The Rudolf Steiner Archive

To-day I want to make various comments on matters that have been mentioned lately, and to fill in certain gaps. If you follow with attention current trends, you will have noticed a feeling that the thoughts and impressions and impulses which for a long time have led to such “splendid progress” are no longer capable of helping us to cope with the immediate future. Yesterday one of our members gave me a copy of the Frankfurter Zeitung for last Wednesday, November 21st. There speaks a very learned gentleman ... he must be very learned, for he is not only a Doctor of Philosophy but also a Doctor of Theology, and also a Professor, so naturally he is a very clever man. He has written an article which deals with all sorts of spiritual needs of the present time, and in the course of it he says:

“The experience of the form of being which lies behind things does not require pious dedication or a religious evaluation, for it is itself religion. We are concerned not with feeling and grasping a particular content, but with the great Irrational which lies hidden behind all existence ... Anyone who makes contact with this, so that the divine spark leaps across, goes through an experience which is of primal character and may be called the primordial experience. Anyone who experiences this one thing, together with all that is stirred by the same flow of life, is imbued with—to use a favourite modern phrase—a feeling of cosmic existence.”

Excuse me for reading this to you: I am quoting it not in order to arouse in you any magnificent ideas, but so as to bring before you a sign of the times:

“A cosmic religiosity is coming to birth among us, and how strong is the demand for it is shown by the evident spread of the theosophical movement, which undertakes to discover and unveil the phases of this life beyond the range of the senses.”

It is really difficult to stumble through all these wishy-washy ideas, but you will agree that the article is remarkable as a symptom of the times! He goes on: “In this cosmic piety there is no question of a mysticism which turns away from the world ...” and so on.

It would be hard to discover anything intelligent in all this, but since it is written by a man with all these degrees, one must suppose that some intelligence is there! Otherwise we should have to take it as the obscure stammering of a learned man who has reached a dead end on his own path and now feels impelled to call attention to something which certainly exists and evidently appears to him as not wholly unattainable.

There is no cause for satisfaction in such remarks; we must above all take care not to let them lull us into a comfortable slumber just because it has again been noticed, from some point of view or other, that something lies behind the spiritual-scientific movement. That would be really harmful. People who write in this way are often quite satisfied with having written it. With these misty thoughts they point to something which is trying to make its way into the world, but they are far too complacent to go in for the serious study that Spiritual Science requires. Nothing less than that must lay hold of men's minds if some reality is to be brought into the trends of the times, so that healing can come of it. Of course it is easier to talk of this “surge” of “cosmic feeling” than to give serious attention to those things that are demanded by the signs of the times and must be made known to mankind. For this reason it seems to me necessary to repeat here the remarks I have made in public lectures and shall make again, with particular emphasis now on the distinction between the worn-out ideas which have led into these catastrophic times and those which must take hold of human souls if any sort of progress is to be accomplished.

The old wisdom, through which mankind has been guided up to our time, may give rise to thousands of congresses, world-congresses, people's congresses and so on; thousands and thousands of societies may be founded; but we must be clear that all these congresses and societies will accomplish nothing unless the life-blood of Spiritual Science flows through them. What is lacking among people to-day is the courage to embark on real research into the spiritual world. Strange as it may sound, it must be said—as a first step nothing else would be needed than to spread the little booklet, Human Life in the light of Anthroposophy, in the widest circles. Something would thereby be done to evoke knowledge of a connection between man and the cosmic order. The booklet calls attention precisely to this knowledge by showing in concrete terms how throughout the year the earth undergoes changes in its state of consciousness—and so on. What is said in that booklet and in this lecture is said with full consideration for the needs of our time. Acceptance of it would signify more than all this wishy-washy talk on cosmic feeling and surges and I know not what. I have just read this to you and I can't bring myself to repeat it—it is all put in such a senseless way.

This should of course not prevent us from taking note of such things: they are important and real. What I want to bring home to you is that we must not befog ourselves: we must be absolutely clear as to what we wish to do on behalf of Spiritual Science.

Now I will turn again to the fact that in this fifth post-Atlantean epoch humanity will have to find ways of dealing with great life-problems which in a certain sense were veiled by the wisdom of the past. I have already called your attention to them. One of these great problems will be concerned with finding out how to place the spiritual etheric forces at the service of practical life. I have told you that in this epoch we have to solve the problem of how the radiations from human states of mind are carried over into machines; of how human beings are to be brought into relation with an environment which must become increasingly mechanised. A week ago I pointed out how superficially this mechanisation is treated in a certain part of the world. I gave you the example of how an American way of thinking tries to extend the realm of the machine over human life itself. I told you of the rest-pauses which were used in order to enable a given number of workmen to load up to 47½ tons, instead of a much lower figure; this involves simply the application of Darwinian natural selection to human life.

Where this kind of thing goes on, the wish to yoke up human strength with the strength of machines is always involved. It would be quite mistaken merely to oppose these things. They are not going to fade away; they are on the march. The only question is whether in the course of world-history they are going to be brought on to the scene by men who are unselfishly aware of the great aims of earth-evolution and wish to shape these developments for the healing of mankind, or by groups of men who want to use them for their own or the group's selfish ends. That is the issue. The point is not what is going to happen, for it certainly will happen, but how it happens—how these things are handled. The welding together of human beings with machines will be a great and important problem for the rest of the earth-evolution.

I have often pointed out, even in public lectures, that human consciousness depends on destructive forces. During public lectures in Basle I twice said that in our nerve-system we are always in process of dying. These forces of death will become stronger and stronger, and we shall find that they are related to the forces of electricity and magnetism, and to those at work in machines. A man will be able in a certain sense to guide his intentions and his thoughts into the forces of the machines. Forces in human nature that are still unknown will be discovered—forces which will act upon external electricity and magnetism.

That is one problem: the bringing together of human beings with machines, and this is something which will exert ever-increasing influence on the future.

The other problem is concerned with calling in spiritual relationships to our aid. This can be done only when the time is ripe, and when a sufficient number of people are rightly prepared for it. But we must come to the stage when spiritual forces are brought into action for the governance of life in relation to illness and death.

Medicine will be spiritualised—very highly spiritualised. These things will be caricatured from various standpoints, but the caricatures only show what has to come. Again, the question is whether or not this problem—like the other problem I have mentioned—is handled in an egotistic way by individuals or by groups.

The third great question concerns ways of thinking about human birth and upbringing. I have told you how congresses on this subject have already been held, and how a materialistic form of science will be brought to bear in the future on procreation and the union of man and woman. These things indicate the great significance that attaches to this process of becoming. It is easy enough to ask why those who have the right knowledge in these matters do not apply it. In the future it will be clear enough what the state of affairs is regarding this application, and what are the forces which are even now opposing, for example, a more generous provision for a spiritualised medicine or a spiritualised economic life. All that can be done at present is to speak of these things, until people—I mean those who are ready to accept them selflessly—understand them sufficiently. There are many who think they have already got as far as that, but many hindrances arise from the circumstances of life to-day. These will be overcome in the right way only if understanding goes deeper and deeper, and if we actually refrain, for a time at least, from attempting practical applications on any large scale.

Things have developed in such a way that one can say: Little is known of all that lay behind the old atavistic searchings which continued up to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. People talk a great deal about the old alchemy; sometimes they call to mind the creation of Homunculus and so on. But most of this talk misses the point. If people would come to understand what can be said about the Homunculus scene in Faust, for instance, they would be better informed: the essential thing is that a mist has been spread over these subjects since the sixteenth century. They have receded into the background of human consciousness.

The law which prevails here is the same law which governs the rhythmic alternation of waking and sleeping in man. Just as a person cannot do without sleep, so mankind could not dispense with the sleep regarding spiritual knowledge which has marked the whole period since the sixteenth century. Man had to fall asleep to the spiritual, so that it could reappear in a new form. These necessities must be clearly seen, but without letting them depress us. We must realise clearly that the time for awakening has now come, that we have to play our part in it, that events often run ahead of our knowledge and that we shall not understand the events going on around us unless we are willing to receive the knowledge and to act in accordance with it.

I have repeatedly told you that certain groups are working esoterically in the direction I have indicated. It was first of all necessary that certain forms of knowledge—called nowadays by such misunderstood words as alchemy, astrology, etc.—should fall into abeyance, so that men should no longer be able to discern the soul-element in outer Nature and should rather be thrown back on themselves. And in order that they should awaken their inward forces, certain things had to appear as abstractions. Now these things must again take on a concrete spiritual form.

During the last centuries three ideas have gradually emerged in abstract guise. They were incorrectly named by Kant, and correctly by Goethe. Kant called them God, Freedom and Immortality; Goethe called them God, Virtue and Immortality. If we look into what lies behind these three words, we find that the same words are taken abstractly by modern man and were taken more concretely—but also more materially in the old atavistic sense—up to the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries. Experiments in the old style were carried out: the alchemists sought to observe processes in which the working of God could be seen. And they tried to produce the Philosopher's Stone.

Something concrete lies behind all these things. The Philosopher's Stone was to enable men to become virtuous—but this was thought of in a more material sense. It was also to lead to an experience of immortality: to bring a man into such a relationship to the cosmic whole that he would experience in himself what lies beyond birth and death. All the nebulous ideas by which people nowadays try to grasp these things no longer correspond with what was really intended. It has all become abstract, and it is of abstract ideas that modern men speak. They want to understand God through an abstract theology, and virtue also as something abstract—the more abstract it is, the better people like it. And it is the same with immortality. Speculation turns on what in man could be immortal. In my first Basle lecture [23rd November, 1917. (Not translated into English.)] I said that the kind of learning which under the name of philosophy occupies itself with such questions as that of immortality is a starveling, under-nourished kind of learning. That is merely another way of describing the abstract terms in which such matters are pursued.

In certain Western brotherhoods, however, a connection with the old traditions has been retained, and endeavours are made to use it for the egotistic interests of the group. It is time to call attention to these things. Of course, if from this Western quarter anything is said about God, virtue or freedom, and immortality, the words are given an abstract sense, but in the circle of initiates it is well known that all this is not mere abstract speculation. For their own part, they look for something much more concrete behind these abstract formulae, and in their own schools these terms are accordingly translated. God is translated as gold, and an endeavour is made to arrive at what lies behind the secret of gold, as it may be called. For gold, the representative of the sun-like within the earth's crust, does in fact enshrine an important secret. Gold stands in the same material relationships to other substances as the thought of God does to other thoughts. The only question is what is made of this secret.

This is linked up with the egotistic use of the mystery of birth, and here, real cosmic understanding is sought. All such understanding has been replaced for modern men by a purely earthly understanding. If someone wants to investigate, for example, how the embryonic life-cell of animal or man develops, he studies it through a microscope and is concerned only with what lies there directly under his lens. But that is far from being the whole thing. It will be realised—and some groups are very near this already—that the forces at work are not contained in the cell but come from the cosmos and its constellations. When a seed of life arises, it does so because the living creature which harbours the seed is receiving forces, cosmic forces, from all sides of the cosmos. And when fertilisation occurs, the results depend on which cosmic forces enter actively into the process.

One thing, not yet seen, will be recognised. To-day the idea is that we have a living creature, a hen, let us say. When a new seed of life appears in the hen, the biologist investigates how the egg arises out of the hen; he looks within the hen itself for the forces which cause the seed to grow. That is nonsense. The egg does not grow out of the hen; the hen is merely the substratum for it. The growth-forces work from out of the cosmos on to the soil which has been prepared in the hen for engendering the egg. The biologist to-day believes that the relevant forces are all to be found within the field of his microscope. Actually, what he sees there depends on stellar forces which work together in a certain pattern at a given point. When we discover the cosmic at this point, then for the first time we shall have got at the reality and the truth: it is the cosmic whole which conjures up the egg in the hen.

All this is connected especially with the secret of the sun, and in earthly terms with the secret of gold. To-day I can give you only a sort of schematic indication of it; these things will become much clearer in the course of time.

When “virtue” is discussed in these same schools, they call it simply “health,” and try to learn how the cosmic constellations are connected with health and sickness in men. By this means they come to know the particular earthly substances, the juices and so on, which are in their turn connected with sickness and health. We shall see develop increasingly from a certain direction a more material form of medical knowledge, but it will rest on a spiritual foundation.

From this side also will be spread the idea that man cannot be made good by learning all sorts of ethical principles, but by ingesting copper, for example, under a certain constellation, and arsenic under another. You can well imagine how ideas of this kind can be used by egotistic groups for enhancing their own power. They need only withhold this knowledge from others, and this will be the best means of dominating large numbers of men. They will not need to talk about such things; it will be enough to bring forward some new titbit. Then they will find openings for this titbit, having first flavoured it appropriately, and they will achieve their purpose when these novelties are accepted in a materialistic sense. We have only to remember that spiritual potencies are hidden in everything material. Only he who knows that in a true sense there really is nothing material, but only the spiritual—only he will penetrate behind the secrets of life.

