal condition. When we are able to observe the whole human being under the influence of some disease, everything nature reveals to us in the sick person leads us deeply into cosmic connections. We are led to understand the particular constitution of this human being, how the atmospheric and extraterrestrial influences work upon him as the result of his particular constitution, and we are then able to relate his human organization to the particular substances of nature that will act as remedies. We are thereby led into wider connections. When we add to our understanding of the healthy person all that we are able to learn from observation of the sick person, a profound insight will arise into the interconnections and deeper significance of life. Such insight, however, becomes the foundation for a knowledge of the human being that can be shared with everyone. True, we have not as yet accomplished very much in this direction because spiritual science has only been able to be active for a short time. The lectures given here must therefore be thought of merely as a beginning.² By its very nature, however, spiritual science is able to work upon and develop what is contained in the separate sciences in such a way that what everyone should know about the human being can be introduced to everyone.

Think what it will mean if spiritual science succeeds in transforming science in this way, succeeds in developing forms of knowledge about the human being in health and illness that are accessible to general human consciousness. If spiritual science succeeds in this, how different will be the relations of one human being to another in social life; what a greater understanding one person will have for another, far greater than there is today when people pass one another without the one having the slightest understanding for the particular individuality of the other. Social issues will be removed from intellectual considerations when the most diverse realms of life are based upon objective knowledge and concrete experiences of life. This is evident especially in the domain of health care. Think what a social effect it would have were there to be a real understanding of what is healthy in one person, what is unhealthy in another; think what it would mean if health care were taken in hand with understanding by the whole of humanity. Certainly this does not mean that we should encourage scientific or medical dilettantism—most emphatically not—but imagine that a sympathetic understanding of the health and illness of our fellow man were to awaken not merely feeling but understanding, an understanding that grows from a view of the human being—think of the effect it would have in social life. Then indeed it would be realized that social reform and reconstruction must proceed in their separate realms from expert knowledge, not from general theories—whether from Marx or Oppenheimer—which lose sight of the human being as such and want to organize the world on the basis of abstract concepts.³ Healing can never spring from abstract concepts but only from a reverent awareness of the individual spheres of life. And hygiene, the care of health, is very special because it leads us most closely to the joy of our fellow man through his healthy, normal way of life, or to his sufferings and limitations through what lives in him more or less as illness.

This is something that directs us immediately to the particularly social way in which spiritual science can be active in the domain of hygiene or health care. For let us say that someone nurtures the knowledge of the human being in this way, the knowledge of the healthy and sick human being; if he now specializes to become a physician, and if such a person is placed within human society, he will be in a position to bring about enlightenment within this society, he will find understanding. The relationship of such a physician to society will not be merely the usual one in which, unless one is the doctor's friend or relative, one goes to the physician's house only when something hurts or has been broken; rather a relationship will develop in which the physician is continuously the teacher and advisor for a prophylactic health care. In fact, there will be a continual participation of the physician not only in treating an illness that he discovers in someone but in maintaining a person's health in so far as this is possible. A living social interaction will take place between the physician and the rest of society. In turn, medicine itself will be illuminated by the health of such a knowledge. Because materialism has extended itself even into medical considerations in life we have become truly entangled in some strange conceptions.

Thus on the one hand we have all the physical illnesses. They are investigated by observing the abnormalities of the organs or the various processes that are thought to be of a physical nature and are to be found within the boundaries of the human skin. Then the goal is to seek to rectify what is found to be wrong. In this case, the view of the human body in its normal and abnormal conditions is completely materialistic. Then, on the other hand, there are the so-called psychological or mental illnesses.' As a result of materialistic thinking, these are considered to be merely diseases of the brain or nervous system, although efforts have also been made to find their causes in the organ systems of the human being. Because there is generally no conception of the way in which the soul and spirit work in the healthy human body, however, it is impossible to arrive at a conception of the relationship of mental illness—so-called men-tal illness—to the rest of the human being. Thus mental illness is even thought about materialistically by that curious hermaphroditic science, psychoanalysis, though it definitely does not understand the material either. Mental illness stands there without our being able to bring it together in any meaningful way with what actually takes place in the human organism. Spiritual science is now able to show—and I have recently drawn attention to this—that what I have been speaking about here is not merely a program but is something that can be pursued in detail, as has been attempted during the opportunities offered here in the recent course for physicians.⁴ Spiritual science is able to show in detail how all so-called psychological and mental illnesses have their source in disturbances of the organs, in organ deterioration, in enlargement and shrinking of the organs in the human organism. A so-called mental illness arises sooner or later whenever there is some irregularity in an organ, in the heart, in the liver, in the lungs, and so on. A spiritual science that has penetrated to the point of knowing the spirit's activity in the normal heart is also able to discover in the deterioration or irregularity of the heart the cause of a diseased life of spirit or soul, called mental illness today.

The greatest fault of materialism is not that it denies the existence of the spirit; religion can see to it that due recognition is given to the spirit. The greatest error of materialism is that it provides us with no knowledge of matter itself, because, in effect, it considers only the outer side of matter. It is just this that is the defect of materialism, that it lacks insight even into matter. Take, for example, psychoanalytical treatments where attention is merely directed to something that has taken place in the soul and is described as a "complex,"" which is a pure abstraction. A more appropriate way to pursue this would be to study how certain soul impressions, which were made on a person at some period of his life and are normally bound up with the healthy organism, have come into contact with defective organs, e.g., with a diseased rather than a healthy liver. It must be considered that this may have happened long before the moment when the defect becomes organically perceptible.

There is no need for spiritual science to be afraid of showing how so-called psychological or mental illness is invariably connected with something occurring in the human body. Spiritual science must show emphatically that when merely the soul element, the soul "complex""—a deviation from the so-called normal soul life—is studied, the most that can be achieved is a one-sided diagnosis. Psychoanalysis, therefore, can never lead to anything more than something diagnostic, never to a real therapy in this domain. In mental illness, therapy must proceed by administering therapy for the body, and for this reason there must be detailed knowledge of the ramifications of the spiritual in the material. We must know where to take hold of the material body (which is, however, permeated with spirit) in order to cure the disease of which abnormal conditions of soul are simply symptoms. Spiritual science must emphasize again and again that the root of so-called mental or psychological illnesses lies in the organ systems of the human being, but it is possible to understand abnormal organ function of the human being only when the spirit can be pursued into the minutest parts of matter.

Looked at from the other side, all those phenomena of life that seemingly affect merely the soul or work in the soul element—for instance, all that is expressed in the different temperaments and the activity of the temperaments in the human being, what is expressed in the way the child behaves, plays, walks—all this is studied today only from a soul-spiritual point of view, but it also has its bodily aspect. Faulty education of the child may come to expression in later life in some familiar form of physical illness. In certain cases of mental illness, we must often look to the bodily element and look for the cause there; however, in certain cases of physical illness, we must look to the spiritual in order to find the cause. The essence of spiritual science is that it does not speak in abstractions about a nebulous spiritual aspect as do mystics or one-sided theosophists; rather it traces the spirit right down into its material workings. Spiritual science never conceives of the material as modern science does today, but it always penetrates to the spirit in all study of the material. Thus it is able to observe that an abnormal soul life must inevitably express itself in an abnormal bodily life, although the abnormality may, to begin with, be hidden from outer observation.

On all sides today, people form entirely false pictures of a serious, anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. This may have a certain justification when they listen to people speak who do not truly penetrate to what is actually important but speak only of abstract theories such as that the human being consists of such and such, that there are repeated earthly lives, and so forth. These things are, of course, full of significance and beauty; but the point is that we must work earnestly in this spiritual scientific movement, truly entering into a particular subject, into the individual spheres of this life.

In the widest sense, such a spiritual scientific movement leads again to a socially minded community of human beings, for when one is able to perceive how a soul that appears sick radiates its impulses into the organism, when one can really feel this connection between the organism and the soul that appears to be ill—feels this with understanding—and when on the other hand one knows how the general ordering of life affects the physical health of the human being, how the spiritual, which apparently exists in social arrangements only outwardly, works into the physical care of health of the human being, then one will stand in a completely different way within human society.

A true understanding of the human being will be gained, and we will treat each other quite differently. Individual character will be understood quite differently, knowing that one person possesses certain qualities and another possesses quite different ones. We will learn how to respond to all variations, to see them in relation to particular tasks; it will be known how to make use of the different temperaments in human society in the right way and particularly how to develop them in the right way.

In relation to health care or hygiene, one domain of social life in particular—that of education—will be most strongly influenced by such a knowledge of the human being. We cannot, without a comprehensive knowledge of the human being, evaluate the consequences of allowing our children to sit in school with bent backs so that they never breathe properly, or the repercussions of never teaching children to speak the vowel or consonant sounds loudly, clearly, and in a well-articulated way. As a matter of fact, the whole of later life depends on whether the child in school breathes in the right way and whether he is taught to speak clearly and with good articulation. I say this merely by way of example, for the same thing applies in other realms. It is an illustration, however, of the specific application of general hygienic principles in the sphere of education. The whole social significance of hygiene is revealed in this example.