Similar endeavours are made from the same quarter to transpose the problem of immortality into a materialistic frame, and this, too, can be done by making use of the cosmic constellations. This method certainly does not yield the immortality that is the subject of so many speculations, but immortality of another sort. Given a brotherhood lodge, then—at least so long as life cannot be lengthened by working on the physical body—preparations are made for subjecting a soul to such experiences as will enable it to remain within the lodge after death, so that it may contribute its forces to those at the disposal of the lodge. In these circles, accordingly, immortality is called simply “lengthening of life.”

External signs of all this can indeed be seen. I don't know if some of you may have noticed a book which also came from the West and caused a little stir for a while; it was called “On the Nonsense of Death.” These things all move in the same direction. They are still at their beginnings, for everything beyond that is kept as a closely guarded esoteric secret by the egotistic groups. But these things are really possible if they are given a materialistic colouring; if the abstract ideas of God, virtue and immortality are turned into the concrete ideas of gold, health and lengthening of life, and if what I have called the great problem of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch is utilised for the purpose of an egotistic group. You see, this “cosmic feeling,” which the learned Professor and Doctor of Theology talks about, is already being widely presented to people—and often, unfortunately, in an egotistic sense—as cosmic knowledge. For centuries science has kept its eyes fixed on earthly processes, and has ignored all the most significant influences that come from beyond the earth, but it is precisely in our fifth post-Atlantean epoch that extra-terrestrial forces from the cosmos will be put to use.

And so, just as it is essential for an orthodox professor of biology to have the most powerful microscope available and the most efficient laboratory methods, so, in the future, when science has been spiritualised, it will be of the utmost importance whether certain processes are carried through in the morning or in the evening, or at midday, and whether what has been done in the morning is allowed to be further influenced by an evening activity, or whether the cosmic influences are cut out, paralysed, from the morning until the evening. Processes of this kind will of necessity come to light and will run their course. Naturally, a great deal of water will have to flow under the bridges before the professional chairs and laboratories, at present organised on purely materialistic lines, are handed over to spiritual scientists, but this replacement must come about if humanity is not to sink into utter decadence. For example, if the question is one of doing good in the immediate future, existing laboratory methods must give way to methods whereby certain processes take place in the morning and are interrupted during the day, so that the cosmic stream passes through them again in the evening and is in turn rhythmically withheld again until morning. So the processes would take their course: certain cosmic workings would always be interrupted by day, and the cosmic morning and evening processes would be brought in. All sorts of arrangements would be necessary for this. You will realise that if one is not in a position to take any public action about these things, all one can do is to speak of them.

However, just as gold, health and the prolongation of life are put in the place of God, virtue and immortality, so from the same quarter efforts will be made to work not with the morning and evening processes, but with others. Last week I told you how an attempt will be made to set aside the impulse of the Mystery of Golgotha, while for the West another impulse, a sort of Anti-Christ is introduced; and from the East an attempt will be made to paralyse the twentieth-century manifestation of the Christ Impulse by diverting attention from the coming etheric Christ.

Those concerned to present an Anti-Christ as the real Christ will try also to make use of something that works through the most material forces, but in this very way can work spiritually. Above all they will strive to make use of electricity and earth-magnetism in order to produce effects all over the world. I have shown you how earth-forces rise up into what I have called the human Double, the Doppelgänger. This secret will be opened up. An American secret will be to make use of earth-magnetism, with its north-south duality, and by this means to send over the earth guiding forces which will have spiritual effects. Look at the magnetic chart of the earth and compare it with what I am now saying. Observe where the magnetic needle deviates to East and West and where it does not deviate. I can give only hints about all this. From a certain direction in the heavens, spiritual beings are continually active, and they have only to be put into the service of the earth, and—because these beings working in from the cosmos can mediate the secret of the earth's magnetism—it will be possible for egotistic groups to get behind this secret and to accomplish a great deal in connection with gold, health and the prolongation of life. It will be necessary for them only to pluck up their faltering courage—and in certain circles that will be done readily enough!

From the East an endeavour will be made to strengthen what I have already explained: to place in the service of the earth the beings which work in from the opposite side of the cosmos. In the future there will be a great battle. Human science will stretch out to the cosmic, but will try to get there by different paths. It will be the task of good, healing science to find certain cosmic forces which can reach the earth through the co-operation of two cosmic streams, those of Pisces and Virgo. The great secret to be discovered will be how the influence which works from the direction of Pisces as a power of the sun unites itself with the influence working from the direction of Virgo. It will make for good when it is learnt how the morning and evening forces from the two sides of the cosmos can be brought into the service of humanity. (See diagram at end of lecture.)

These forces, however, will be left aside by those who try to achieve their whole purpose through the polaric duality of positive and negative forces. The forces which enable the spiritual to stream down to earth with the aid of positive and negative magnetism come from Gemini; they are the midday forces. In ancient times it was known that cosmic influences were involved in this, and to-day even exoteric scientists are aware that in some or other way positive and negative magnetism lie behind Gemini in the Zodiac. The aim will be to paralyse all that could be gained through a revelation of the true duality in the cosmos—to paralyse it in a materialistic, egotistic way by means of the forces which stream in particularly from Gemini and can be placed entirely at the service of the human “Double.”

Other brotherhoods, concerned above all to divert attention from the Mystery of Golgotha, will try to make use of the duality in human nature—the duality which in our epoch embraces man as a unity, but includes within him his lower animal nature. A human being is really a centaur in a certain sense: his humanity rests on his lower animal nature in its astral form. This working together of the duality in man gives rise to a duality of forces. This duality of forces will be utilised particularly by certain egotistic brotherhoods, chiefly from the side of India and the East, in order to mislead eastern Europe, whose task it is to prepare for the sixth post-Atlantean epoch. And this will be done with the aid of the forces which work in from Sagittarius.

Whether to conquer the cosmic for mankind in a wrong, twofold way, or rightly in a one-fold way—that is the question facing mankind. From this will come a true renewal of astrology, which in its old form is atavistic and cannot survive. The wise Beings of the cosmos will enter into the struggle; one side will use the morning and evening processes in the way I have indicated; the West will prefer the midday processes, shutting out the morning and evening ones; and the East will prefer the midnight ones. Men will no longer manufacture substances on the basis merely of chemical attraction and repulsion; they will know that different substances arise according to whether they are made with morning and evening processes, or with midday and midnight ones. It will be known that such substances act in a quite different way on the triad, God, virtue and immortality—gold, health and prolongation of life. When the forces of Pisces and Virgo act in co-operation, nothing wrongful can be brought into being. Men will achieve something through which the mechanism of life will be detached, in a certain sense, from man himself, but will not give any one group power and rulership over another. The cosmic forces drawn from this direction will create remarkable machines, but only those that will relieve man of work, because they will carry a certain power of intelligence within themselves. And a Spiritual Science which itself reaches out towards the cosmic will have to see to it that all the great temptations which come from these machine-animals, created by man himself, are not allowed to exercise any harmful influence upon him.

With regard to all this, the essential thing is that people should prepare themselves for it by not treating realities as illusions and by coming to a genuine spiritual conception and understanding of the world. To see things as they are—very much depends on that! But we can see them as they are only if we are in a position to bring the ideas of Spiritual Science to bear on reality. For the rest of the earth's existence the dead will be co-operating actively in the highest degree, and it is how they co-operate that will matter. Here, above all, a great distinction will arise. On one side the attitude of men on earth can rightly lead the co-operation of the dead in such a direction that the dead will be active out of their own impulse, an impulse coming from the spiritual world which the dead are themselves experiencing. But from the other side many endeavours will be made to introduce the dead into human existence by artificial means. Along the indirect path through Gemini the dead will be led into human life, with the result that human vibrations will pass over into the mechanism of machines and will continue to vibrate there in a quite definite way. The cosmos will impart motion to the machines by the indirect path I have indicated.

It will thus be essential, when these problems emerge, that no improper methods should be applied to them, but only those elemental forces which belong to nature on their own account, and great care will have to be taken not to introduce improper forces into the realm of machines. In this occult sphere the human element must not be related to machinery in such a way that the Darwinian natural selection theory is used to determine the working capacity of human beings, in the way of which I gave you an example last week.

I am making these remarks—obviously they cannot exhaust the subject in so short a time—in the belief that you will meditate on these things and will try to build a bridge between them and all those experiences of life which can be encountered, particularly in this difficult time. You will see how things become clear to you if you contemplate them in the light that can come from such ideas as those I have been placing before you. The real point is not that in our time powers and constellations of powers are standing opposed to each other, as we are always being told in external exoteric life. The real point is quite different. It is that a kind of veil is now meant to be spread over the true impulses at work. Certain human powers are intent on saving something for themselves—what is it? Their aim is that impulses which up to the time of the French Revolution were justified, and were represented also by certain occult schools, shall now be taken charge of in an Ahrimanic-Luciferic sense, so as to maintain a form of society which is generally thought to have been overcome since the end of the eighteenth century.

Two powers, especially, stand in opposition to each other: the power representing the principle that was overcome at the end of the eighteenth century and the power representing the new age. A great many people, of course, are instinctively supporters of the new age. Therefore the representatives of the old impulses, those of the eighteenth, seventeenth and sixteenth centuries, must be yoked by artificial means to the forces which emanate from certain brotherhoods who are working for group-egotistic ends. The most effective principle for extending power over as many men as may be needed is to-day the principle of economic dependence. But that is only an instrument: the real thing is quite different. The real issue you can gather for yourselves from all the various hints I have given. The economic principle is connected with everything which seeks to enlist a great number of men all over the world as a kind of army in the service of these principles.

These are the powers which stand opposed to each other. And this indicates what it is that is really battling in the world to-day. In the West we have the principle which is really rooted in the eighteenth, seventeenth and sixteenth centuries, but which passes unnoticed because it clothes itself in the phrases of revolution and democracy. It wears them as a mask and by this means strives to gain all possible power for itself. These endeavours are favoured if as many people as possible do not exert themselves to see things as they are, and in this field allow themselves to be lulled to sleep again and again by the illusion that to-day there is a war between the Entente and the powers of Central Europe.

In reality there is no such war; only by going behind this illusion can one get at the real struggle, but light can be thrown on it if it is approached along the lines which, for certain reasons, I only hint at. At least we should endeavour not to take illusions for realities: then gradually the illusion will be dispelled as far as it need be. Above all we must strive to see these things objectively, as they really are.

If you bring together all that I have been saying, you will see that an apparently casual remark I made in the course of these lectures was not so at all. When I quoted something that Mephistopheles said to Faust, “I see you know the Devil” (he would certainly not have said this to Woodrow Wilson), it was by no means a casual remark: it can throw a great deal of light on the present situation. We must really look at these things objectively, without sympathy or antipathy; above all, we must be able to see how much in a particular case depends on the setting and how much on the capacity of an individual, for behind an individual's capacity there often lies something quite different from what lies behind the setting. Ask yourselves without prejudice—how much would Woodrow Wilson's brain be worth if it were not throned on the Presidency of the United States? Consider how it would be if this brain had a quite different setting: then its individual capacity would be revealed! The setting is what matters.

Let me now speak abstractly and radically, of course without discussing in detail the particular case I have mentioned—in a neutral country that would not be appropriate. If you take any individual brain, it can be revealing to ask whether it is worth something because it is illuminated and activated by a particular spiritual soul-force—whether it has the kind of spiritual significance I have been speaking of here—or whether it is worth no more than its weight, measured on a pair of scales.

In the eyes of people to-day, all this is grotesque; but what seems grotesque to them must come to seem obvious, if certain things are to be diverted from an unhealthy stream into a health-giving one. And what good is it to be always talking about them? You must come to see that there is no point in wishy-washy talk about “cosmic religiosity” or “how strong the striving for it is,” or of “the movement which aims at discovering and revealing the circulation of the life behind the senses,” and so on. All this does is to spread a mist over things which must be brought out clearly in the world, and should above all be carried as practical moral-ethical impulses into human life.

I can give you only indications. I leave you to build on them in your own meditations. I have been speaking aphoristically in many respects. But you will have the possibility of drawing a great deal out of the relationships shown in this picture of the Zodiac, if you truly use it as a subject for meditation.

In these days I have tried to show you the conditions of human life from an individual aspect, and also from a wider aspect. You will have noticed that even during the public lectures which I held recently, I was anxious to point out the problems of spiritual science needed for an understanding of mankind. For we must abandon certain vicious circles of thought that are now to be found throughout the world, and are, really, one of the causes which led to the catastrophic events of the present.

Above all, people must understand where the boundary line between the so-called physical world and the spiritual really lies. This boundary-line really lies in the very center of man. In order to understand the world, it is very important to know that this boundary-line between the physical world and the spiritual world can be found in man himself. I have often pointed out, from the aspect of spiritual science, the great importance of scientific methods of thinking, both for the present and for the future, and have shown that scientific thought really stands more or less where it has always stood from its beginnings. One might well say that it is qualified to spread darkness over some of the most important truths of life.

Let us be quite clear that the evolution of the times only begins today to introduce scientific thinking gradually into the conceptions of the universe and of life. Today a few monistic societies, and others too, are engaged in introducing scientific conceptions into the consciousness of the general public—often in a shockingly amateurish way. This is only one of the channels through which scientific thinking will flow gradually into the human soul. A far more effective and incisive way is the one of publicity.

Not by chance, but in accordance with an inner reality, the new scientific way of thinking entered the evolution of mankind at the same time as the invention of printing. All new things that mankind has learnt so far through printed books (with the exception of books containing old things that existed already) came from the scientific consciousness. I mean that the new element came from the scientific consciousness. Above all, the way in which thoughts have been captured came from a scientific way of thinking.

Theologians will of course raise this objection: Have we not printed theological wisdom and all kinds of religious things during the last years, decades and centuries? Yes, this is true, but to what has it led us? The way in which human souls have become conversant with spiritual life under the auspices of printing has brought about this result, that the spiritual element has gradually left the sphere of religious consciousness altogether. Under the influence of scientific thought, even Christ-Jesus has become the “simple man of Nazareth” (you know this already) and although he has been characterized in many ways, he has nevertheless been placed on the same level as other great personalities of history—but for the present at least he still stands above the others. The real spiritual element connected with the Mystery of Golgotha gradually disappeared—at least for those who think that they have advanced in the civilization of our times.

I have already explained that the scientific way of thinking was obliged at first to cooperate in producing a certain darkening of the spirit, in support of what the Spirits of Darkness bring into human thinking, ever since 1879. In the scientific sphere this assumes a very subtle aspect. The scientifically trained thinker, or better, the scientific expert who cooperates in the general education of our age and in the formation of a world-conception, cannot help diverting man from casting a glance at the boundary-line between the physical world and the spiritual world, which exists in him. He cannot help this because science is as it is, and he does his very best (excuse this banal expression) to work in this direction by popularizing the scientific methods of thought. A future age will dawn for human thinking (it is terrible that such things are mentioned today – terrible for those who follow a particular line of thought), an age in which certain ideas will be looked upon as comical—ideas now ruling in science, which have not entered the consciousness of the masses, but influence them, because scientists (forgive me) are considered to be authorities.

I have often pointed out the following thought—even publicly in my book Riddles of the Soul: It is a current scientific idea that in the nervous system (we will limit ourselves to man, for the moment, although this can also be applied to animals) we can distinguish sensory, or sense-nerves or perceptive nerves, and motor nerves. It can be drawn schematically, by showing, for instance, that any nerve, say a nerve of touch, carries the sensation of touch to the central organ—let us suppose, to the spinal cord. The sensations from the periphery of the body reach the spinal cord. Then, from another point of the spinal cord goes out the so-called motor nerve. From there, the impulse of the will is sent on (see drawing).

In the brain this is shown in a more complicated way, as if the nerves were like telegraphic wires. The sense-impression, the impression on the skin, is led as far as the central organ: from there, an order goes out, as it were, that a movement must be carried out. A fly settles somewhere on the body—this causes a sensation; the sensation is led on to the central organ; there, the order is given to lift the hand as far as the forehead to chase away the fly. From a diagrammatic aspect, this is an idea that is generally accepted. A future age will look on this as something very comical indeed, for it is comical only for him who can detect this. But it is an idea that is accepted by the majority of professional scientists. Open the nearest book on the elements of science dealing with these things and you will find that today we must distinguish between sensory and motor nerves. You will find that they mention particularly the very comical picture of the telegraphic wire—that the sensation is conducted to the central organ and that the order is given out from there for the production of a movement. This picture is still very much diffused in popularized science.

It is far more difficult to see through reality than through the thoughts that set up comparisons with telegraphic wires, reminding us of the most primitive kinds of ideas. Spiritual Science alone enables us to see through reality. An impulse of the will has nothing in common physical matter. Nerves—both sensory and motor nerves—obey a uniform function, and this can be seen no matter whether the nerve-cord is interrupted in the spine or in the brain; in the brain it is merely interrupted in a more complicated way.

This interruption or break exists not only in order that something from the external world may be conducted through the one half to the central organ and then, in the form of will, from the central organ through the second half to the periphery—this interruption exists for an entirely different reason. Our nervous system is interrupted in this regular way because at the very point of the interruption, reflected in an image in man, there lies the boundary line between physical and spiritual experience; it is the bodily reflection of a complicated spiritual reality. This boundary exists in man in a very remarkable way. Man enters into a relationship with the world immediately around him, and this process is connected with that part of the nerve-cord that goes as far as the interruption. But man must also have a link with his own physical body as a soul-being. This connection with his own physical body is transmitted through the other nerve-cord. When an external impression causes me to move my hand, the impulse to move the hand already lies here (shown in the diagram), already united with the soul, with the sense-impression. And that which is conducted along the whole sensitive nerves, along the so-called motor nerve, from a to b, is not “conducted as a sense-impression as far as c, where an order is given that gives rise to b”– no, the soul-element is already fructified when an impulse of the will takes place at a, and passes through the entire nerve-path indicated in the diagram.

It is quite out of the question that such infantile ideas should correspond to any form of reality—ideas which presuppose that the soul is to be found somewhere between the sensory and the motor nerves, where it receives an impression from the exterior world and transmits an order from there, like a telegraphic operator. This childish idea, which is met with again and again, is very strange when found in conjunction with the demand that science must at all costs avoid being anthropomorphic! Anthropomorphic lines of thought must be avoided, yet people do not realize how anthropomorphic they themselves are, when they say that an impression is received, an order sent out, etc., etc. They talk and talk and have not the slightest idea what mythological beings they conjure into their dreams about the human organism! They would realize it if they would take things seriously.

Now the question arises: Why then is the nerve-cord interrupted? It is interrupted because, if this were not so, we should not be included in the whole process. Only because at the point of interruption the impulse springs over the gap, as it were (the same impulse, let us say, an impulse of the will, starts from a), because of this fact, we ourselves are in the world and are at one with this impulse. If the entire process were uninterrupted, with no break at this point, it would be entirely a process of Nature, in which we would not participate.

Imagine this process in a so-called reflex movement: A fly settles somewhere on your body, you chase away the fly, and the whole process never enters your consciousness fully. The entire process has its analogy, an entirely justified analogy, in the sphere of physics. Inasmuch as this process demands an explanation by means of physics, the explanation will be only a little more complicated than that of another physical process. Take a rubber ball, for instance: you press it here, and deform it. But the ball fills out again and reassumes its former shape. You press in and the ball presses out again. This is the plain physical process, a reflex movement, except that there is no organ of perception, there is nothing spiritual in the process. But if you interpolate something spiritual at this point by interrupting the process, the rubber ball will feel itself an individual being. However, in this case the rubber ball must have a nervous system, so that it can feel both the world and itself. A nervous system always exists in order that we may feel the world in ourselves: it never exists in order to pass on a sensation along one side of the wire, and a motor impulse along the other side.

I am pointing this out because the pursuance of this subject leads us into one of the many points where natural science must be corrected before it can supply ideas that correspond approximately to the real facts. The ideas ruling today are instruments of the impulses coming from the Spirits of Darkness. The boundary line between physical and spiritual experience lies in man himself.

You see, this piece of nerve that I indicated in red really serves to place us into the physical world, so that we may have sensations in the physical world. The other piece of nerve, indicated in blue, really serves to make us feel ourselves as body. There is no essential difference whether we experience a color consciously from outside, through the nerve-cord a c, or whether we experience an organ, or the position of an organ, etc., from inside, through the cord d b; in essence, this is the same. In the one case we experience something physical is in us, i.e., enclosed within our skin. Not only that which is outside, but also what is within us, places us in the process that can be experienced as a will-process. The strength of the perception varies according to the nerve-cords that transmit it—the cord a c, or the cord d b. Indeed, a definite weakening of the intensity takes place. When an idea is linked up with a will-impulse in a, the impulse is passed on from a; when it jumps from c to d, the whole process weakens to such an extent in our consciousness or experience that we experience its continuation—for instance, the lifting of our hand—only with that slight intensity of consciousness which we possess during sleep. When we lift our hand we are again aware of the will, but in the form of a new sensation from another side. Sleep extends continually in an anatomical and physiological sense into our waking life. We are connected with the exterior physical world, but we are completely awake only with that part of our being that goes as far as the interruption of the nerves. What lies in us beyond this interruption in the nerves is wrapped in sleep, even by day. In the present stage of the evolution of the Earth this process is not yet physical; it takes place on a certain spiritual level, although it is connected to a great extent with the lower qualities of human nature. However, I have often expounded the secret that just man's “lower nature” is connected with the higher manifestations of certain spiritual beings. If we note all the places in the human being where the nerves are interrupted, and jot them down in a diagram, we obtain the boundary-line between the experiencing in the physical world and the experience that comes from a higher world. Hence I can use the following diagram: Suppose that I indicate here all the nerve-interruptions—here is the head and here is a leg. Now suppose that a so-called impression goes out from here and that the interruption of the nerve is in this place. “Walking” will be the result, and the real process consists in this—that everything that we experience through the nerve here, is experienced by day in a waking way. But what we experience here as unconscious will is experienced in a sleeping way, even when we are awake. The spiritual world forms and creates directly everything that lies below the point of interruption in the nerves.

You may find these things difficult if you hear them for the first time, but they should make you aware that you cannot enter into the more intimate questions of knowledge without some difficulty.

When it becomes clear to you that everything above the boundary line connects man with the physical world, and everything below the boundary with a spiritual world, of which he possesses only an inferior kind of physical image, you will be able to reach the following conception:—Think of the plant-world; the plants grow out of the earth, but they would not do so unless they received from the universe forces which are intimately connected with the life of the Sun, and which receive everything that the earth generates in the form of forces. All these cosmic forces, everything that pours in from the universe out of the Sun's life, with all that emanates from the earth, belongs to the life of the plants.

This joint action of cosmic and telluric, or earthly, forces is part of the life and existence in the physical world, as we must understand it. The forces working on the plants below this line, from the earth, together with the plant's germinating force (the seed is put into the earth) are of the same kind as those that we must seek here, where the red lines are indicated [original article notes “This diagram cannot be given.”] You must look for the forces that the plant receives from the earth through its roots, above the boundary-line indicated in the diagram. Man takes from the earth in a more delicate way, through his eyes and ears, and above all through his skin, what the plant assimilates from the soil through its roots. Man is an earthly being through his nerves, and through what he receives in the form of telluric or earthly forces in the air he breathes, and in the food that the earth gives him. What the plant receives from the earth (except that the plant sends its roots into the earth), man receives through organs that he unfolds after death, from the earth; but he receives it in a more delicate way, and the plant in a coarser way through its roots.

The plant receives other forces as well; it receives forces that stream in from the Sun's sphere, from the heavenly sphere—the sphere of the cosmic spaces, or the universe. In my diagram, this sphere is indicated in blue; it represents the forces that the plant receives from the universe. They are of the same kind as those indicated in blue, beyond the boundary line. Man draws out of his body what the plant draws out of the universe. From the earth, man receives in a more refined state the forces and substances which the plant assimilates more coarsely from the soil through its roots. From this body, man receives more coarsely the same forces and substances that the plant draws from the universe in a more refined state. These forces do not exist in the universe in the form in which man draws them out of his own body; they existed as such during the old Moon period. Man has preserved them from that period. Through what lies beyond this limit (shown in the blue part of the diagram) man does not receive his perceptions immediately from the present, but from what he brought over as an inheritance from the old Moon period. He has carried the cosmic conditions of a past age into the present. Man has preserved the Moon-conditions in his body.

You can see, therefore, that we are cosmic to a certain extent and are even connected with the universe in such a way that we bear within us an image of what has already been conquered by the universe outside.

This is again an example of what I mentioned last time, that it will not be of much use if we say, from a general, vague and nebulous standpoint, that man must take up again a cosmic way of feeling and cosmic ideas. These things are only of value if we approach them quite concretely, and if we really know how matters stand, how they are connected. This will place the experimental attempts of the present day on a sound basis, on a really sound basis. If we know that everything in the human body lying beyond the nerve-interruptions is connected with the Moon nature, we shall find in the universe and in the life on earth the forces that make us ill or that heal us. We shall find them through these relationships, and when we know how that which lies on this side of the boundary-line is connected with the conditions of the earth (in a finer way than the plant's connection with the soil through its roots), we shall find, in a really conscious way, the connection between illness and health and the qualities of certain plants.

These things are still in the experimental stage. Man's thinking must first be placed on a sound basis, and then there will also be a sound foundation of knowledge for the conceptions and ideas which he develops, in order that his thinking may regulate, permeate, and give a certain structure to the social, ethical, pedagogic and political aspects of life.

In many realms of knowledge, we perceive that just those people, who in their scientific thought are broad-minded, able experts, begin to romance, to talk absolute nonsense, when they transfer their habitual ideas to the sphere of social life. But the sphere of social life is not an entirely independent sphere. The human being, with his physical soul and spiritual nature, takes his place in social life, and it is not possible to separate these things from one another. We must not content ourselves with the fact that men are made scientifically stupid in the social sphere in order that they may only be able to talk nonsense where the social sphere is concerned!

Today it is quite easy to prove that experienced scientists begin to talk nonsense when they cross the boundary between science and spiritual life. Medical men, especially, are very prone to all kinds of absurdities when they enter the spiritual sphere with the ideas that are gained today in the realm of science. We need not search far afield: any example taken from human life will serve, for wherever we look we shall find confusion in this respect.