It is also apparent that, rather than further specialization, life demands that the specialized branches of knowledge be brought together to form a comprehensive view of life. We need something more than educational norms according to which the teacher is supposed to instruct the child. The teacher must realize what it means for him to help the child to speak clearly and articulately. He must realize what it will mean if he allows the child to catch his breath after only half a phrase has been spoken and does not see to it that all the air is used up in the phrase being uttered. There are, of course, many such principles. A proper appreciation and practice of them, however, will live in us only when we are able to measure their full significance for human life and social health; only then will they give rise to a social impulse.

We need teachers who are able to educate children on the basis of a world view that understands the true being of man. This was the thought underlying the course I gave to the teachers when the Waldorf School in Stuttgart was founded.⁵ All the principles of the art of education that were expressed in that course strive in the direction of making human beings out of the children who are being educated, human beings in whom lungs, liver, heart, and stomach will be healthy in later life because as children they were helped to develop their life functions in the right way, because, in effect, the soul worked in the right way.

This world view will never give a materialistic interpretation to the ancient saying, "A healthy soul lives in a healthy body"" (Mens sana in corpore sano). Interpreted materialistically, this means that if the body is healthy, if it has been made healthy by every possible physical method, then it will, of itself, be the bearer of a healthy soul. This is pure nonsense. The only true meaning is that a healthy body shows me that the force of a healthy soul has built it up, has molded it and made it healthy. A healthy body proves that an autonomous, healthy soul has worked in it. This is the true meaning of this saying, and only in this sense can it be an underlying principle of true hygiene. In other words, it is quite inadequate to have, in addition to teachers who are working from an abstract science of education, a school doctor who turns up every fortnight or so and goes through the school with no real idea of how to help. What we need is a living alliance between medical science and the art of education. We need an art of education that teaches the children in a way conducive to real health. This is what makes hygiene or health care a social issue, because a social issue is essentially an educational issue, and this, in turn, is essentially a medical issue, but only if medicine, hygiene, are fructified by spiritual science.

These matters are extraordinarily significant in relation to the theme of hygiene or health care as a social issue. For if one works with spiritual science and if spiritual science is something concrete for the human being, then one knows that contained within spiritual science is something that distinguishes it from what is contained in mere intellectualism—and natural science in the present is also mere intellectualism—from what is contained in mere intellectualism or in a merely intellectually developed natural science or in a merely intellectually developed history or jurisprudence today. All the sciences today are intellectualistic; if they claim to be experiential sciences, this is based only on the fact that they interpret intellectually their experiences based on sense observation. What is offered in spiritual science is essentially different from these intellectually interpreted results of natural science; it would be most unfortunate if what lives in our intellectualistic culture were not merely a picture but a real power that worked more deeply on the human being. Everything intellectualistic remains only on the surface of the human being. This sentence is to be taken very comprehensively.

There are people who study spiritual science only intellectually, who make notes: there is a physical body, etheric body, astral body, ego, reincarnation, karma, and so forth. They make notes of it all, as is the custom in modern natural or social science, but they are not sincerely devoting themselves to spiritual science when they cultivate this way of thinking. They are simply carrying over their ordinary way of thinking into what they encounter in spiritual science. What is essential about spiritual science is that it must be thought in a different way, felt in a different way, must be experienced not in an intellectual way but quite differently. It is for this reason that by its very nature spiritual science has a living relationship to the human being in health and illness, but a relationship altogether different from what is often imagined.

By now, some people must be sufficiently convinced of the impotence of our purely intellectual culture in dealing with those suffering from so-called mental illnesses. One who suffers from such an illness may say to you, for example, that he hears voices speaking to him. No matter what intellectual reasoning you use with him, it proves useless, for he makes all kinds of objections, you may be sure of that. Even this might indicate that one is dealing here with an illness not of the conscious or unconscious soul life but of the organism.

Spiritual science teaches, moreover, that one cannot come to grips with these so-called psychological and mental illnesses by means of the kinds of methods that take recourse to hypnotism, suggestion, and the like; one must rather approach mental illness by physical means, which means by healing the organs of the human being. This is exactly where a spiritual knowledge of the human being is essential. Spiritual knowledge knows that so-called mental illnesses cannot be affected by soul or spiritual procedures, because mental illness consists precisely of the fact that the spiritual member of the human being has been pressed out, as it were, as is normally the case only in sleep. As a consequence, the spiritual member grows weak, and we must cure the bodily organs so that the soul and spirit may be taken up again in a healthy way.

When, as a result of spiritual scientific work, Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition arise, they are able to penetrate into the whole organism, as they proceed not from the intellect or the head alone but from the entire human being.⁶ Through real spiritual science, the physical organization of the human being may be permeated with health. The fact that there are dreamers who feel ill or show signs of the opposite of health in their spiritual scientific activities is no proof to the contrary. There are so many who are not really spiritual scientists at all but who simply amass intellectually vast collections of notes about the results of spiritual science. Spreading the real substance of spiritual science is in itself a social hygiene, for it works upon the whole human being and regulates his organic functions when they develop extreme tendencies in one direction or another, either toward dreaminess or the reverse. Here we have the overwhelming difference between what is given in spiritual science and what appears in merely intellectual science. The concepts arising in the domain of intellectualism are far too weak to penetrate the human being and to work healthily upon him, because they are merely analogies. Spiritual scientific concepts, on the other hand, have been drawn from the entire human being. Lungs, liver, heart, the entire human being and not the brain alone have participated in building up spiritual scientific concepts, and what they have derived from the strength of the entire human being adheres to them, penetrates them, as it were, in a sculptural way. If one then permeates oneself with such concepts, if one receives them cognitively through the sound human intellect, they work back again onto the entire human being in a hygienic, health-engendering way. This is how spiritual science can penetrate and give direction to hygiene, health care, as a social concern.

In many other ways too—now I can only offer an example—spiritual science will be able to lay down guidelines for the life of humanity in the domain of health, if it gains a firm footing in the world. Here let me give just one brief indication. The relationship of the waking human being to the sleeping human being, the great difference between the human organization in waking and sleeping, is one of the subjects that spiritual science must study again and again. How the spirit and soul act in waking life, when they permeate each other in the bodily, soul, and spiritual aspects of the human being, how they act when they are temporarily separated from each other in sleep—all these things are studied conscientiously by spiritual science. Here I can do not more than refer to a certain principle that is a well-founded result of spiritual scientific investigation.

In our life we occasionally see so-called epidemic illnesses that affect whole masses of the population and are therefore essentially a social concern. Ordinary materialistic science studies these illnesses by examining the physical organism of the human being. It knows nothing of the tremendous significance that the abnormal attitude of the human being to waking and sleeping has for epidemics and the susceptibility to epidemic illnesses. What takes place in the organism during sleep is something that, if it becomes excessive, predisposes the human being to so-called epidemic illnesses. There are people who, as the result of too much sleep, initiate certain processes in the human organism, processes that ought not be set in motion because waking life should not be broken up by such long periods of sleep. These people have a much stronger predisposition to epidemic illnesses and are less able to resist them.

You yourselves can assess what it would entail to explain to people the proper proportion of sleeping to waking. Such things cannot be dictated. You can, of course, tell people that they must not send children with scarlatina to school, but you cannot possibly dictate to people in the same way that they must get seven hours of sleep. And yet this is much more important than any other prescription. People who need it should have seven hours of sleep, and others for whom this is not necessary should sleep much less, and so on.

These matters, which are so intimately connected with the personal life of human beings, have a tremendous effect upon social life. How these social effects come about, whether a larger or smaller number of people are obliged, owing to illness, to be absent from their work, whether or not a whole region is affected: all these things depend upon the most intimate details of man's life. Here hygiene plays an immeasurably important part in social life. Regardless of what people may think about infection or non-infection, with epidemics this element really plays a part in social life. Here external regulations are of no avail; the only thing you can do is to educate people within society so that they are able to understand the physicians who are trying to explain prophylactic measures. This can give rise to an active cooperation in the maintenance of health between the physician who understands his profession and the layman who understands the nature of the human being.

I have described here an aspect of hygiene or health care as a social issue that is utterly dependent on a free spiritual life. We must have a spiritual life in which within the spiritual realm there are those engaged in nurturing this spiritual life, even in so far as it extends into the various practical domains such as hygiene; they must be completely independent of everything that does not yield pure knowledge, that does not bring about the nurture of the spiritual life. What the individual can achieve for the greatest benefit of his fellow man must grow entirely out of his own capacities. There should be neither governmental norms nor a dependence on economic powers. The individual's achievements must be placed entirely in the sphere of the intimate, personal connections that only exist between individuals, in the trust, based on understanding, that those who require the services of a capable person can bring to that person. There, a spiritual life is needed—independent of all authority, governmental or economic—which is active in a manner that arises purely out of spiritual forces. If you consider what can bring about a hygiene intimately united with insight into human nature and social behavior, you will also recognize that the spirit obviously must be managed by those who nurture it; not the specialists active as experts in governmental agencies but rather those active in spiritual life must be the sole managers of this spiritual life. This becomes especially clear if one goes into the individual branches of activity, such as hygiene, with real experience, as is required by the separate, concrete realms "“ and this could be shown to hold good in other realms as it does for hygiene. When hygiene or health care exists as a real social institution, based on social insight arising from the free spiritual life, then the economic aspects of such a hygiene can be handled in a totally different way, especially if the independent economic life is constituted as I have described in my book The Threefold Social Order.⁷

If the forces for the nurture of hygiene or health care that are latent in society, resting in its womb, as it were, are taken up with human understanding, if they result in social institutions, then out of the independent economic life, without consideration of dependence on profit or governmental impulses, can emerge what is necessary to support a genuine hygiene. Only then will the kind of idealism enter economic life that is necessary for the nurture of hygiene in human life. If the mere profit motive prevails in our economic sphere, it always has the tendency to become increasingly incorporated into the political state, and the generally accepted opinion is that one must produce what yields the most profit. If this idea continues to prevail, then the independent impulses of a free spiritual life cannot manifest in the domain of hygiene or health care, and spiritual life will then become dependent on political or economic forces; then the economic will govern the spiritual, but the economic must not prevail over the spiritual. This fact is most evident to one who wants to arrive at what the spirit demands in the economic life, to one who wants to serve a genuine and true hygiene.