For instance, here is a pamphlet by a very good doctor, entitled: “The Injurious Effects of the War upon the Nervous System and Mental Life.” In order not to arouse your prejudice, I will not even say what a good doctor he is. This excellent medical man, however, observed the nervous system, concerning which science has not even a glimmer of a correct idea (this can be realized from the few examples I have given today); he observed to what extent the nervous system has been injured by the present war conditions. We need only consider the most primitive examples, in order to show how really sound thinking ceases when scientific conceptions are transferred to that which is connected, to some extent, with the spiritual sphere—I will not even say, the spiritual sphere itself! The discussion of such a subject as “The Injurious Effects of the War upon the Nervous System and Mental Life” implies the necessity of expressing what is supposed to take place in the nerves, as a result of all kinds of things pertaining to the spiritual (mental) life—naturally, that spiritual life which takes its course on the physical plane—through all kinds of ideas which are taken from this spiritual life.

This man, for instance, brings forward an idea that is supposed to be justified under certain conditions of abnormal life of the nerves, the idea of “over-estimated thoughts.” They are a symptom of diseased nerves. “Over-estimated thoughts”—what does this mean? You see, anyone who brings forward such a conception must make sure that it is really effective in life. What is an over-estimated thought? This doctor says it arises when the feeling, or the sensation, in the thought is emphasized too strongly, when it is a one-sided thought; in fact, he brings forward all kinds of vague ideas. Of course, I cannot give you a precise idea of this, but do not ascribe this lack of a clear definition to spiritual science, for now I am quoting. An over-estimated thought arises, for instance, if one hates a foreign country excessively, owing to the war. A “valued thought” would be real patriotism. But this real patriotism becomes “over-valued” when the nervous system is irritated. One does not only love one's country, but hates the other countries: then the thought has become “over-valued.” The “valued” thought is sound, and from the valued thought one must conclude that the nerves also are sound. But if the thought is over-valued, the nerves are injured. Do we meet reality anywhere, if we characterize, on the one hand a nerve process, and on the other hand a thought which is supposed to have a certain quality? As a thought, it is supposed to be “over-valued”; the nerve process is on one side and the idea “over-valued” on the other. People would do well to think out such things always to the very end, for a thought reveals itself as correct or incorrect, i.e., as real or unreal, only if it is thought to the end. For instance, it would be an over-valued thought if I were to think that I am the King of Spain; undoubtedly this would be an over-valued thought. But it need not be “over-valued” if I really happened to be the King of Spain. In this case my nervous system would be quite sound, although the thought is the same. It has the same content. Hence the thought itself is not over-valued; otherwise we must believe the King of Spain to be afflicted with nerve troubles because he thinks that he is the King of Spain! This is so, is it not? Consequently, this connection is not important, nevertheless there is a great deal of talk about this. There is not only talk: conceptions, definitions, etc., are formed. The results are very strange and not worth more than idle chatter.

You see, now, that this man has formed the idea of over-valued thoughts. The over-valuation of thoughts is a symptom for disturbances in the life of the nerves. Very well. But his sub-consciousness does not feel very much at ease, for sub-consciously he feels that while he is explaining to people all these matters concerning the over-valuation of thoughts, they, too, have all kinds of sub-conscious thoughts, they think there is a flaw in the argument; but this remains, of course, in the sub-consciousness of people, for this person is an “authority”! Hence their impressions must not rise into consciousness , for, with the designation “over-valuation” is expressed not only the vivid and high valuation of the ideas in question, but also their “over-valuation” in connection with the real facts which lie at their foundation. The over-valued thought rules consciousness to such an extent that there is no room beside it for other objective thoughts, which are also justified. The latter are pushed aside and lose their efficacy in consciousness and their influence in bridling and limiting the over-valued thoughts. Thus a one-sided exaggeration arises when judgments are formed, a one-sided tendency in the strivings of the will, and a turning away from all other spheres of thought which are not immediately connected with the center of the over-valued thoughts.

(It is more or less the same thing as arguing that poverty comes from “pauvreté”!)

Certainly, two people may have the same thought substance, but in one case this is Lucifer, in the other case Ahriman, and in a third case it may be in keeping with the normal evolution of humanity. Instead of coining the empty expression “over-valued thoughts,” we must accept the idea of spirituality, such as the luciferic or the ahrimanic spirituality; then we shall know that the important point is to recognize whether a human being wills something out of himself, or whether something else in him wills it. But of course, so-called science still shrinks from such views.

And if we expect real, concrete results from science, things become very amusing! Listen to this:

“First of all, I will define” (he tries to explain himself, because he wishes to show the symptoms of certain nervous disturbances), “first of all, I will define the thoughts that often play the chief role in the nervous disturbances of individuals” (he means also in the modern nationality-mania), “the ideas of despondency, care, fear, lack of courage and of self- confidence.” Very well, these are the things that characterize the nervous system in the life of the nerves that is determined by over-valued thoughts.

Despondency, care, fear, lack of courage and of self-confidence—well, such a lecture is meant to be of help somehow, for this authority does not speak merely to cause vibrations in the air, but because he wishes it to be of use. Hence one would expect this gentleman to tell us how humanity can overcome these handicaps, because he finds, not only in individuals, but also in humanity, lack of courage, care, despondency, lack of self-confidence as symptoms of nervous disturbances; now we should expect him to tell us how to get rid of these things, how to get beyond this lack of courage, care, despondency, lack of self-confidence. One would take this for granted. Indeed he takes it for granted, for he says:

“Thus for a time at least, that discontented, discouraged mood can spread among the great masses of the people, which is to be feared more than anything else. For it leads to the abandonment of strong sound impulses of the will, it loosens the firm, united striving after a goal, and it weakens energy and endurance.”

Now we expect something, and he continues: “Not to be nervous, therefore, means above all courage, confidence, trust in one's own strength, and not swerving from what has been recognized as the right course of action.”

So now we have the conclusion. People are nervous when they are oppressed by care, lack of courage, despondency, lack of self-confidence. How do they get rid of their nervousness? When they are not oppressed by all this! This is quite clear, is it not? When they are not oppressed by all these things!

The worthlessness of thought is carried over into substantiality also in science. Certain authorities have at their disposal all the material, have taken possession of it. It is already confiscated when any attempt is made to work upon it with reason. But when they work upon it themselves, they do so with worthless thoughts. All anatomical, physiological and physical subject matter is consequently lost. Nothing is created, for at the very table where something useful for humanity should be produced, people stand with these worthless thoughts. Certainly nothing can come of the dissection of a corpse, when—forgive the hard expression—an “empty head” dissects. Here already the matter becomes social. Things must be considered from this point of view. And a very promising treatise ends in the manner I have just shown.

I have given you one example. Not be become nervous means above all not to lose courage, confidence and trust. But when today the average reader takes up such a treatise and reads: “The Injurious Effects of the War upon the Nervous System and Mental Life”—and thinks, “here I shall be enlightened, for this is by Professor So-and-so, director of the Medical Hospital in So-and-so.”—well, now he is clear about it, now naturally he is enlightened.

But on page 27, where national hatred is discussed, we read:—“Certainly similar impulses flared up within us, and we found it almost a relief and satisfaction to oppose our greatest enemies with a similar attitude on our side. And yet, only a little quiet consideration is needed to realize that this general national hatred is only the outcome of a diseased, overstimulated attitude of soul, into which the various peoples have fallen through mutually inflaming, inciting and imitating one another.”

How then has the history of national hatred arisen, according to this statement? Here are various peoples: a, b, and c, but neither a, b, nor c is in any way capable of hating, of itself, for the whole history has not arisen thus,—this general national hatred has developed through a diseased, over-stimulated attitude of soul into which the various peoples have fallen through mutually inflaming, inciting and imitating one another. Thus, a cannot bring it about, b also cannot, nor can c; but what each is unable to do, they achieve by mutually provoking one another. Consider how ingenious the thought is. I explain something and have before me a, b, and c. All this is unable to provide an adequate explanation, but does so just the same. I explain something therefore out of nothing at all in the most beautiful manner

People pick up such things and read them without observing that they are simply nonsense.

It is necessary to point out such things for they show how disjointed and worthless the thought is which today assumes authority. Naturally in science, which pertains to what already exists, this does not come to light so strongly and cannot be controlled. But just as people think here in the realm of science, so they also think in social, pedagogical and political life and this has been prepared during the last four centuries. This is the present situation.

So it has come about that gradually out of the disjointed, worthless thought, just such impulses as those which meet us in the present catastrophic events have arisen. Here we must penetrate thoroughly to the roots of the matter. And only when people then come to the surface of things, where the matter becomes actual for the single individual, and may also become so for the social structure of whole peoples, there the matter becomes especially terrible and tragic. It is our task on the one hand to grasp these things, is it not? We must learn to know them within their mutual limits, if we are to understand them. If we wish to understand such an event as the present war, which is so complicated and which unquestionably cannot be grasped in its details from the physical plane, we must—as people say—trace it back to its sources. But everyone believes, when he has traced a matter back to its source, when he has understood it in this manner, that it was a necessity, that it had to happen just as it now is. Today for instance, one does not in the least notice that the one has nothing whatever to do with the other. Because we understand something in its interrelationships, this does not also establish the fact that the event had to take place, that it could not have been omitted. He who tries to make clear to himself, in a more or less intelligent way, why the present war had to come, why it is not something determined by a few people, but something connected with deeper causes in the evolution of humanity—often goes away satisfied and says: Now I understand that nothing else was possible except that this war should come. It is obviously a necessity—in the sense that when we know its causes it develops with absolute necessity out of them, out of these concrete conditions. But this does not mean that we may draw the conclusion that things had to happen just as they have happened. No event arising in world history is necessary in this latter sense. Although in the former sense it is necessary, no event is necessary in this latter sense. Each event might have been different, and each might not have happened at all.

He who speaks of absolute necessity might reflect with the same right: I should like to know when I shall die. Now if I go to a life insurance company, they reckon out—determining the amount of the insurance policies accordingly—how many people out of a certain number have died in a given length of time and how many still live. The insurance money is paid accordingly. I go to a life insurance company for information and it must appear from their calculations whether I shall be dead or not in 1922.

This is naturally complete nonsense. But it is exactly the same nonsense when we try to derive the necessity of one event from another, from the realization of the cause that must lead to it. Here I touch upon a theme which indeed is not easy, for the reason that just in this sphere the most disjointed ideas are prevalent, because very little will to become clear about things exists in this realm today.

If we really wish to be clear on this point, we must recognize that when something takes place, it does so under the influence of certain conditions. In the sequence of circumstances we always come to a certain point where there are beginnings—real beginnings. If today we see a sapling that is still small, later on it will become larger; the largeness of the tree develops of necessity from its smallness. After a short time we may say: It is a necessity that this tree has developed thus. I could see how it developed according to necessity when it was still very small, perhaps while it was unfolding its very first germinating forces out of the earth. If I am a botanist I can see that in time a large tree must of necessity arise. But if the seed had not fallen into the earth at this particular spot—perhaps someone planted it there, but if he had not done so—then here would be a point where necessity would not have been introduced. For necessity must begin here. We have before us a mighty oak, let us say—it is not here in reality—we look at it and admire it; it was once naturally a sapling and has grown from this sapling, according to necessity. But now imagine that a good-for-nothing boy (or girl!) had come along while it was still very small and pulled it up. Because it is pulled up, the whole necessity does not result. In a negative sense also the necessity may be done away with. Starting points, where necessities begin, these reveal themselves to the thought that conforms to reality. This is the essential point.

But we do not reach these starting points when we observe merely the outer course of events. We reach them only when we can at least feel the spiritual foundations. For just as you have here a bunch of roses, and when you form a concept of it, if you are an abstract person, an idea will result which is a copy of the reality (for the bunch of roses is real and the idea of it is a copy of reality)—so for the occultist the bunch of roses is not a reality at all when he conceives it, because the bunch of roses does not exist; the roses can only exist when with their roots they are connected with the earth. The real concept does not result when we form an image of something that is from the outset external, but only when we have formed out of the reality this fully experienced concept. But this fully experienced concept yields itself only to spiritual-scientific contemplation—even in the case of outer sense reality.

A valid concept of a world-historical event is only reached when we can view this event according to the methods of spiritual science. Here we find that it may indeed be traced in regard to its necessity; we find its ramifications, its roots within reality. But something is accomplished only by actually tracing the roots, not by the general statement of an abstract necessity.

Had, for instance, certain events during the eighties of the nineteenth century been different, the events in 1914 would also have been different. But this is just the important point, not to proceed as the historian does, who says: What now takes place is the effect of preceding events, these are in turn the effect of preceding events, which are the effect of still other events, etc. We come thus not only to the beginning of the world, but still farther, into cornplete nothingness. One such idea rolls along behind the other. This, however, is not the important point, but we must follow the matter concretely to where it first took root. Just as the root of a plant begins somewhere, so also do events. Seeds are sown in the course of time. If the seeds are not sown, then the events do not arise. I have touched upon a theme here that I naturally cannot exhaust today. We will have more to say later on this subject that I will describe essentially thus: “In spite of all considerations of necessity, there is not a single event which is absolutely necessary.”

It is really essential that men of the present day should, in their whole attitude of mind, emerge from this frightful dogmatism that permeates modern science, and that matters should be [taken] seriously.