The forces of the free spiritual life in the threefold social organism arrive at the insight which becomes a matter of public concern; an understanding of the human being becomes a public concern in the threefold social organism. The human being must stand within a free spiritual life in order that a firmly grounded hygiene can be nurtured. On the other hand, people must develop the idealism through which the products of the economic life are met with an understanding that results not merely from a sense for profit but out of insights emerging from the free spiritual management of hygiene or health care. Once this insightful, social human understanding has arisen, this human idealism, there will emerge a willingness to work economically simply because the social situation of humanity requires hygienic service. If these requirements are met, people will be able to meet democratically in parliaments or other such gatherings. For then, out of a free spiritual life, the recognition emerges of the necessity for hygiene as a social phenomenon; attention to what is necessary for hygiene as a social issue emerges from an impartial and professionally managed economic life through the high intentions that would be developed within it. Then mature human beings will deliberate on the ground of the economic life out of their insight and understanding of the human being as well as out of their relations to an economic life at the service of hygiene. Then people will be able to meet as equals within the legislative, rights, or economic life concerning the measures that are necessary regarding hygiene and the care of public health.

Were all this to come about, however, laymen or dilettantes would not do the healing; rather, the mature person will encounter as an equal and with understanding whoever advises him on matters of hygiene, namely, the experienced physician. For the layman, the understanding of the human being that is nurtured in social life, with the help of the physician, makes it possible to meet expert knowledge equipped with understanding, so that in a democratic parliament the layman is able to say "yea"" with a certain understanding and not merely out of pressure from authority.

When we consider impartially how the spiritual, legislative, and economic members of the social organism work together in such a special domain, we discover the complete justification of the idea of the threefold nature of the social organism. This idea is met with disapproval only when it is understood merely abstractly.

Today I was able to give you no more than a sketchy indication of what speaks for the necessity of the threefolding of the social organism if one thinks correctly about a particular, concrete domain such as hygiene. If those paths are followed, toward which I have only been able to point today in their beginnings, one will see that whoever meets the impulse of the threefold social organism with abstract concepts will work against it in a certain way. Such a person will generally bring up the obvious objections. Whoever enters the various domains of life with a full inner understanding, however, entering into the individual realms that matter so much in social life, whoever truly understands something in a concrete realm of life and takes the trouble to understand something about true practical life in any domain, will be led again and again in the direction that has been suggested by the idea of threefolding the social organism.

This idea did not arise out of a dreamy or abstract idealism; it arose as a social demand of our time and of the near future, especially out of the concrete and sober observation of the individual domains of life. By penetrating these individual domains of life with what is active out of the impulse for threefolding the social organism, one will find for all these domains just what they so desperately need today. This evening I only wished to give a few indications concerning how what emerges out of spiritual science regarding the social life can penetrate human society as a social concern, arising out of a socially nurtured understanding of the human being. Striving for a realization of the threefold social organism can fructify what can be accepted today only on the basis of belief in authority, through a completely blind subjection. Through the enrichment that hygiene or health care can receive from a medicine fructified by spiritual science, it can become a social, a truly social concern. It can become a democratically nurtured, common public concern in the truest sense.

In the discussion following the lecture, Rudolf Steiner added the following comments in response to prepared questions.

In matters such as I have discussed today, it is essential that one be able to enter into the whole spirit of what has been expressed. For this reason, it is difficult at times to give appropriate answers, for the questions have already been formulated in such a way that they bear the stamp of contemporary thinking and attitudes. Before answering such questions, it may first be necessary to reformulate them or at least to provide some sort of appropriate explanation. Having said this, I will begin at once with the question that may appear to many of you to be so exceedingly simple that it ought to be able to be answered with a few sentences or even with one sentence:

"How can a person rid himself of the habit of sleeping too long?"

In order to answer this question appropriately, it would be necessary for me to give an even longer lecture than I have already given, because I would first have to bring various elements together. It is possible to say the following, however. The intellectual attitude of soul is almost universal in humanity today. It is particularly those who believe they are judging or living out of feeling or who believe, for one reason or another, that they are not intellectual who are most subject to the intellectual attitude of soul. The fundamental character of the intellectual soul and organ life is that through it our instincts are destroyed. The correct instincts of the human being are destroyed. It is actually so that one must point to primeval humanity, or even to the animal kingdom, to discover instincts that are not yet entirely destroyed. On another occasion a few days ago, I pointed to a very telling example. There are birds who, out of greed, feed on certain insects, for instance spiders. After consuming these spiders, which are poisonous to them, the birds get convulsions, seizures, and die a miserable, agonizing death soon after swallowing the spider. If henbane is in the vicinity, however, the bird flies there, sucks the healing sap from the plant, and thus saves its own life.

Now, just think how there we see developed something that in the human being is shriveled down to the few reflex instincts such as the movements we make without any deep deliberation to encourage the departure of a fly that has alighted on our nose. A defensive instinct arises in response to this insulting stimulus. In the bird feeding on the spider, the consequence of the effect the spider has in the bird's organism is a defensive instinct to this insult, driving it to do something very reasonable. We would still be able to find such instincts among ancient populations if only we interpreted history properly. In our time, however, we have different experiences.

It has always been exceedingly painful to me, accustomed as I am to seeing a fork, knife, and spoon next to a plate, to see instead a scale next to the plate of someone sitting down to eat. This really happens! Such a person weighs the piece of meat and only then knows how much meat he should eat for his particular organism. Just think how bare of all truly original instincts humanity has become to require such a measure! The important thing, then, is that one not remain stationary within intellectualism but rise instead to a spiritual scientific way of knowing. You will now believe that I am speaking pro domo, even if also pro domo of this great house, but I am not speaking pro domo. I am really speaking about what I believe to have recognized as the truth, quite apart from the fact that I myself represent this truth. It can readily be seen that if one penetrates not only into what is intellectual but into what needs to be grasped by way of spiritual science and which therefore confronts humanity more in a pictorial sense, it becomes noticeable that by taking hold of knowledge not accessible to the mere intellect one is again led back to healthy instincts, if not in a single life then perhaps -more so in those matters that lie in the underpinnings of life. Whoever concerns himself, be it ever so briefly, with developing this completely different soul attitude, which must be developed if one really wants to understand something of spiritual science, will again be led back to healthy instincts in matters such as the proper requirement for sleep. Animals do not sleep too much under normal conditions, and primeval man did not sleep too much either. It is only necessary to educate oneself again to have healthy instincts, which were lost by virtue of the intellectual culture prevalent today. It can be said that a truly effective means of ridding oneself of the habit of sleeping too long is to be able to take up spiritual scientific truths without falling asleep as a result. If a person falls asleep at once upon hearing spiritual scientific truths, then he will be unable to rid himself of the habit of sleeping too long. If one succeeds, however, in being truly present inwardly while working through spiritual scientific truths, then this inner human aspect will be activated in such a way that one can actually discover the exactly appropriate time needed for sleep for one's own organism.

Again, it is exceedingly difficult to give intellectual rules prescribing the amount of sleep an individual person requires who is suffering, let us say, from a kidney or liver disorder that has not made him ill in the ordinary sense. As a rule, such a prescription would not lead to anything of consequence. To induce sleep in an artificial way is not the same as when the body, out of its own need for sleep, refuses the entry of the spirit only for as long as is necessary. It can thus be said that a proper hygiene emerging out of spiritual science will also bring the human being to the point at which he can determine in the right way the proper amount of sleep for his own organism.

The other question that was posed here also cannot be answered so simply: "How can a person know how much sleep he needs?"

I would like to say that it is not at all necessary to reach the answer through discursive thinking; that is not necessary at all. It is necessary to acquire those instincts that can be acquired not by receiving collections of notes out of spiritual science but by the way in which one understands spiritual science if it is understood with full inner participation. Once this instinct is achieved, a person is able to discern in an individual way how much sleep is appropriate for him. This is what can be said as a rule in response to such a question. As I said, I can give only a kind of direction for how questions like this can be answered; this may not be what is expected, but what is expected is not always what is right.

"Is it healthy to sleep in a room with the window open?"

Such a question, too, cannot actually be answered in general terms. It is certainly conceivable that for one person, sleeping in a room with an open window is very healthy, depending on the particular construction of his respiratory organs; for another person, however, it might be better to air out the room before sleeping and then close the windows while sleeping. What is necessary, in fact, is to gain an understanding of the relationship the human being has to his environment in order then to be able to make a judgment in each individual case in accordance with this understanding.

"How, from a spiritual scientific point of view, do you explain the development of mental disturbances associated with crimes that are committed, that is, how, in such a situation, can one recognize the bodily illness which lies at the foundation of the mental disturbance?"

If one were to try to deal with this question thoroughly, it would really be necessary to enter into a discussion of all criminal and psychiatric anthropology. I would simply like to say the following: first, in considering such matters, one must presuppose that the organic predisposition of someone who becomes a criminal is abnormal right from the outset. In this direction, you need only follow up the relevant studies by Moriz Benedikt "“ the first really significant criminal anthropologist⁸ "“ and you will see how in fact the pathological investigation of the forms of single human organs can be brought into connection with this predisposition to criminality. There you already have an inherent abnormality, although materialistic thinkers, such as Moriz Benedikt, naturally draw the wrong conclusions from their findings, because it is certainly not an absolute requirement that whoever shows signs in this direction is inevitably a born criminal. What is important is that one is definitely able to work on the defects within the organism "“ I mean the organ defects, not the already existing mental illness, but the organ defects "“ and to have an effect especially through education and later through the appropriate spiritual element, if only the state of affairs is studied from a spiritual scientific point of view. Therefore the conclusions arrived at by Benedikt are not correct. Such organ defects can already be discovered, however.

Then one must also be clear about the fact that there are also non-intellectual elements in ordinary human life, more in the realm of feelings or emotions, which set off reactions. These work first on the glandular activity, the secretory activity, but from there they have an influence on the other organs. In connection with this issue, I would advise you to read an interesting little book concerning the mechanics of emotions that has been put out by a Danish physician.⁹ There you can read much that is of value for the topic under consideration. Take the bodily predisposition that can be traced in everyone who truly comes into consideration as a criminal; add to that everything that has had consequences for the apprehended criminal, consisting of emotional disturbances and the continuation of these emotional disturbances into the organs; then you have the path by which to seek for those defective organs which as a consequence bring forth mental illness, specifically the mental illness associated with committing a crime. In this way, we must attempt to obtain a clear idea about such connections.

"What is the relationship of theosophy to anthroposophy? Is the theosophy which was presented here previously no longer fully recognized?"

I would simply like to say that nothing has ever been presented here other than an anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, and what has been presented here today has always been presented in this way. The common identification of our presentations with so-called theosophy is simply based on a misunderstanding. This will remain a misunderstanding because, within certain limits, anthroposophically oriented spiritual science moved for a time within the framework of the Theosophical Society; even in the framework of that society, however, the representatives of an anthroposophically oriented spiritual science never presented anything other than what is presented here today. This was tolerated in the Theosophical Society only so long as matters didn't look too heretical. The anthroposophists were thrown out, however, as soon as it was noticed that anthroposophy was something completely different from the abstract mysticism manifested so often in theosophy. This expulsion was undertaken by the other side, but what is presented here never had any other form than it has today. Of course, those who concern themselves with matters superficially and who listen only to those who haven't gotten beyond a superficial comprehension as members of the Anthroposophical Society "“ for one needn't always be outside in order to understand anthroposophy superficially or to confuse anthroposophy with theosophy; one can also be in the Society "“ those who therefore achieve only a superficial knowledge of what is going on get confused about the issues. What I have characterized here today regarding a particular area has never been presented here in any other way.

Of course there is continuous work, and certain things may be said today in a much more precise, thorough, and intensive way than was possible fifteen, ten, or even five years ago. This is just the nature of working, that one progresses in the formulation of making oneself understood in such difficult matters as spiritual science. It is really unnecessary to engage in any discussion with those who, out of ill will, attribute to us all kinds of changes of world view because of a more recent, more complete expression of something said incompletely on an earlier occasion. Discussions with such ill-willed persons are really a waste of time, because spiritual science, as it is meant here, is something living and not something dead. And whoever believes that it cannot progress and wants to nail it down where it is and where it once was, as happens so often, does not believe in what is living; he would prefer to make it into something dead.

"Would you please say something about the origin of an epidemic such as influenza or scarlet fever? How does it come about if not by the spreading of bacteria? In many illnesses the causative agent has been scientifically determined. What is your position in relation to this issue?"

If I were also to deal with this question concerning which I have indicated that I do not wish to take sides, I would have to give another entire lecture. Nevertheless, I would like to direct your attention to the following: a person may be impelled, in accordance with his knowledge, to direct attention to the fact that for illnesses accompanied by the occurrence of bacilli or bacteria, there are deeper causes "“ acting as primary causes "“ than the mere occurrence of bacteria; such a person does not assert that bacteria don't exist. It is one thing to assert that bac-teria exist and that they increase during the course of an illness; it is quite another to seek the primary cause of the illness in the bacteria. What needs to be said regarding this I have developed in great detail in the course that is being held here now [4], but it takes time to deal with the issues properly. This also applies to certain elements that must be considered before this question can be dealt with, and this cannot be done so quickly in a question-and-answer period such as this. Nevertheless, I will point out the following, the human constitution is not such a simple matter as one often imagines. The human being is a multi-membered being. Right at the beginning of my book, Riddles of the Soul,¹⁰ I stated that man is a threefold being. First there is what can be called the nerve-sense man, then the rhythmic man, and thirdly the metabolic man. This is the human being. These three members of human nature work into one another and may not, if the human being is to be healthy, interact with one another without in a certain way maintaining a separation of the different realms. For example, the nerve-sense man, which is far more than contemporary physiology imagines it to be, may not extend its influence without consequences on the metabolic man, unless its effects are mediated by the rhythmic movements of the circulatory and respiratory processes which, as is well known, extend into the outermost periphery of the organism. This working together, however, can be interrupted in a certain way. This working together is brought about by something very specific. (When such questions are posed "“ if you will pardon me "“ one must also answer in accordance with the facts; I will attempt to be as decent as possible, but it is nevertheless necessary to say a few words that must also be listened to as related to the facts.) It is so, for example, that in the lower man processes occur that are incorporated into the entire organism. If they are incorporated into the entire organism, then they will work in the right way; if, however, they are heightened by various processes, either directly in the lower body, so that they become more active, or through the corresponding processes, which are always there in the human head or in the human lung being diminished in their intensity, then something very curious takes place. Then it becomes evident that, in order to have a normal life, the human organism must develop processes that may develop to the extent that they are integrated into the entire human being. If a process is heightened excessively, however, then it becomes localized; a process arises, for example, in the lower body of the human being, through which there is an improper separation of what goes on in the head or lung, which corresponds to certain processes in the lower body. Processes always correspond to one another in such a way that they proceed parallel to one another; thereby what ought to be present in the human being only to a certain extent, whereby he maintains his vitality, the soul- and spirit-bearing vitality, is brought beyond a certain level. This then encourages an atmosphere, as it were, in which all kinds of lower organisms, all kinds of tiny organisms, can develop. The nurturing element for these small organisms is always present within the human being, only it is spread out over the whole organism. If it becomes concentrated, it provides the life soil for small organisms, for microbes. The reason they can thrive there, however, must be sought in the exceedingly fine processes in the organism which then prove to be the primary cause.

I am really not speaking out of an antipathy for the bacillary theory. I certainly understand the reasons people have for believing in the bacillary theory. You must believe that if I did not have to speak this way because of the facts I could well recognize these reasons. Here, however, we have a knowledge that necessarily leads to the recognition of something else which impels one to speak in the following way: I see a certain landscape in which there are many exceedingly beautiful and well cared-for cattle. I now ask, why are there favorable conditions in that area? They come from the beautiful cattle, I determine. I explain the conditions of life in this area by explaining that beautiful cattle have moved in from somewhere and then spread over the landscape. "“ Don't you agree that such an explanation does not correspond with the facts? Instead, I must look for the primary causes: the diligence, the understanding of the people in that area, and they will explain to me why such beautiful cattle develop on this soil. I would give quite a superficial explanation if I were to say: here it is beautiful, a nice place to live, because beautiful cattle have moved in. The same logic is applied when I find a typhus bacillus and then claim that a patient has typhus because typhus bacilli have moved in. To explain typhus, entirely different factors are necessary than merely to draw attention to the typhus bacillus. In submitting to such erroneous logic one is led astray in many other ways. The primary processes that provide typhus bacillus with the foundation for its existence certainly bring about all kinds of other problems that are not primary. And it is very easy to confound completely or even interchange what is secondary with the actual original form of illness. This is as much as I can say now that could lead to a proper perspective on these issues and show what must be done in order to put in its proper place what is justifiable within limits.

Maybe you can see, nevertheless, from the way in which I have given this answer "“ even if I have done so only sketchily and could easily be misunderstood "“ that I am not at all concerned here with the popular hollering about the bacillary theory; we are interested rather in studying these matters very seriously.

"Please give us a few examples of how bodily organic disturbances bring about soul-spiritual illnesses."

This question would naturally, if it were answered thoroughly, lead much too far, but here, too, I will point out just a few things. You see, in the historical development of medical thinking it is not, as is presented today, that the healing art began with Hippocrates and then developed further. So far as can be traced, very curious things are found in Hippocrates' writings, and rather than the mere beginnings of contemporary intellectual medicine we have in Hippocrates remnants of an ancient, instinctual kind of medicine.