I will give you a good example. At Zurich and Basle I endeavored to explain what nonsense it is to consider a sequence of historical events in such a way that one event must necessarily arise from another. This is the same as if I said: Here is a light that illumines first an object a, then an object b, then an object c. I do not notice the light itself, but merely the fact that first a, then b, then c in turn becomes illumined. I should be mistaken if, on seeing a and then b illumined, I were to say that b is lighted from a, and when I see that c is illumined, I were then to say: c is lighted from b. This would be quite incorrect, for the illumination of b and c have nothing to do with a; they all receive light from a common source. I gave this example in my lectures in order to explain historical events.

Now suppose that somebody found this idea quite a nice one. This is possible, is it not, that an idea which has sprung up on anthroposophical soil should be found quite good? Indeed, here and there even our opponents have taken such ideas to use for themselves. Many indeed have become opponents because such things had to be censured. Thus it is quite possible that an analogy brought forward from an anthroposophical quarter should not be absolutely foolish. Suppose some person took it and used it in a connection differing from that in which I had used it. Suppose that he used it dogmatically, not symptomatically as I did. Suppose that he used it from quite a different attitude of mind, and that I heard a lecture in which he said: “The sequence of cause and effect is quite wrongly explained by saying that effect b is the result of cause a, effect c of cause b, for this would be the same as saying: ‘When three objects, a, b, and c, are illumined, then b is illumined by a, c by b’.”

Suppose I am listening to all this, and that the explanation is not given in the same connection in which I spoke at Basle and Zurich, then I should perhaps object to the lecturer's conclusions, arising from his connection. I should perhaps say: “Supposing that a, b and c are luminescent substances—there are such substances; when exposed to light they become luminous and can give light even when the source of light is removed—suppose that a, being luminescent, actually illumines b, and that b, being luminescent, illumines c, then b would in truth be lighted by a, and c by b. In this way the whole analogy can become very brittle, when it is used by someone who, in the course of his lecture, has not explained that concepts for the realities in the spiritual life are like photographs, which differ when taken from different points of view. If this is not said at the outset, if the lecturer does not lead up to ideas that conform to reality, so that these ideas are always ideas from a certain point of view, then what has been said quite rightly from a certain perspective may become nonsense when used in an absolute sense.

The difference lies in this: Does the speaker start from reality or ideas? If from the latter, he will always be one-sided. If he takes as his starting point reality—since he can only bring forward ideas and nothing else, and every idea is one-sided—he may and must produce one-sided ideas, for that is quite obvious. You will now understand that a complete, a fundamental alteration of the soul-life is essential. For this reason it is easy for people to criticize many ideas of which I am the author. I do not know if anyone has hit upon this particular criticism. I have myself already made all the criticisms that are necessary.

Men must now realize in what way the idea is related to the reality. Only then shall we be able to penetrate into reality. Otherwise we shall always quarrel about ideas. Today the whole world is fighting about ideas in the social sphere, even when this fight has been transformed into external deeds. The fight about ideas changes very frequently into external deeds. These things lead into the intimacies of the spiritual life. Those who would understand existence must reflect on such things.

I have called your attention to these matters today in a more theoretical way. Next time I will speak of contemporary history from this standpoint and will show how far certain events have been necessary, and how far they were quite unnecessary, how quite different events might have happened, and how the catastrophes under which we all suffer need not have happened at all. We shall speak of these important questions in the next lecture.

As I have already remarked, we shall consider certain matters during these lectures which will then culminate, tomorrow or the next day, in an exposition of Historical Necessity and Free Will, will culminate by my having to show in what sense an historical event is necessary, and in what sense such an event—as something which, generally speaking, interferes in the soul-sphere of human life—could also be otherwise than it is. Indeed, at the present time—when such important occurrences are interfering in human life—this is a problem which is of very special, deeply penetrating significance; for, in face of the sad, catastrophic events of the present day (the war) every human being must indeed ask himself the question:—in how far are such happenings—and directly this present one—dependent on a certain necessity and in how far could the present occurrence have turned out differently, had it been able to assume a different aspect.

As we indicated, it will be our aim during these lectures to reply to this large, inclusive question with means that we can have at our disposal now in the occult basis that is to be explained in public lectures. But we must proceed from a more inclusive consideration of human life. We must deepen ourselves somewhat, from a certain aspect, in human nature itself For, as you are perhaps able to gather directly from the public lectures held recently, in human life the forces of that world are playing in which the human being finds himself between death and a new birth. Into this life—much more intensely than one imagines—are the forces playing, in which the human being is embedded, as the so-called dead. We are, as human beings, so fashioned—in the last lecture I drew attention more to the physical aspect—that in reality, the threshold between the everyday physical world and the spiritual world, cuts right through our midst. If we hold in mind our everyday life, and what we have considered the last time more from the physical side, today more from the side of the soul, then we may say: While we are incarnated here in the physical body, our human life runs its course in such a way that we have active in us, first, everything that can be experienced through the senses during our life, everything that is outspread around us, so to say, as a tapestry of the sense impressions, and from which we receive knowledge through our senses. Upon this world, then, everything is built which we elaborate out of this sense world, but which we also, independently of it, are able to interpenetrate in our thought life. When, however, we unite sense life and thought life, we have in reality everything in which we live with our usual waking consciousness.

From the moment we awaken in the morning until the moment we fall asleep, we are awake in reality only in our sense impressions and in our thought life. We are not awake at all, in the full sense of the word, in our feelings, in our feeling life. And there, between the thought life and the feeling life, practically unnoticed for the everyday consciousness, lies the threshold. For what interpenetrates our feeling life as a deeper reality does not actually come to consciousness at all in the human being. The feelings themselves do [not?] come to consciousness in him. They surge up and down out of a subconscious world. But the consciousness has really nothing more to do with feeling that we in sleep have to do with our dreams. Therefore it was possible recently to say here in Switzerland in public lectures:—While the human being lives in his feeling life, he is actually asleep and dreaming. The dream life extends itself over into our waking life. We are really continuously in a dream state from the moment of going to sleep to that of awakening, but only those dreams are remembered or enter our consciousness that are most strongly connected with our physical existence; dreaming continues on throughout the entire sleep life. Only in the deeper layers of our consciousness do we sleep, so to say, dreamlessly. But this dreaming and dreamless sleep life goes over into our feeling life, into the life of our affections. And we know no more of the reality, of the actual content of the ordinary consciousness in the non-clairvoyant consciousness of our feeling life, than we know what actually occurs when the images of the dream life run their course before us. Therefore it was also stated in these lectures that the human being does not inwardly experience the content of what is termed “History” with waking consciousness, but dreams it through, goes through it in a dream. History is what may be termed a cosmic dream of the human being. For the impulses that live in history live actually in feeling and emotional impulses. He dreams, while he inwardly experiences, history. Thus the life of feeling lies quite underneath the threshold of the real, waking consciousness. In this soul relationship also the boundary between the conscious and the unconscious life cuts right across the middle of the human being. In his will life the human being sleeps completely. For with his everyday consciousness he knows nothing about what actually lives in the will. His ordinary consciousness lives in the reality that expresses itself in the will in exactly the same way in which he lives in deep sleep. He follows consciously only that which, proceeding out of the will, has gone over into action. In this he awakens; in the execution of the will he cannot awaken. Therefore the philosophers continually quarrel about the freedom and the non-freedom of the will, because they are unable to penetrate into the region that can only be seen into with clairvoyant consciousness, the region out of which the will really draws its impulses.

Thus—I accentuate it once more—in the soul relationship also, the threshold lies between the actual physical world of waking life and the world which remains subconscious for him, lies in the midst of the human being himself, for this human being.

Now everything which the human being experiences and lives with between death and a new birth plays right into his life, insofar as it is the life of the feeling and the will—that is, insofar as it has been dreamt and slept through. What the dead live through is actually in the world in which we are living, in as far as we feel and will. Only we do not know with ordinary consciousness the realities that live in feeling and willing. If we could live through the reality which gives the basis of the feeling life, if we would live through especially the reality giving the basis of the willing life, just as in waking we live through the reality of the sense perceptions and the thought conceptions—the conceptions indeed to a minor degree, nevertheless to a certain degree—then would the departed, the man who has passed through the portals of death, be just as much beside us, in continual association with us, as someone who still walks about with us here on the physical plane, so that we are able to receive impressions from him in our waking consciousness by means of our senses and thought life. What is living in the impulses of the departed dead ascends continually within our feeling life, into the life of our will impulses. And only because we dream and sleep this away do we feel separated from the dead with whom we were associated.

In reality, however, the world in which the so-called dead live is quite different from the world in which we live while we are incarnated in the physical body. For observe, when you ask quite seriously: what then exists for the waking non-clairvoyant consciousness from the time of waking until going to sleep? The answer is: Only that which can be lived through in the world which is spread out as a tapestry of the sense impressions and also in the world we fashion out of it for ourselves by means of our thought conceptions. From this world, in the first place, everything belonging to the so-called mineral kingdom, for which the sense organs are used in perceiving, is not directly existent for the dead. To this mineral world belong, for example, also the stars, the sun and moon; in general everything belongs to it that is perceptible to the senses, and to it belongs also a large region of the plant world. These are regions that primarily do not lie open to the spiritual- and soul-eyes of the dead.

On the other hand there begins to open up already for the soul-eyes of the dead the world of which we are more or less unconscious when we direct our glance toward it—the glance which is of course veiled by the sense world—that is to say the world of impulses, of forces which live in the animals. This is for the dead the lowest world, in exactly the same way that the mineral world is the lowest world for us here in the physical body. Just as for us the plant world, which sprouts forth out of the mineral kingdom, builds itself up, so, for the dead, the human world, as soul world, erects itself upon the foundation that lives in the animal world. And just as the animal world forms the third category, which erects itself upon the mineral and plant world, so the kingdom of the Angels, Archangels, etc., forms a higher kingdom in the world of the dead.

The entire environment into which the departed one is transposed is thereby different from the environment in which we ourselves live in the physical body. For just conceive for a moment how it would be, were everything you perceive with the senses taken out of the world which you perceive with your physical body, about which you, in your physical body, form concepts. There would be something remaining over and above for the non-clairvoyant perception which can only have the appearance of a dream world, a world which can only be dreamed, which cannot live any more strongly in the consciousness than a dream. But the distinction becomes clearer if we hold the difference in mind in yet another way. Just notice that as long as we are incarnated in the physical body, the essential thing that lends character to our lives (the chief characteristic) is that we (although inwardly the matter is difficult as you know from other lectures) are able to have the consciousness that whatever we do with the beings of the mineral and plant kingdoms—as a result of our intercourse with them—remains relatively a matter of indifference to them. We act indeed under the influence of this thought just expressed. We break the stone calmly and have the idea that we do not cause the stone pain, nor also give it any joy. You know that inwardly the matter is somewhat different: but in as far as we human beings are in touch with the surrounding mineral world, we think with a certain justification that joy and pain is not at once aroused when we break a stone to pieces or do something similar.

In a like manner do we relate ourselves to the plant world. The human beings are now very rare who, for example, feel a sort of pain, have a somewhat similar feeling when a flower is plucked. The individuals, who in a certain sense still prefer to have the rose on the rosebush than to have the rose bouquet in the room, are not at all so numerous. It is only with the animal world that we begin to bring our human nature directly into relationship with the surrounding world. And yet let it be said once more:—the human beings are just now quite rare among present day people who have a feeling—only distantly similar to be sure—when plucking roses similar to the one they would have were the heads of animals being torn off in order to bind them together in a nosegay:—even among anthroposophists I have found that not everyone always prefers to have roses on the rose-bush—although indeed the feeling has already progressed so far that there has never been, let us say, a bouquet of nightingale heads presented in a hall! Now we are beginning to feel how the life that extends itself out of us continues on into our surrounding world.

The departed has no such condition. For him nothing exists at all in the environment for which he could not have the feeling that if he were only to stretch out a finger—this is now expressed quite symbolically, in imagery—then what is accomplished—through the sticking out of his finger, indeed, through any action whatever, yes, through everything done by the dead—would not bring about, would not release joy and pain in the environment. He does not enter at all into relationship with his surroundings unless he awakens joy and pain, unless there exists an echo of joy and pain. If you do something after you have passed through the portals of death, then through your action, wherever it may be, pain or joy, tension or relaxation of something is continually occurring which is similar to the feeling life. If we knock on a table we feel that it does not pain the table. The one who is dead can never carry out an action without knowing that he lives and weaves, not only into the living element, but into the living element filled with feeling. The feeling-filled incitement is spread out over his entire environment.

From another aspect you will find that described in the corresponding chapter of my book Theosophy. This world of incitement filled with feeling lives thus upon the lowest level there above in the animal kingdom. And just as we are acquainted with a certain external side of the mineral kingdom by means of our sense perceptions, so is the departed dead familiar, over the extent of his whole world, with the inner side, not with the outer form, but with the inner aspect of animal life. This animal life is the lowest basis upon which he lives, upon which he fashions himself, upon which he erects his existence. And a large amount of work of the dead consists in their placing themselves in direct relationship to the world of living animal creatures. Just as we here on earth, from childhood on, place ourselves in connection with the dead mineral world, so do we after death establish ourselves continually on a broad and expanding, growing relationship to the world of the living animal. This world the dead person learns to know on all sides. This world the departed learns to know through having to penetrate step by step all the secrets which here on earth are concealed from him, just as that is concealed from his soul which slumbers underneath his feeling life, for it is the same thing.

Granted, such a question as the one I now intend to interject cannot be allowed as a proper scientific one. But it can nevertheless point toward something behind which real relationships exist. It can be asked: why then is there so much really concealed from the human being here in the physical world by the governing power of the all-penetrating world wisdom? We can ask, why is that concealed into which the dead must be initiated, the mysteries of the construction of the whole animal world?

Directly when we attempt to answer such a question, we plunge into the deepest of all mysteries of existence. And in these considerations we shall have to try to understand this question also. In the first place, however, we must perceive how this comprehension of the inner side of the animal life really takes place.

Here I might proceed, in order not to become theoretical, from a fact of recent history. You know that in a certain external way human historical consciousness has experienced a change in modern times through so-called Darwinism. There has been an endeavor to find the forces by means of which the organisms evolve from the so-called imperfect condition. The Darwinists have named several kinds:—primarily the principle of special selection, survival of the fittest, the adjustment to environment, etc., I do not intend to come to you with these things which you indeed can read in every handbook on Darwinism, even in every encyclopedia. But I wish to point out that those are external, abstract principles: that for those who look deeper, nothing at all is said thereby. What actually happens is not shown when it is said: the perfection occurs through the selection of the fittest, the others gradually dying out and the fittest surviving. Here nothing is actually said about the forces, about the impulses that actually live in the animal kingdom—in order that these creatures may be able not only first to perfect themselves but also to be able to frame their life correspondingly in the ordinary present-day world. What really acts in the forces of selection, in forces that are put forward by Darwinism as forces of selection, as forces that are of a purely mechanically purposeful character. It is the dead working there. It belongs to the most astonishing and impressive experiences which can be made in the circle of the dead, to discover that just as here there are smiths and joiners and others who work in the world of mechanics, in the handicrafts, and thereby create the physical sensible basis of life here, so in the spirit realm, beginning with the animal kingdom and upwards, do the dead work. While the animal kingdom here in many respects is such that we feel it to be an inferior one—however, the mineral world lies indeed still lower—yet the very basis of the work of the dead is the furthering of the animal kingdom. Therefore, the departed become accustomed to living in all the skillfulness that is concealed from him, through the fact of his world of feeling being plunged down into the life of animal existence, during the life between birth and death.

You see, we come here to the point of view that until our age was held more or less secret by the brotherhoods that believed, partly justly, partly unjustly, that other men were not ripe enough for such things. If you gain the knowledge of what is related to the animal nature in the world of the dead, if you look about, you then see that all this belongs to the living element filled with feeling. The human being has also this living element filled with feeling in his soul. But in what way? Between birth and death he possesses it in such a way that were it not locked up in his subconsciousness he could at every moment employ this living element filled with feeling, which exists in the period between birth and death, for the destruction of the remainder of this element in the world. So just imagine what that really means. You yourself, in your personal life, live as a living-element-filled-with-feeling, which, however, is enclosed in the boundaries that are drawn into the physical human being. If human beings were to have this element generally, freely at their disposal—anthroposophists will already be more cultivated in this regard—then they could, in every instance, employ these concealed forces to destroy the living element filled with feeling that is lying in their environment.

The animal nature in the human being is primarily, even in the most exact meaning of the word, a destructive one. And it is even endowed with the capacity to destroy. And when the individual has passed through death's door, then it is his task above everything to tear out of his soul all the impulses that have then become free in such a way that there is really a very great deal remaining of the desire to destroy the living, to kill the living. And it can be said, that to have respect and reverence for all living things is something that the departed must learn above everything else. This reverence for everything living is something that can be looked upon as the self-evident evolution of the departed. So just as we here with inner participation follow a child which as a matter of course evolves from a small infant onward, gradually from day to day, from week to week, just as we follow up with this child the way the soul takes hold of the fleshly bodily nature, having great joy in what happens without the cooperation of the so-called free will, in what occurs there through the pure organic forces of the soul; so in a similar manner, when we follow up the course taken by the departed from the day of his death onward through his life after death, we again behold the development of the deepest reverence for all living beings in the environment, a development from which free will has been withdrawn.

This is something which, as it were, happens like an external side in the departed, just as with the child this occurs as an external side through its growing up, by its traits becoming more expressive. What increases externally in the child to our joy, in like manner increases in the departed by our discovering something radiating from him, more and more through his holding every living thing sacred in such an exalted way. But in this connection an important difference occurs between the life after death and the life here on earth. The life here has concealed by a veil just that in which the departed must deepen himself. We perceive the world through our senses and form for ourselves certain laws which we call the laws of nature, according to which we then form round about us our mechanical instruments, our tools. What we erect round about us according to the laws of nature is indeed essentially a world of the dead. We must even kill the plant, even the tree, when we wish to place its wood at the service of our mechanical arts. And again it belongs to the most staggering knowledge, that in reality everything which our senses teach us, when we apply it by means of our will, is something destructive and cannot be anything else but something destructive.

Even when we create a work of art we must take part in the world of destruction. What we thus create first arises out of destruction. A beneficent world wisdom has only caused us at first to shrink back, as human beings, from placing what lives (generally speaking, from the animal-world upward) at the service of mechanical art. In a certain higher sense, however, everything lives in the world. You will already realize this from the various accounts given during the course of the year. But what do we do in reality when we place at the service of mechanical art that which we perceive through our senses and combine through our understanding? We continually carry death into life. Even a Raphael painting cannot come into being unless death is carried into life. Before a Raphael painting arises it contains more life than afterwards. In the universe this is compensated only through the fact that souls appear who enjoy the Raphael painting and receive from it an impulse, a strong impression. The impulse, the impression which the creating or enjoying soul receives, this alone can help to overcome the forces of death, even when the highest treasure, the so-called highest spiritual possessions of mankind are created here on the physical plane. Essentially, the earth will be destroyed because through their mechanical acts human beings carry death into the earth in such a strong measure. The earth will no longer be able to live, because the forces of death prevail over that which can be saved and carried over into the world of Jupiter, beyond the decay of the physical earth. But out of what human beings have created by weaving together death and life—out of what they have thus created—they will have regained a soul content which they will then carry over into the world of Jupiter.

Death or the destruction of what is living, continually weaves into life, more than words can say; it weaves in human activity itself, through the fact that between birth and death [unreadable] human activity is intimately interwoven with the sense of [unreadable]. Indeed, consciousness arises because death weaves itself into life. Man would not accomplish his task on earth, as far as consciousness is concerned, were he not called upon to weave death into life. Even within ourselves we kill the life of the nerves the very moment in which we form a thought; for a really living nerve cannot form thoughts. In recent public lectures I have said that—“We enter into the life of our nerves through a constant death-process.”

In this respect the life between death and a new birth is the exact opposite. There it is essential for the human soul to acquire the habit of holding holy all that is living, of permeating the living with ever more and more life.

In this manner the life between birth and death is connected with death; the life between death and a new birth, with the life of the whole. An animal kingdom lives upon the earth only through the fact that man dies and sends his impulses from the spiritual world into the life of the animals.

The second thing which man learns to know after death is the kingdom of the human soul itself, regardless of whether these human souls are embodied here in physical bodies or have already passed through the gate of death. After death, man faces the animal world with the feeling that when he carries out an action, something experiences joy, or another being, at least something possessing being, suffers pain. He knows that he strikes against living reality when his spiritual force alone hits against this. Here it is more a universal living and weaving within living reality. In regard to the familiarity with what exists in our own human sphere after we are dead, it is so, that when another soul enters into a relationship with us, after we ourselves have passed through the gate of death, we become aware that our own life-feeling is either strengthened or diminished, according to the way in which we face this soul. Through our relation to a certain soul, regardless of whether it dwells here upon the earth or in the spiritual world, we feel that we become inwardly strengthened. Our companionship with this soul strengthens us in a certain way; our inner forces become stronger and at the same time more alive. We meet this soul and feel that it makes us more awake than we would have been otherwise. An intimate sense of life streams toward us with a certain intensity, through our companionship with this soul. Instead, the relationship with another soul may weaken us in the direction of certain forces and dim down our life, as it were.

Our companionship with souls consists therein that we feel our own life surging livingly in this relationship with the others. We live out our life of feeling and will as human beings between birth and death without knowing that the souls of the dead live in the waves of this life of feeling and will, which we sleep and dream away. They are always there; they live in the waves of our own feeling and will, and they live there in such a way that they experience this life with us. While we experience the surrounding world through our senses as something external, the dead live in the impulses of our feelings and will; they are far more intimately bound together with us than we, insofar as we are physically embodied, are bound together with our surroundings.

It is so that this life—or better, this experiencing, this inner presence in life—of the dead, develops gradually in accordance with the conditions that have been spun out during our life here. Assuredly we live together with all souls after death; this is true, but we know nothing about it. Relationships set in slowly and gradually; namely, with souls with whom we have formed connections during our life between birth and death. We cannot form new relationships, original connections with other human beings during the life between death and a new birth; we can form no such connections originally and directly. When we have loved or hated someone here, i.e., when we were connected with him either in a positive or in a negative way, this again rises from a gray spiritual depth, in the gradual awakening of the life after death, so that we live within these souls, as I have just described.

Thus, a great part of this experiencing, or this inner life-presence of the dead, consists in the fact that everything that exists in the form of a link with other souls, during our last or earlier incarnations, gradually rises up from a gray spiritual depth. This can widen out—and in the case of many departed souls it widens out very soon after death—but in an immediate way. Someone may die; he may have stood in some kind of relationship to a soul dwelling either on the earth or in the spiritual world. This relationship appears before him once more after death, as I have described just now. But this soul with whom he is linked up has relations with other souls, with whom, perhaps, he has never come into contact during any of his lives between birth and death. But here, after death, such souls can establish an indirect contact with the so-called dead soul, and thus enter into relationship with him.

But, as I have already said, these are never direct connections, for they are always mediated by the souls with whom we are linked up karmically through our physical life. The connection with souls where no relationship has been established during physical life is always quite a different one, and is transmitted through the soul who was connected with us in physical life.

You can easily realize, now, that first there are direct, then indirect relationships. Through the fact, however, that all souls are more or less connected with one another throughout the earth, and that during his long life between death and a new birth, man forms, indirectly at least, many new connections—through this fact, the human being enters a very wide field of mutual experience with other souls, if we also take into consideration these indirect relationships. Even when we are here on earth we have already within us this living-into other souls. In the spiritual world we have lived together with innumerable souls, over and over again. The feeling of being at one with all souls, which an abstract philosophy considers only abstractly, and discusses as an abstract at-oneness, has its quite concrete side. Namely, that souls are scarcely to be found over the whole earth with whom there is not at least a distant and indirect connection. We must grasp this fact as concretely as possible, then this will lead us to something real. What the departed experiences is thus a gradual growing into and awakening into a world based, in a wider sense, on his karma. An inward brightness that increases more and more spreads, as it were, over this world, as our experiences become richer in this second realm, which is based upon the animalic realm, just as our experiences in the plant realm are based upon the mineral realm. Our experiences become ever richer and richer.

Imagine this experience extending in all concrete directions, and you will obtain a great deal of that which permeates the soul of the departed between death and a new birth; for all thoughts that connect us in any way with other souls are bound up with this experience. Herein lies an infinitely rich world. Essentially is it so (you will gather this from the cycle on Life Between Death and Rebirth) that during the first half of this life between death and a new birth, the development is more filled with wisdom, more permeated with wisdom. In a wise way man becomes accustomed to the connections that he gradually draws up again out of the spiritual depth. He becomes familiar with all this in a very wise way. Essentially, the threads leading to all karmic relationships of a direct or indirect nature begin in what I have called in the Mystery Plays “The Midnight Hour of Being.” Then follows the further working out, and then an element of force, similar to the will, but only similar, not exactly the same—enters into the life of the soul. This element of force, similar to the will, makes the human being stronger and stronger. Above all, it strengthens those impulses in him that are added to the wisdom-filled survey of the world, as elements and impulses pertaining to the will, as impulses of force.

A certain form of will becomes active in man during the second half of the life between death and a new birth. If we observe this will (we can do this especially in the case of souls who, through this or that circumstance, have a shorter or a shortened life between death and new birth) we find that the will takes a peculiar direction, which may be characterized by saying—the will arises in order to wipe out in some way the traces of our life, the traces of karma.

Please grasp this quite clearly. Such a will, aiming at the effacement of the traces of karma, becomes more and more evident in man. This effacement of the traces of karma is connected with the deepest secrets of human life. Were man to have a continual and full survey of the wisdom which he can acquire very soon, comparatively soon, after death, then there would be numberless human beings who would prefer to wipe out the traces of their existence, rather than enter into new lives. The elaboration of our earlier lives into a karmic connection, which we achieve, can only be achieved because we are dulled by certain beings of the higher hierarchy during the second half of the life between death and a new birth; we are paralyzed in regard to the light of wisdom, so that we restrict our activity and our will- impulses more and more. And we must say that the aim of this is to restrict them in such a way that we create what can then become united with a physical human body in the stream of heredity, and can live out its earthly destiny in this physical body.