In addition, we find something else, however. In this ancient, instinctual medicine, as long as it was still valid, one did not speak of psychological depressions of a certain kind, which is indeed a very abstract kind of expression; rather one spoke of hypochondria, i.e., cartilage in the lower body. It was known, therefore, that when hypochondria occurred, one was dealing with disturbances in the lower body, with a hardening in the lower body. One cannot say that the ancients were more materialistic than we are.

Similarly, it can very easily be shown that certain chronic lung defects are definitely connected with what could be called a false mystical sense of the human being. And so one could point to all kinds of things completely apart from what the ancients suggested for the organic realm with the temperaments, again all corresponding to a proper instinct. For them, the choleric temperament originated out of the white gall; the melancholic temperament arose out of the black gall and whatever the black gall brings about in the lower body; the sanguine temperament arose out of the blood; and the phlegmatic temperament arose out of the phlegm, what they called phlegm. When they saw deviations of the temperaments, these suggested deviations in the corresponding organic aspects. How this was regarded in the instinctual medicine and hygiene may again become part and parcel of a soul attitude in a strictly scientific way and can be supported from the standpoint of our contemporary knowledge.

Here is another question concerning which great misunderstandings can arise: "Do you know about iris diagnosis? Do you acknowledge it as a valid science?"

It is generally correct that in an organism, and especially in the complicated human organism, conclusions regarding the whole can be arrived at out of all kinds of details, if these details are looked at in the right way. Furthermore the role that the isolated part plays in the human organism is very significant. What the iris diagnostician investigates in the iris is on the one hand very isolated from the rest of the human organism; on the other hand, it is inserted into the rest of the organism in a remarkable way so that it is actually a very expressive organ. Especially in such matters, however, one ought not to schematize, and the error in such matters often lies in the fact that a schema is made. It is definitely so, for example, that people with different soul and bodily constitutions show different signs in the iris from other people. A prerequisite, then, for a meaningful application of this technique would be such an intimate knowledge of what happens in the human organism that whoever had this knowledge actually would no longer need to look into a single organ. To be dependent on an intellectual adherence to certain rules and schemas is of little, if any, value.

"What relation do diseases have to the course of world history, especially those that have arisen more recently?"

A whole chapter of cultural history! Well, I will only comment on the following: in order to study history one must have a sense for what can be called symptomatology; that is, much of what is taken today as history can be considered only a symptom for what lies much deeper, that is, the spiritual stream carrying these symptoms. Thus what resides in the depths of the development of humanity is also symptomatic or comes to expression in this or that disease of an era. It is interesting to study the relationships between what works in the depths of the evolution of humanity and what takes its course in the symptoms of this or that disease. The existence of certain diseases may point to impulses in historical development that could elude a symptomatology not applying such a method.

This question, however, could lead to something else, which is "˜also not unessential when one pursues the history of humanity. Diseases, regardless of whether they occur in a single person or in a society by way of an epidemic, are in many instances also reactions to other excesses. From the point of view of public health, these other excesses may be taken as much less serious; from a moral or spiritual point of view, however, they are nevertheless considered to be very serious. But you must not apply what I just said to the question of healing or hygiene, for that would be very wrong. Diseases must be healed. In hygiene, it is important to be active in furthering or helping the human being. One may not say, "I will first see whether it may be your karma to have this illness. If so, I must let you have this illness; if not, then I can cure it." This way of looking at the issue is not valid if one is concerned with healing. What may not be valid regarding our intervention in the case of helping another human being, however, may nevertheless be objectively valid in the world outside. And there it must be said that much of what develops as a disposition to moral excesses engraves itself so deeply into the organization of the human being that reactions then appear in certain diseases and that the disease is the suppression of a moral excess.

In the individual person it is not of much significance to pursue these things, because the individual ought to be allowed to go through his individual destiny, and one really ought not to meddle in this, just as one doesn't meddle with the personal mail of other persons, unless, from the viewpoint that is so close at hand, it is "opened by government decree in times of war." Just as little as one ought to snoop into other people's personal mail, so little ought one to meddle with another person's individual karma. With the history of the world it is a different matter, however; there one ought to be concerned, because there the individual human being plays, you could say, only a statistical role. One must always point out that statistics are very helpful in letting life insurance companies know what the mortality rate is according to which they can determine their rates. These things are quite accurate. The calculations are correct and everything is very scientific. But one needn't simply die at the moment that has been specified by statistics; one also needn't live as long as has been calculated. Other issues arise when the individual human being comes into consideration. If groups of human beings, or even the whole historical development, come into consideration, however, it can be very helpful not to be superstitious but rather to be very scientific. If one studies to what extent symptoms of an illness occur that are corrective for other excesses, then one can, in fact, already look for certain repercussions of the illness or at least a calling forth by the illness of something that would have occurred in a completely different form if the disease had not arisen.

These are only a few indications of how something might be considered that is touched on by this question.

Now, however, our time has progressed so far that we will follow the others who have already left us.

• 1. In German, these illnesses are called Seelen-oder Geisteskrankheiten, diseases of the soul or spirit as opposed to diseases of the body. As Steiner is speaking here of the role of soul and spirit in bodily phenomena, it may be helpful to keep in mind the thought of soul-spiritual illnesses, though in the translation we have chosen the more commonly used English equivalents, psychological and mental illnesses.
• 2. Rudolf Steiner is referring here to a number of lectures given by various scientists during the medical course at the Goetheanum in Dornach.
• 3. Karl Marx (1818-1883); Franz Oppenheimer (1864-1944), an economist.
• 4. Rudolf Steiner, Spiritual Science and Medicine, 20 lectures given in Dornach, 1920, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1975.
• 5. Rudolf Steiner, The Study of Man, lectures given at the founding of the Waldorf School in Stuttgart, 1919; Rudolf Steiner Press, London, reprinted 1981.
• 6. See chapter five in Rudolf Steiner's An Outline of Occult Science, Anthroposophic Press, Spring Valley, N.Y., reprinted 1984.
• 7. Rudolf Steiner, The Threefold Social Order, Anthroposophic Press, Spring Valley, N.Y.
• 8. Moriz Benedikt (1835-1920), professor of neuropathology at the University of Vienna; founder of criminal anthropology.
• 9. Carl Georg Lange (1834-1900), professor of pathology in Copenhagen.
• 10. Rudolf Steiner, Von Seelenrätseln, 1917; excerpts of this are published in English under the title, The Case for Anthroposophy, Rudolf Steiner Press London, 1970.

During these three days, I would like to speak about a topic that one normally considers from a more formal aspect, and whose contents one normally only considers that the position of the philosophical worldview to Christianity was fixed as it were by the underlying philosophical movement of the Middle Ages. Because just this aspect of the matter was recently refreshed because Pope Leo XIII called on his clerics to do Thomism the official philosophy of the Catholic Church, our present topic has a certain significance from this side.

However, I would just like to look not only from this formal aspect at the matter that is connected as medieval philosophy with the central personalities of Albert the Great (1193-1280) and Thomas Aquinas (~1225-1274), but in the course of these days I would like to show the deeper historical background from which this philosophical movement arose which our time appreciates too little. One can say that Thomas Aquinas tried to grasp the problem of knowledge, of the complete worldview in a quite astute way in the thirteenth century, in a way that is hard to comprehend with our thinking today because conditions are part of reflection that the human beings of the present hardly fulfil, even if they are philosophers. It is necessary that you can completely project your thoughts in the way of thinking of Thomas Aquinas, his predecessors and successors that you know how you have to understand the concepts which lived in the souls of these medieval people about which, actually, the history of philosophy reports quite externally.

If you look now at the centre of our consideration, at Thomas Aquinas, he is a personality that disappears, compared with the main current of Christian philosophy in the Middle Ages, as a personality as it were who is, actually, only the exponent of that which lives in a broad worldview current and expresses a certain universality with him. So that Thomism is something exceptionally impersonal, something that only manifests by the personality of Thomas Aquinas. Against it, you recognise immediately that you look at a full, whole personality if you envisage Augustine (354-430) who is the most important predecessor of Thomism. With Augustine, we deal with a struggling person, with Thomas Aquinas with the medieval church that determines its position to heaven, earth, human beings, history et cetera. It expresses itself—indeed, with certain restrictions—as church by the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas.

A significant event takes place between both men, and without looking at this event, it is not possible to determine the position of both personalities to each other. This event took place in 553 when Emperor Justinian I (527-565) branded Origen (185-~254) as a heretic. The whole colouring of Augustine's worldview becomes clear only if you consider the historical background from which Augustine worked his way out. However, this historical background changes because that powerful influence on the West stops which had originated from the Greek academies in Athens and somewhere else. This influence lasted until the sixth century, and then it decreased, so that something remained in the western current that was quite different from that in which Augustine had still lived.

I ask you to take into consideration that I would like to give an introduction only today that I treat the real being of Thomism tomorrow, and that the purpose of my executions will completely appear, actually, only at the third day. Since I am in a special situation, also with reference to the Christian philosophy of the Middle Ages, in particular of Thomism,—you forgive for this personal remark. I have emphasised many a time what I experienced once when I reported that before a proletarian audience what I have to regard as truth in the course of western history. It caused that the students took kindly to that, however, the leaders of the proletarian movement believed that this was no real Marxism. Although I appealed to freedom of teaching, one answered to me in the decisive meeting that this party knows no freedom of teaching but only reasonable compulsion!—Hence, I had to finish my teaching, although I had many students of the proletariat who supported me.