We can only understand these thoughts fully when we consider earthly destiny itself. How dream-like this earthly destiny is for man on earth! As a child he accustoms himself gradually to the conditions of earthly life. What we call destiny comes to him in the form of single life experiences. Out of the woof of these life experiences, something is formed which is in reality man himself. For think what you would be as far as the present day, had you not lived through your own particular destiny! You can indeed say—I myself am what I have experienced as destiny. You would be quite another human being had you experienced a different destiny. And yet, how strange destiny seems to be, how little interwoven with what man calls his ego! In how many countless cases the ego feels itself struck by destiny! Why? Because what we ourselves do towards the molding of our destiny remains hidden in the subconsciousness. What we experience takes up its place in the world of sense-experience and in the world of thoughts. It merely strikes against our feeling life. Our feeling life remains passive to this. What we have in common with the realm of the dead springs forth actively out of our feeling life and out of the life of the will impulses. What springs forth in this way, and what we ourselves do without our consciousness, by dreaming and sleeping through it, this forms our destiny; we ourselves are this. We dream and sleep through all we do toward the molding of our own destiny. We wake in what we experience as our destiny, but only because it remains unconscious. What is it that remains in reality unconscious? That which sounds across as impulses, out of earlier incarnations on earth, and out of the life between death and a new birth in a purely spiritual way—out of the regions where also the dead are to be found—a region which we dream and sleep away. At the same time, these are forces that come also from ourselves. They are the forces with which we mold our destiny. We weave our destiny out of the same region that the dead inhabit in common with us.

Think how we grow together with this world, of which we now know something to a certain extent—how we sleep through it and how we experience it—although we have not yet spoken of the experiences in connection with the beings of the higher hierarchies. This will also be considered. But what I wish to convey in a description of this kind is that we must place the realm of the so-called dead within the same realm in which we ourselves live, and we must become conscious of the fact that we feel separated from the dead (but in reality we are not separated from them) only because we dream and sleep away our feeling-life and will-life, where the dead are. However, something else can be found in this world that we dream and sleep away, something that man as a rule does not follow at all in his usual consciousness. Sometimes he becomes aware of this when it appears before him in specially striking cases; but these are exceptional, outstanding cases, which only draw attention to what is always permeating life and streaming through it. You yourselves will have heard of many cases resembling the following one:—

Someone is in the habit of taking a daily walk; it leads him to a mountain slope. He goes there every day; it is his special pleasure. One day he goes there again as usual. Suddenly, while he is walking, he hears something like a voice, although it is not a physical voice, which tells him:—Why are you taking this walk? Can you really not do without this pleasure? It speaks more or less like this. He begins to hesitate and turns aside, in order to think over what has just happened to him. In this instant a piece of rock rolls down; it would quite certainly have struck him, had he not turned aside.

This is a true story, but one that only points out sensationally something that is always present in our lives. How often you plan to do this or that—and this or that prevents you. Think how many things would have been different, even in the smallest experiences of life, had you started out at an appointed hour, instead of half an hour later, because something detained you. Think what changes have thus come into your life; what changes have also come into the lives of many other people! It is quite easy to picture this. Let us suppose that you have planned to take a walk at 3:30 PM; you were supposed to meet another person and to tell him some news that he, in his turn, would have told to someone else. Because you came too late you do not tell him this news; this was not done, and with a certain right. Here we see a universal order of laws that differs from the one that we describe as a necessity of Nature. It consists therein, that someone is prevented from continuing his walk because he hears a voice that causes him to turn aside, and thus saves him from being struck dead by the falling piece of rock. We feel that here a different world system is at work. But this world system permeates our existence always, not merely when such sensational events take place. Even in such matters, we are used to see only the sensational aspect of things. We do not notice this other world. Why? Because we turn our gaze toward the events that occur in our life and in our surroundings and not toward the events that do not occur, events that are continually being prevented, continually being hindered.

From a certain moment in spiritual experience, that which does not happen is held back from us. That from which we are, as it were, prevented, can rise up in our consciousness in the same way as that which does happen; except that it comes to our consciousness as another world system. Try to place this world system before your souls by saying to yourselves: man is accustomed to look only at what happens and not at what has been prevented from happening. What he does not notice in this case is intimately connected with the realm in which the dead are, in which we ourselves are with our dreamlike feeling and sleeping will. Within us, we cut ourselves off from this other world because dream and sleep play also into our waking life. All that seethes, lives and weaves beneath the boundary which separates our thinking from our feeling contains, at the same time, the secrets that build not only the bridge between the so-called living and the so-called dead, but also the bridge between the realm of necessity and the realm of freedom and of so-called chance.

In an introductory way, I will touch shortly upon a few facts that have already been considered, because we shall need them in the further course of our considerations. I have said that what we may call the threshold between the usual physical world of the senses and the soul-spiritual world lies in man himself, also psychically. It lies in him in such a way that in the usual everyday consciousness with which man is endowed between birth and death, he is really awake only as far as his sense-perceptions, or his perceptive activity, are concerned; he is awake in all that comes to him in the form of ideas—ideas concerning that which he perceives through his senses, or ideas arising out of his own inner being; they make the world intelligible and alive for him. Even a very ordinary self-recollection teaches us (clairvoyant endowment is in no way necessary for this) that when usual human consciousness is fully awake it cannot embrace more than the sphere of the life of ideas and the sphere of sense perceptions. However, we experience in our soul also the world of our feelings and the world of our will. But we have said that we live through this world of our feelings only as we live through a dream; the life of dream enters the ordinary waking consciousness and, inasmuch as we are feeling human beings, we are, in reality, mere dreamers of life. Things occur in the depths of our feeling life, of which our waking consciousness, contained in our ideas and sense perceptions, knows nothing at all. The waking consciousness knows less still concerning the real processes of the life of our will. Man dreams away his feeling life in his usual consciousness, and he sleeps away the life of his will.

Consequently, beneath the life of our thoughts lives a realm in which we ourselves are embedded, and which is only partly known to us; it is only known to us through the waves that break up through the surface.

We have emphasized further, that in this realm, which we dream and sleep away, we live together with human souls that are passing through the existence between death and a new birth. We are only separated from the so-called dead through the fact that we are not in a position to perceive with our ordinary consciousness how the forces of the dead, the life of the dead, the actions of the dead, play into our own life. These forces, these actions of the dead, continually permeate the life of our feeling and the life of our will. Therefore we can live with the dead. And it is indeed important to realize at the present time that the task of Anthroposophy is to develop this consciousness—that we are in touch with the souls of the dead.

The earth will not continue to evolve in the direction of the welfare of humanity unless humanity develops this living feeling of being together with the dead. For the life of the dead plays into the life of the so-called living in many ways.

During the course of these public lectures I have purposely drawn your attention to the historical course of life—what man lives through historically, what he lives through socially, what he lives through in the ethical relationships between people. All this really has the value of a dream, of sleep; the impulses which man develops when he surpasses his personal existence and is active within the community, are impulses of dream and sleep.

People will consider history in quite another way when this has reached their living consciousness; they will no longer consider as history the fable convenue that is usually called history today; but they will realize that historical life can only be understood when that which is dreamed and slept away in usual consciousness, and contains the influences of the deeds, impulses and activities of the so-called dead, is sought in this historical life. The deeds of the dead are interwoven with the impulses of feeling and will of the so-called living. And this is real history.

When the human being has gone through the Gate of Death, he does not cease to be active
within the human community. He continues to be active, although his activity is of another kind. We live under the illusion that our actions are our own, because they flow out of our feelings, out of our impulses of will; in reality they flow out of the deeds of those who have departed, even in the very moment in which we are carrying out our actions.

In the future development of man it will be of great importance to know that when we do something connected with our life in common with other men, we do this together with the dead. But of course, such a consciousness, which is related essentially to the life of the feeling and of the will, must be grasped also by the feeling and by the will. Abstract and dried-out ideas will never be able to grasp this. But ideas that have been taken from the sphere of spiritual science will be able to grasp this. Indeed, people will have to accustom themselves to form quite different conceptions about many things.

You all know that he who is firmly rooted in the comprehension of spiritual-scientific impulses may undertake to remain connected with those who have passed through the Gate of Death. The thoughts of spiritual science, the ideas that we form about the events in the spiritual world, are thoughts that are intelligible to us on earth, but are also intelligible to the souls of the dead. This may result in what we may call “reading to the dead.” When we think of the dead, and in doing so read to them, especially the contents of spiritual science, this is a real intercourse with the dead. For spiritual science speaks a language common to both the souls of the living and of the dead. But what is essential is to approach these things more and more, particularly with the life of feeling, with the illuminated life of feeling.

Man lives, between death and a new birth in an environment which is essentially permeated through and through, not only with living forces, but with living forces full of feeling. This is his lowest sphere. As the insensible mineral kingdom surrounds us during our sense life, so a realm surrounds the dead, which is of such a nature that, when he comes in contact with anything within it, he calls forth pain or joy. Thus, with the dead it is as if we were forced to realize, during life, that as soon as we touch a stone, or the leaf of a tree, we call forth feelings. The departed one can do nothing that does not call forth feelings of joy, feelings of pain, feelings of tension, relaxation, etc., in his surroundings. When we come into contact with the departed human being—this is the case when we read to him—he himself experiences this communion as already mentioned; he becomes aware of this when we read to him; he experiences it in this particular case. In this way the departed one comes in connection with that soul who reads to him, that soul with whom he is in some way related through Karma. The dead is connected with his lowest realm (which we had to bring in connection with the animal kingdom) in such a way that everything he does calls forth joy, pain, etc; he is connected with all that calls forth a relationship with human souls (whether they are human souls living here on the earth, or souls already disembodied and living between death and a new birth) in such a way that his feeling for life is either increased or diminished through what takes place in other souls.

Please realize this clearly. When you read to a so-called living person, you know that he understands what you read to him, in the sense in which we speak of human understanding; but the departed one lives in the contents, the departed one lives in each word that you read to him. He enters into that which passes through your own soul. The departed one lives with you. He lives with you more intensely than was ever possible for him in the life between birth and death. When this companionship with the dead is sought, it is really a very intimate one, and a consciousness endowed with insight intensifies this existence in common with the dead.

If man enters consciously into the realm that we inhabit together with the dead, the intercourse with the dead is such that when you read or speak to the departed one, you hear from him, like a spiritual echo, what you yourself are reading. You see, we must become acquainted with such ideas as these if we wish to gain a real conception of the concrete spiritual world. In the spiritual world things are not the same as here. Here you can hear yourself speak when you are speaking, or you know that you are thinking when you think. If you speak to the dead, or if you enter into a relationship with the dead, your words, or the thoughts you send to him, come to you out of the departed one himself, if you consciously perceive your connection with the dead.

And when you send a message to the dead, you feel as if you were intimately connected with him. If he replies to this message, it seems at first as if you were dimly conscious that the departed one is speaking. You are dimly conscious that the departed one has spoken, and you must now draw out of your own soul what he has spoken. This will make you realize how necessary it is for a real spiritual intercourse to hear from the other one what you yourself think and conceive, to hear out of yourself what the other one says. This is a kind of inversion of the entire relationship between one being and another being. But this inversion takes place when we really enter the spiritual world.

Because the spiritual world is so entirely different from the physical, and because—since about the fifteenth century—people only wish to form conceptions based on the physical world, they displace and obstruct their entrance to the spiritual world. If people would only realize that a world can exist which is, in certain respects—not in all—the direct opposite of what we call the true world; if people would be willing to form ideas which, perhaps, appear most absurd to those who insist upon living only in a materialistic world—then they will transform their souls and attain the possibility of seeing into the spiritual world, which is always around us. It is not that human beings, through their nature, are separated from the spiritual world; but that through habit, through the circumstances of inheritance, they have become entirely unaccustomed, since the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, to forming other ideas than those borrowed from the physical world. This applies even to art. What other scope has modern art than to copy, from the model, what Nature forms outside? Even in art people no longer attach value to what arises freely out of the spiritual life of the soul, and is also something real. But in the free reality that thus arises, people cannot efface what is effective and active in historical events, in the ethical, moral and social life of the community—except that they dream and sleep away this active element. As soon as man goes beyond his own personal concerns, even in the smallest measure—and in every moment of life he goes beyond these—the spiritual world, the world—I must emphasize this again and again—which we share with the dead works through his arm, through his hand, his word, his glance.

As the departed one grows familiar with the realm I have already spoken of, with the lowest one connected with the animal kingdom (just as we become familiar with the mineral, vegetable, animal, and human physical world in the life between birth and death during our gradual growth)—as the departed one continues to develop in the second region, where companionship with all those souls arises, with whom he is karmically connected either directly or indirectly, he evolves to the point of becoming familiar with the kingdom of the Beings who stand above man, if I may use this expression, although it is merely figurative—with the kingdom beginning with the Angeloi and Archangeloi.