I experienced something similar another time with that which I wanted to say about Thomism and the medieval philosophy twenty years ago. At that time, the materialist monism was on its climax. To the care of a free, independent worldview, but only to the care of this materialist monism, the Giordano Bruno Association was founded in Germany in those days. Because it was impossible for me to take part in all empty gossip and phrases that appeared as monism in the world, I held a talk on Thomism in the Berlin Giordano Bruno Association. I tried to prove in this talk that Thomism is a spiritual monism, which manifests by an astute thinking of which the modern philosophy—influenced by Kant and Protestantism—has no idea or has no strength for it. Thus, I fell out also with monism! Today it is exceptionally difficult to speak of the things in such a way that the spoken arises from the real thing and is not put into the service of any party. Hence, I would like to speak about the phenomena, which I have indicated, during these three days again.

Augustine positions himself as a struggling personality in the fourth and fifth centuries, as I have already said. The way in which Augustine struggles makes a deep impression if one is able to go into the special nature of this struggle. Two questions rose in Augustine's soul of which one has no idea today where the real cognitive and psychological questions have faded, actually. The first question is that which one can characterise possibly while one says, Augustine struggles for the being of that which the human being can acknowledge, actually, as truth fulfilling his soul. The second question is, how can one explain the evil in a world that has, nevertheless, sense only if at least the purpose of this world deals with the good? How can one explain that never the voice of the evil is silenced in the human nature also not if the human being strives honestly and sincerely for the good?

I do not believe that one approaches Augustine really, if one interprets these two questions in such a way, as the average human people of the present would like to understand them. One has to look for the special colouring that these questions had for this man of the fourth and fifth centuries. Augustine experiences an internally moved, excessive life at first. However, in this life both questions appear repeatedly in him. He is in a conflict. The father is a pagan; the mother is a devout Christ. The mother did her best to win the son over to Christianity. At first, the son attains a certain seriousness of life and turns to Manichaeism. We want to look at this worldview later that Augustine got to know when he changed from a dissolute life to a serious one. Then, however, he felt more and more rejected—indeed, only after years—by Manichaeism, and a certain scepticism seized him from the whole trend of the philosophical life in which at a certain time the Greek philosophy had ended, and which survived then until the time of Augustine.

However, now scepticism withdraws more and more. Scepticism is only something to Augustine that brings him together with Greek philosophy. This scepticism leads him to that which exerted a deep influence certainly on his subjectivity on his whole attitude for some time. Scepticism leads him to a quite different direction, to Neoplatonism. Neoplatonism influenced Augustine even more than one normally thinks. One can understand his whole personality and his struggle only if one recognises how much he is involved in the Neoplatonic worldview. If one goes objectively into his development, one hardly finds, actually, that the break, which in this personality took place with the transition from Manichaeism to Neoplatonism or Plotinism, recurred with the same strength, when Augustine turned from Neoplatonism to Christianity. Since one can say, actually, Augustine remained a Neoplatonist to a certain degree. That is why his destiny induced him to get to know Christianity. It is, actually, not at all a big leap, but it is a natural development from Neoplatonism to Christianity. One cannot judge the Christianity of Augustine if one does not look at Manichaeism, a peculiar way to overcome the old pagan worldview at the same time with the Old Testament, with Judaism.

At that time, Manichaeism had expanded over North Africa where Augustine grew up in which many people of the West already lived. In the third century, Manichaeism came into being by Mani, a Persian (216-277). History hands down exceptionally little of it. If one wants to characterise Manichaeism, one must say, it depends more on the attitude of this worldview than on the literal contents.

It is typical for Manichaeism above all that the separation of the human experience into spiritual and material does not yet make sense. The words or ideas “spirit” and “matter” have no sense for Manichaeism. Manichaeism sees in that what appears material to the senses something spiritual and does not tower above that which presents itself to the senses if it speaks of the spiritual. It applies to it much more than one normally thinks that it assumes spiritual phenomena, spiritual facts, indeed, in the stars and in their ways that it assumes that with the sun mystery something spiritual takes place here on earth at the same time. Something material manifests as something spiritual at the same time and vice versa. Hence, it is a given for Manichaeism that it speaks of astronomical phenomena, of world phenomena in such a way as it also speaks of moral and of events within the human evolution. Thus, the contrast of light and darkness which Manichaeism teaches—copying the ancient Persian worldview—is something naturally spiritual at the same time even more than one thinks. Manichaeism still speaks of that what moves there apparently as sun at the firmament, of something that is also concerned with the moral entities and impulses within the human evolution. It speaks of the relations of this moral-physical, which is there at the firmament, to the signs of the zodiac like to twelve beings by whom the primal being, the primal light being of the world, specifies its activities.

However, something else is still distinctive of Manichaeism. It considers the human being by no means as that which the human being is to us today. The human being appears to us as a kind of crown of the earth creation. Manichaeism does not concede this. It considers the human being, actually, only as a scanty rest of that which should have become a human being on earth by the divine light being. Something else should have become a human being than that which now walks around as a human being on earth. That which now walks around as a human being on earth originated because the original human being whom the light being had created for supporting him in his fight against the demons of darkness lost this fight against these demons and was moved by the good powers into the sun. However, the demons still managed it to snatch a part of this original human being as it were from the real human being escaping to the sun and to form the earthly human race from it, which walks about on earth like a worse issue of that what could not live on the earth here because it had to be carried away into the sun during the big spiritual fight. The Christ Being appeared to lead the human being who was like a worse edition of his original destiny on earth, and Its activity shall erase the effect of the demons from the earth.

I know very well that not everything that one can still put into words of this worldview by our word usage, actually, is sufficient; since all that just arises from the depths of the soul life that are substantially different from the present ones. However, the essentials are that what I have already emphasised. Since as fantastic it may appear what I tell you about the progress of the earth in the sense of Manichaeism, it did not imagine that as something that one can only behold spiritually, but that a sense-perceptible phenomenon happens at the same time as something spiritual.

That was the first to work powerfully on Augustine. We understand the problems that are connected with the personality of Augustine, actually, even by the fact that one envisages this mighty effect of Manichaeism, of its spiritual-material principle. One must ask himself, why did Augustine become dissatisfied with Manichaeism? Not, actually, because of its mystic contents but because of the whole attitude of Manichaeism.

First, Augustine was taken in by the sensory descriptiveness, the vividness of this view, in a way. Then, however, something stirred in him that could not be content just with the vividness with which one considered the material as spiritual and the spiritual as material. One really does not manage it differently, as if one goes over from that which one has often only as a formal consideration to reality if one looks at the fact that Augustine was just a person who resembled very much the people of the Middle Ages and maybe even modern people than those people who were the natural bearers of Manichaeism. Augustine already has something of a renewal of mental life.

In our intellectual time that is prone to the abstract, one considers that which goes forward historically in any century as result of the preceding century and so on. It is pure nonsense if one states that that which happens, for example, in the eighteenth year of a human being is a mere effect of that which has happened in the thirteenth, fourteenth years. Since in between something takes place which works its way up from the depths of human nature which is not a mere effect of the preceding in the sense as one speaks of effect and cause justifiably, but which is the sexual maturity which just emerges from the nature of humanity. One has to acknowledge such leaps also at other times of the individual human development, where something works up its way from depths to the surface; so that one cannot say, what happens is only the immediately straight effect of that which has preceded.

Such leaps also take place in the evolution of humanity, and you have to suppose that the spiritual condition of Manichaeism was before such leap and Augustine lived after the leap. He could not help ascending from that which a Manichaean considered as material-spiritual to the purely spiritual. Hence, he had to turn away from the vivid worldview of Manichaeism. That was the first to experience in his soul intensely, and we read his words: “the fact that I had to imagine bodily masses if I wanted to meditate on God and believed that nothing could exist but of that kind—this was the most substantial and almost the only reason of error which I could not avoid.”

Thus, he points back to that time in which Manichaeism lived in his soul; and thus he characterises this lifetime as an error. He wanted something at which he could look up as to something that forms the basis of the human being. He needed something that one cannot see as something material-spiritual immediately in the sensory universe, as the principles of Manichaeism did. As everything struggles intensely seriously and strongly to the surface of his soul, also this: “I asked the earth, and it spoke, I am not that. And what is on it, confessed the same.”

What does Augustine look for? He looks for the actual divine.—Manichaeism would have answered to him: I am that as earth, as far as the divine expresses itself by the earthly work.—Augustine continues: “I asked the sea and the abysses and what they entail as living: we are not your God, search Him above us.—I asked the blowing winds and the whole atmosphere with all its inhabitants: the philosophers who looked the being of the things in us were mistaken, we are not God.” Neither the sea, nor the atmosphere, nor everything that you can perceive with the senses. “I asked the sun, the moon, and the stars. They said: we are not God whom you search.”

Thus, he got free of Manichaeism, just of the element of Manichaeism that one has to characterise, actually, as the most significant. Augustine looks for a spiritual that is free of anything sense-perceptible. He lives just in that epoch of soul development when the soul had to break away from mere considering the sense-perceptible as something spiritual, the spiritual as something sense-perceptible; since one also misjudges the Greek philosophy in this respect absolutely. Hence, people have difficulties to understand the beginning of my Riddles of Philosophy because I tried to characterise it in such a way as it was.

If the Greek speaks of ideas, of concepts, the today's human beings believe that he means that with his ideas that we call thoughts or ideas today. This is not the case, but the Greek spoke of ideas as of something that he perceives in the outside world like colours and tones.

What appeared in Manichaeism with an oriental nuance exists in the entire Greek worldview. The Greek sees his idea as he sees a colour. He still has the sensory-spiritual, spiritual-sensory, that soul experience which does not at all ascend to that which we know as something spiritual that is free of anything sense-perceptible as we understand it now—whether as a mere abstraction or as real contents of our soul, this we do not yet want to decide at this moment. The soul experience that is free of anything sense-perceptible is not yet anything that the Greek envisages. He does not differentiate between thinking and sense perception.

One would have to correct the whole conception of the Platonic philosophy, actually, from this viewpoint, because only then it appears in the right light. So that one may say, Manichaeism is only a post-Christian elaboration of that what was in Hellenism. One also does not understand the great philosopher Aristotle who concludes the Greek philosophy if one does not know that—if he still speaks of concepts—he already stands, indeed, hard at the border of abstract understanding that he speaks, however, still in the sense of tradition seeing the concepts close to sense-perception.

Augustine was simply forced by the viewpoint, which people of his epoch had attained by real processes that took place in them among whom Augustine was an outstanding personality, no longer to experience in the soul as a Greek had experienced. He was forced to a thinking that still keeps its contents if it cannot talk of earth, air, sea, stars, sun and moon that does not have vivid contents. He has to push his way to a divine that should have such abstract contents. Only such worldviews spoke to him, actually, which had originated from another viewpoint that I have just characterised as that of the sensory-extrasensory. No wonder that these souls came to scepticism because they strove in uncertain way for something that was not yet there and because they could only find that which they could not take up.

However, on the other side the feeling to stand on a firm ground of truth and to get explanation about the question of the origin of the evil was so strong in Augustine that, nevertheless, Neo-Platonism influenced him equally considerably. Neo-Platonism or Plotinism in particular concludes Greek philosophy. Plotinus (~204-270) shows—what strictly speaking Plato's dialogues and in the least the Aristotelian philosophy cannot show—how the whole soul life proceeds if it searches a certain internalisation. Plotinus is the last latecomer of a kind of people who took quite different ways to knowledge than that which one later understood generally about which one developed an idea later. Plotinus appears to the modern human being, actually, as a daydreamer.

Plotinus appears just to those who have taken up more or less of the medieval scholasticism as an awful romanticist, even as a dangerous romanticist. I experienced that repeatedly. My old friend Vincenz Knauer (1828-1894), a Benedictine monk who wrote a history of philosophy and a book about the main problems of philosophy from Thales to Hamerling was the personified gentleness. This man scolded as never before if one discussed the philosophy of Neo-Platonism, in particular that of Plotinus. There he got very angry with Plotinus as with a dangerous romanticist. Franz Brentano (1838-1917), the brilliant Aristotelian, empiricist, and representative of the medieval philosophy wrote a booklet What a Philosopher Is Epoch-making Sometimes (1876). There, he got just angry with Plotinus, because Plotinus is the philosopher who was epoch-making as a dangerous romanticist at the end of the ancient Greek era. It is very difficult for the modern philosopher to understand Plotinus.

About this philosopher of the third century, we may say at first, that what we experience as our mind contents, as the sum of concepts that we form about the world is to him not at all, what it is to us. I would like to say if I may express myself figuratively (Steiner draws): We understand the world with sense perception, then we abstract concepts from the sense perception and end up in the concepts. We have the concepts as an inner soul experience and we are aware more or less that we have abstractions. The essentials are that we end up there; we turn our attention to the sensory experience and end up where we form the sum of our concepts, our ideas.

That was not the way for Plotinus. To Plotinus this whole world of sense perception hardly existed at first. However, that which was something for him about which he spoke as we speak about plants, minerals, animals and physical human beings, that was something that he saw now above the concepts, this was a spiritual world, and this spiritual world had a lower border for him. This lower border was the concepts. We get the concepts by turning to the sensory things, abstracting and forming the concepts and say, the concepts are the summaries, the essences of ideal nature from sense perception. Plotinus said who cared little about sense perception at first, we as human beings live in a spiritual world, and that which this spiritual world reveals as a last to us that we see as its lower border this are the concepts.

For us the sensory world is beneath the concepts; for Plotinus a spiritual world, the real intellectual world, is above the concepts. I could also use the following image: we imagine once, we would be immersed in the sea, and we looked up to the sea surface, the sea surface would be the upper border. We lived in the sea, and we would just have the feeling: this border surrounds the element in which we live.

For Plotinus this was different. He did not care about this sea around himself. However, for him this border which he saw there was the border of the world of concepts in which his soul lived, the lower border of that what was above it; so as if we interpreted the sea border as the border with the atmosphere. For Plotinus who was of the opinion that he continued the true view of Plato is that what is above the concepts at the same time that which Plato calls the world of ideas. This world of ideas is definitely something about which one speaks as a world in the sense of Plotinism.

It does not come into your mind, even if you are followers of modern subjective philosophy, if you look out at a meadow to say: I have my meadow, you have your meadow, the third one has his meadow, even if you are persuaded by the fact that you all have the mental picture of the meadow only, isn't that so? You talk about one meadow that is outdoors; in the same way, Plotinus speaks about one world of ideas, not of the world of ideas in the first head, or in the second head, or in the third head. The soul takes part in this world of ideas. So that we may say, the soul, the psyche, develops as it were from the world of ideas, experiencing this world of ideas. Just as the world of ideas creates the psyche, the soul, the soul for its part creates the matter in which it is embodied. Hence, that from which the psyche takes its body is a creation of this psyche.

There, however, is only the origin of individuation, there only the psyche divides, which, otherwise, participates in the uniform world of ideas, into the body A, into the body B and so on, and thereby the single souls originate only. The single souls originate from the fact that as it were the psyche is integrated into the single material bodies. Therefore, in the sense of Plotinism the human being can consider himself as a vessel at first. However, this is only that by which the soul manifests and is individualised. Then the human being has to experience his soul that rises to the world of ideas. Then there is a higher kind of experience. Talking about abstract concepts did not make sense to a Plotinist; since a Plotinist would have said, what should abstractions be? Concepts cannot be abstract, cannot be in limbo, they must be the concrete manifestations of the spiritual. One is wrong if one interprets in such a way that ideas are abstractions. This is the expression of an intellectual world, a world of spirituality. That also existed in the usual experience with those people out of whom Plotinus and his followers grew up. For them such talking about concepts generally did not make sense, because for them the spiritual world projected into their souls. At the border of this projection, this world of concepts originated. However, only if one became engrossed, if one developed the soul further, that resulted which now the usual human being could not know which just someone experienced who soared a higher experience. Then he experienced that which was still above the world of ideas which was the One if you want to call it this way, so he experiences the One what was for Plotinus that which no concept reaches if one could delve into it without concepts in the inside, and which one calls Imagination spiritual-scientifically. You can read up that in my book How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds? What I called Imagination there delves into that which is above the world of ideas according to Plotinus.

Any cognition about the human soul also arose for Plotinus from this worldview. It is already contained in it. One can be an individualist only in the sense of Plotinus, while one is at the same time a human being who recognises that the human being rises to something that is above any individuality that he rises to something spiritual in which he rises upwards as it were, while we are more used today to submerging in the sensory. However, everything that is the expression of something that a right scholastic considers as a rave is nothing fictional for Plotinus, is not hypothetical. For Plotinus this was sure perception up to the One that could be experienced only in special cases, as for us minerals, plants, animals are percepts. He spoke only in the sense of something that the soul experiences immediately if he spoke about the soul, the Logos that participates in the Nous, in the world of ideas and in the One.

For Plotinus the whole world was a spiritual being as it were; again it has a nuance of worldview different from that of Manichaeism and that of Augustine. Manichaeism recognises a sensory-extrasensory; for it, the words and concepts “matter” and “spirit” do not yet make sense. From his sensory view, Augustine strives for attaining a spiritual experience that is free of the sense-perceptible. For Plotinus the whole world is spirit, for him sensory things do not exist. Since that which seems material is only the lowest manifestation of the spirit. Everything is spirit, and if we penetrate deeply enough into the things, everything manifests as spirit.

This is something with which Augustine could not completely go along. Why? Because he did not have the view. Because Augustine just lived already as a forerunner in his epoch—as I would like to call Plotinus a latecomer, Augustine was just a forerunner of those human beings who do no longer feel that in the world of ideas a spiritual world manifests. He did not behold this world. He could learn it only from others. He could only find out it that one said this, and he could still develop a feeling of the fact that something of a human way to truth is contained in it. This was the conflict, in which Augustine faced Plotinism. However, actually, he was never completely hostile to an inner understanding of Plotinism, even if he could not behold. He only suspected that in this world something must be which he could not reach.

In this mood, Augustine withdrew into loneliness in which he got to know the Bible and Christianity, and later the sermons of Aurelius Ambrosius (St. Ambrose, ~340-397, Bishop of Milan) and the Epistles of Paul. This mood persuaded him finally to say, what Plotinus sought as the being of the world in the being of the world of ideas, of the Nous, or in the One that one reaches only in special preferential soul states this appeared on earth in the person of Christ Jesus.—This arose to him as a conviction from the Bible: you do not need to soar the One; you need only to look at the historical tradition of Christ Jesus. There the One descended and became a human being.

Augustine swaps the philosophy of Plotinus for the church. He pronounces it clearly when he says: “Who could be so blinded to say that the church of the apostles deserves no faith which is so loyal and is supported by the accordance of so many brothers that it handed its scriptures conscientiously down to the descendants that it also maintained their chairs up to the present bishops with apostolic succession.” Augustine now places much value on the fact that one can prove, in the end,—if one only goes back through the centuries—that there lived human beings who still knew the disciples of the Lord, and an ongoing tradition of plausible kind exists that on earth that appeared which Plotinus tried to gain in the mentioned way.

Augustine was now eager to use Plotinism, as far as he could penetrate into it to the understanding of that which had become accessible to his feeling by Christianity. He really applied that which he had received from Plotinism to understand Christianity and its contents. Thus, he transformed, for example, the concept of the One. For Plotinus this One was an experience; for Augustine who could not penetrate to this experience the One became something that he called with the abstract term “being,” the world of ideas was something that he called with the abstraction of “essence,” psyche something that he named with the abstraction “life” or also with the concept “love.” The fact that Augustine proceeded in such a way characterises best of all that he tried to grasp the spiritual world from which Christ Jesus had come with Neoplatonic, with Plotinist, he thought that there is a spiritual world above the human beings from which Christ comes. The tripartition was something that had become clear to Augustine from Plotinism. The three personalities of trinity—Father, Son, and Spirit—became clear to Augustine from Plotinism.

If one asks, what filled the soul of Augustine if he spoke of the three persons? One has to answer, that filled him, which he had learnt from Plotinus. He also brought that which he had learnt from Plotinus into his Bible understanding. One realises how this works on, because this trinity comes alive again, for example, with Scotus Eriugena (John Scotus Eriugena, ~815- ~877, Irish theologian, philosopher) who lived at the court of Charles the Bald in the ninth century. He wrote a book about the division of nature (De divisione naturae, original title: Periphyseon) in which we still find a similar trinity. Christianity interprets its contents with the help of Plotinism.

Augustine kept some basic essentials of Plotinism. Imagine that, actually, the human being is an earthly individual only, because the psyche projects down to the material like into a vessel. If we ascend a little bit to the higher essential, we ascend from the human to the divine or spiritual where the trinity is rooted, then we do no longer deal with the single human beings but with the species, with humanity.

We do no longer direct our ideas so strongly to the whole humanity from our concepts as Augustine did this from Plotinism. I would like to say, seen from below the human beings appear as individuals; seen from above—if one may say it hypothetically—the whole humanity appears as a unity. For Plotinus now from this viewpoint the whole humanity grew together, seen from the front, in Adam. Adam was the whole humanity. While Adam originated from the spiritual world, he was a being, connected with the earth, that had free will, and that was unable to sin because in it that lived which was still up there—not that which originates from the aberration of the matter. The human being who was Adam at first could not sin, he could not be unfree, and with it, he could not die. There the effect of that came which Augustine felt as the counter-spirit, as Satan. He seduced the human being who became material and with it the whole humanity.

You realise that in this respect Augustine lives with his knowledge completely in Plotinism. The whole humanity is one to him. The single human being does not sin, with Adam the whole humanity sins. If one dwells on that which often lives between the lines in particular of the last writings of Augustine, one realises how exceptionally difficult it was for Augustine to consider the whole humanity as sinful. In him, the individual human being lived who had a sensation of the fact that the single human being becomes responsible more and more for that which he does and learns. It appeared almost as something impossible to Augustine at certain moments to feel that the single human being is only a member of the whole humanity. However, Neo-Platonism, Plotinism was so firm in him that he was able to look at the whole humanity only. Thus, this state of all human beings—the state of sin and death—transitioned into the state of the inability to be free and immortal.

The whole humanity had fallen with it, had turned away from its origin. Now God would simply have rejected humanity if he were only fair. However, He is not only fair; He is also merciful. Augustine felt this way. Hence, God decided to save a part of humanity—please note: to save a part of humanity—God decided that a part of humanity receives His grace by which this part of humanity is led back to the state of freedom and immortality which can be realised, however, completely only after death. The other part of humanity—they are the not selected—remains in the state of sin. Hence, humanity disintegrates into two parts: in those who are selected, and in those who are rejected. If one looks in the sense of Augustine at humanity, it simply disintegrates into these two parts, into those who are without merit destined to bliss only because the divine plan has wisely arranged it this way, and in those who cannot get the divine grace whatever they do, they are doomed. This view, which one also calls the doctrine of predestination, arose for Augustine from his view of the whole humanity. If the whole humanity sinned, the whole humanity would deserve to be condemned.

Which dreadful spiritual fights did arise from this doctrine of predestination? Tomorrow I would like to speak how Pelagianism, Semipelagianism grew out of it. However, today I would still like to add something in the end: we realise now how Augustine as a vividly struggling personality stands between that view which goes up to the spiritual and for which humanity becomes one. He interprets this to himself in the sense of the doctrine of predestination. However, he felt compelled to ascend from the human individuality to something spiritual that is free of any sense-perceptible and can arise again only from the individuality. The characteristic feature of the age whose forerunner Augustine was is that this age became aware of that of which in antiquity the human being did not became aware: the individual experience.

Today one takes many things as phrases. Klopstock (1724-1803, German poet) was still serious, he did not use commonplace phrases when he began his Messiah with the words: “Sing, immortal soul, on the sinful men's redemption.”—Homer began honestly and sincerely: “Sing, o goddess, to me about the rage ...” or: “Sing, o muse, to me of the man, the widely wandered Odysseus.”—These men did not speak of that which lived in the individuality; they spoke of that which speaks as a general humanity, as a type soul, as a psyche through them. This is no commonplace phrase if Homer lets the muse sing instead of himself. The fact that one can regard himself as an individuality arises only gradually. Augustine is one of the first to feel the individual existence of the human being with individual responsibility. Hence, he lived in this conflict. However, there just originated in his experience the individual pursuit for the non-sensory spiritual. In him was a personal, subjective struggle.

In the subsequent time, that understanding was also buried which Augustine could still have for Plotinism. After the Greek philosophers, the latecomers of Plato and Plotinus, had to emigrate to Persia, after these last philosophers had found their successors in the Academy of Gondishapur, in the West this view to the spiritual disappeared, and only that remained which the philistine Aristotle delivered as filtered Greek philosophy to future generations, but also only in single fragments. This propagated and came via the Arabs to Europe. This was that which had no consciousness of the real world of ideas. Thus, the big question was left; the human being has to create the spiritual from himself. He must bear the spiritual as an abstraction. If he sees lions, he thinks the concept of the “lion” if he sees wolves, he thinks the concept “wolf” if he sees the human being, he thinks the concept of the human being, these concepts live only in him, they emerge from the individuality.

The whole question would not yet have had any sense for Plotinus; now this question still gets a deep different sense. Augustine could still grasp the mystery of Christ Jesus with that which shone from Plotinism in his soul. Plotinism was buried; with the closing of the Neoplatonic Academy in Athens by Emperor Justinian in 529, the living coherence with such views ended. Different people felt deeply, what it means: the scriptures and tradition give us account of a spiritual world, we experience supersensible concepts from our individuality, concepts which are abstracted from the sensory. How do we relate to existence with these concepts? How do we relate to the being of the world with these concepts? Do our concepts live only as something arbitrary in us, or does it have anything to do with the outer world?

In this form, the questions appeared in extreme abstraction, but in an abstraction that were very serious human and medieval-ecclesiastical problems. In this abstraction, in this intimacy the questions emerged in Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas. Then the quarrel between realists and nominalists took place. How does one relate to a world about which those concepts give account that can be born only in ourselves by our individuality? The medieval scholastics presented this big question to themselves. If you think which form Plotinism accepted in the doctrine of predestination, then you can feel the whole depth of this scholastic question: only a part of humanity could be blessed with the divine grace, can attain salvation; the other part was destined to the everlasting damnation from the start whatever it does. However, that which the human being could gain as knowledge to himself did just not arise from that into which Augustine could not yet transform his dreadful concept of predestination; this arose from the human individuality. For Augustine humanity was a whole, for Thomas every single human being was an individuality.

How is this big world process of predestination associated with that which the single human being experiences? How is that associated which Augustine had completely neglected, actually, with that which the single human being can gain to himself? Imagine that Augustine took the doctrine of predestination because he did not want to assert but to extinguish the human individuality for the sake of humanity; Thomas Aquinas only faced the single human being with his quest for knowledge. In that which Augustine excluded from his consideration of humanity, Thomas had to look for the human knowledge and its relation to the world.

It is not enough that one puts such a question in the abstract, intellectually and rationalistically. It is necessary that you grasp such a question with your whole heart, with your whole personality. Then you can estimate how this question weighed heavily on those persons who were its bearers in the thirteenth century.