Here in the physical world man is, as it were, the crown of creation—many like to emphasize this; he feels himself as the highest of all beings. The minerals are the lowest, then the plants, then the animals, and then man himself He feels that he belongs to the highest kingdom. It is not thus with the dead in the spiritual realm; the dead feels himself connected with the Hierarchies above him, the Hierarchies of the Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai, etc. As man here in the physical world feels, in a certain sense, that the physical kingdom of man evolves and grows out of the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms, so the departed one feels himself sustained and carried by the Hierarchies above him, in the life between death and a new birth.

The way in which the human being gradually becomes familiar with this kingdom of the Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai, etc., can be described as follows:—It is like a liberation from Self. Again we must acquire a conception of these things that cannot be won in the physical world of the senses. In this world of the senses, as we grow up from childhood, we gradually become acquainted with things, first with our nearest surroundings, then with what is to be our life experience in a wider sense, etc. We become acquainted with things in such a way that we know—they approach us little by little. This is not the case between death and a new birth. From the moment on, in which we know that we are connected with the Angeloi, we feel as if we had been united with them since eternity, as if we belonged to them, were one with them; yet we are only able to develop our consciousness by reaching the point of separating the idea of the Angeloi from ourselves. Here in the physical world we make our experiences by taking up ideas. In the spiritual world we make our experiences by separating the ideas from ourselves. We know that we carry them within us—and we know that we are entirely filled by them, but we must separate them from ourselves in order to bring them to consciousness. And so we set free the ideas of Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai.

In the lowest kingdom, man is, as it were, connected with the animalic, which he must strive to conquer, as I have already explained. Then he is connected with the kingdom immediately above this one—the kingdom of the souls with whom he is directly or indirectly linked up through Karma. In this kingdom man experiences his relationship with the Angeloi. His relationship with the kingdom of the Angeloi gives rise, at first, to a great deal of that which creates a right connection with the kingdom of human souls. Hence, in the life between death and a new birth, it is difficult to distinguish between the experiences which man has in common with other human souls and those with the Beings belonging to the kingdom of the Angeloi. There are many links between human beings and the Beings belonging to the kingdom of the Angeloi. Although we can speak of these things merely in comparison, and although we can only allude briefly to them, we may however say:—Just as here, in our physical life, memory leads us back again to some event which we have experienced, so does a Being belonging to the kingdom of the Angeloi lead us to something which we must experience in our life between death and a new birth. Beings belonging to the kingdom of the Angeloi are really the mediators for everything that arises in the life of the so-called dead. And the Angeloi help man in everything that he must do between death and a new birth in connection with the conquest of the animalic (he must raise his animal nature into the spiritual part of his being in order to prepare himself for his next incarnation). If you grasp this in its right meaning you will say:—Because man associates with the Angeloi between death and a new birth, he can form the right kind of relationships in connection with the souls with whom he must come into touch. And because man is in contact with the kingdom of the Angeloi, he can prepare rightly the things that must take place during his next incarnation. The tasks of the Archai, or the Beings belonging to the Spirits of the Time, are common both to the dead and to the living. My explanations will show you that the departed one has more to do with the Angeloi, who regulate his connection to other souls, and with the Archangeloi, who regulate his successive incarnations. But in his association with the Beings of the Hierarchy of the Archai, the dead works together with the so-called living, with those who are incarnated here in the physical body. The dead who is passing through the life between death and a new birth, and the so-called living, in his life between birth and death, are embedded alike in something which the Spirits of the Time weave as an unceasing stream of universal wisdom and universal activity of the will. What the Spirits of the Time thus weave is history, is the ethical-moral life of an age, the social life of an age.

We might say that we can look into the spiritual kingdom and realize:—The so-called dead are there; what they experience in this kingdom—inasmuch as these experiences are their own—is regulated by the Angeloi and Archangeloi; what they experience in common with the so-called living is woven by the Beings who belong to the Hierarchy of the Archai. We cannot fulfill any fruitful work in the social, historical, and ethical-moral life unless we realize this work must come from an element that we share with the dead—the element of the Archai, or Spirits of the Time.

These Spirits of the Time do their work alternately. We have often spoken of this. Through several centuries, one of the Time Spirits weaves the events contained in the stream of historical and social life and in the ethical-moral stream of human events; then another Time Spirit relieves him. The moment in which a Time Spirit relieves another one is most important of all, if we wish to observe what really takes place within the evolution of mankind. We cannot understand this evolution unless we bear in mind the living active influence of the Time Spirits and, in general, of the entire spiritual world. We cannot understand what takes place between man and man unless we consider the kingdom of the Spirit.

Very abstract are man's thoughts concerning that which is social, ethical-moral and historical. He thinks that history, or the stream of events taking place in the course of time, is a continuous current, where one event follows upon the other. He asks:—Why did certain events happen at the beginning of the twentieth century?—Because they were caused by events at the end of the nineteenth century.—Why did certain events happen at the end of the nineteenth century?—Because they were caused by events in the middle of the nineteenth century. And events in the middle of the nineteenth century were caused again by events at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and so on.

This way of considering historical events as the result of immediately preceding events is just the same as if a peasant were to say:—The wheat that I shall harvest this year is the result of the wheat of last year. The seeds remained, and the wheat of last year is again the result of the wheat of the year before last. One thing depends on the other—cause and effect. Except that the peasant does not really follow this rule: he must of course interfere personally in the growth of the wheat. He must first sow the seeds in order that an effect may follow the cause. The effect does not come of itself. From a certain point of view this is one of the most terrible illusions of our materialistic age, for people believe that the effect is the result of the cause; they do not wish to form the simplest thoughts concerning the real truth of these things.

I have already given you an example, by relating to you a sensational event in the life of a human being. It is indeed so, that people prefer to contemplate sensational events rather than consider the other events, which are of exactly the same kind and take place every hour and every moment of our life. I have told you how such an event can occur: A man is accustomed to take his daily walk to a mountainside. He takes this walk every day for a long time. But one day during his walk, on reaching a certain spot, he hears a voice calling out to him:—Why do you go along this path? Is it necessary that you should do this? The voice says more or less these words. On hearing them he becomes thoughtful, steps aside and thinks for a while about the curious thing that has happened to him. Suddenly a piece of rock falls down, which would have killed him had he not stepped aside after hearing the voice. This is a sensational event. But one who considers the world calmly, yet spiritually, will see in this event one of the many which take place every moment of our life. In every moment of our life something else, too, might happen, if this or that would occur.

A very clever man—we know that especially modern people are very clever—would say: Why was this man spared? Because he went away. This is the cause. Very well—but suppose he had not gone away; in this case he would have been killed, and a very clever modern man would argue:--the falling stone is the cause of the man's death. Indeed—seen from outside and in an abstract and formal way—it is true that the falling stone is the cause, and the man's death the effect: but the cause has nothing to do with the effect; it is quite an indifferent matter to the falling stone, where the man was standing. This cause has nothing whatever to do with the effect. Ponder this matter and try to understand what is really contained in all this talk of cause and effect. The so-called cause need not have anything to do with the effect.

The stone would have taken exactly the same course had the man been standing elsewhere. As far as the stone is concerned, nothing has been changed owing to the fact that the man was warned and went away. I gave you an example that, even in outer quite formal things, the so-called cause need have nothing to do with the so-called effect. The whole way of looking at cause and effect is based entirely on abstraction. It is only possible to speak of cause and effect within certain limits. Take this example, for instance: Here you have a tree with its roots. What takes place in the roots can certainly be considered, in certain respects, as the cause of the growing tree; what takes place in the branches can, to a certain extent, be designated as the cause of the growing leaves. You see, the tree is, to a certain extent, a whole; and a concrete way of looking at life considers totalities and the aspect of the whole; an abstract way of looking at life always links up one thing with another, without considering the complete whole. But for a spiritual way of looking at things it is important to bear in mind the whole. You see, where the outer leaves end, the tree ceases to exist, as well as the inner causes of its growth. Where the leaves end, also the forces of their growth end; but something else begins there. Where these forces end, the spiritual eye can see spiritual beings playing around the tree, spiritual elementary beings. Here begins, if I may say so, a negative tree, which stretches out into infinity, but only apparently so, because after a while it disappears. An elementary existence meets what comes out of the tree; where the tree ceases, it comes into contact with the elementary existence, which grows toward it. It is thus in Nature.

The plant ceases to exist when it grows out of the soil, and the causes of its growth cease when the plant ceases. But an elementary existence from the universe grows toward the plant.

In the lecture on human life from the aspect of spiritual science, I have mentioned some of these things. The plants grow out of the soil from below. A spiritual element grows toward the plant from above. It is thus with all beings. What you observe in Nature is contained in all existence. Above all, there is a stream of social, ethical-moral and historical life. Events do not consist in a continuous stream, but a Time Spirit reigns for a while; another one replaces him; a third one replaces him; a fourth one replaces him; and so on. When a Time Spirit replaces another one, there is a difference also in the stream of continuous events. When such a new period begins, it is not possible to say that its events are the immediate effect of preceding events. They are not the effect of the preceding ones, in the sense in which we imagine this.

There is indeed an order of law in the successive course of events, but what we generally call necessity is an illusion, if we look upon it as it is often looked upon today. In the course of continuous events, we have something similar to what we find when we look at the tree—where the tree ceases, the elementary tree begins; but in Nature, a being belonging to the visible kingdom of the senses touches a being that remains invisible to the senses, a super-sensible being; the world of the senses and the super-sensible world touch. There is something similar also in the course of Time. Just as the physical tree ceases and an elementary tree begins, so also in the course of Time, something ceases and something new begins. There are epochs in which old events and old impulses cease, as it were, and are replaced by new ones. At such points of time, people like to keep to Lucifer and Ahriman, who help them to maintain what is really dead. It is possible to keep alive in human consciousness impulses and forces that are, in reality, dead. This is not possible in Nature. If someone cultivates exactly the same kind of ideas in 1914 that were justified in 1876, he can do so of course. He can do this because, in the continuous stream of human events, which is seized by Ahriman and Lucifer, the old can be maintained even if it is already dead. It is the same as if someone were to make a tree grow on and on without ceasing, after it had reached its natural limits. In the course of history we generally find that people cannot face a new epoch rightly; in other words, that they cannot place themselves at the service of the new Time Spirit.

In our age this is particularly important. During the last weeks we have spoken of the spiritual events of 1879. This was the end of an epoch. Something died and ceased to exist, just as the tree ceases. From 1879 onward it became necessary (this is of course still necessary today and will be so for a long time) that people should open themselves to the ideas and impulses coming from the spiritual world. Otherwise the old impulses become Ahrimanic or Luciferic.

These remarks contain something very important. The last third of the nineteenth century was an important time in the evolution of humanity. It was necessary, and it is still necessary, that people should become accessible to the influence of inspired ideas. People must open themselves to these. But looked upon from outside (we shall not only look upon this from outside, but study the deeper inner meaning), looked upon from outside, things have a very hopeless aspect. Impulses did come from the spiritual world. They came streaming in and worked in order that men might be led beyond this point, beyond the year 1879, and in order that they might open themselves to inspired ideas. They were impulses that could give men thoughts enabling them to become conscious, even at the end of the nineteenth century, that whenever we fulfill actions of a historical, social or ethical-moral value within the life of the community, we fulfill them together with our dead, and with the Archangeloi, Angeloi, and Archai. These impulses were there; they were there, but went past many people without leaving a trace. I have said that today I will first consider these things from an outer aspect, and it is good if you realize how apparently everything went past without leaving a trace. In the second half of the nineteenth century important things and important impulses already existed, and there were people who proclaimed and wrote significant thoughts. If we look at these thoughts today they may seem abstract. This is indeed so. But they are not abstract thoughts and they should not remain as they were then. (I repeat once more that this is looked upon from outside, tomorrow we shall consider these things from an inner aspect.) This was the case more or less in all spheres of modern civilized life. For instance—who studies the life of this country, Switzerland, in such a way as to say: In the fifties of the nineteenth century a man lived here in Switzerland, a man with great ideas, that were indeed of a philosophical kind. But had they been accepted by two or three, had they been popularized, would they not have had a very fruitful, spiritualizing influence on the entire history of Switzerland? Who considers, for instance, that in the middle of the nineteenth century a high spirit lived in Otto Heinrich Jäger? He is one of the greatest men of Switzerland. But who knows his name now, and who names him? Who is aware of the fact that although his thoughts had an abstract appearance they were only apparently abstract. They might have become concrete, they might have blossomed and borne fruit, because something very great was in this man, who taught at the Zurich University and wrote books on great thoughts, thoughts that should enter the life of the present. He wrote on the idea of human liberty and its connection with the entire spiritual world. Otto Heinrich Jager wrote, here in Switzerland, a kind of “Philosophy of Spiritual Activity,” from another point of view than my own The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, which arose in the nineties.

Innumerable examples like this one could be given. The most fruitful ideas germinated and greened, but what is recounted today as the spiritual history of the nineteenth century leading into the twentieth century is the least significant part of all that really took place, and the most important part, that influenced it most of all, has not been considered at all.

This is how matter stand, from an exterior aspect, to begin with. Perhaps they will look more hopeful when we shall look at them from an inner standpoint.

The subject that we shall discuss now is a very wide one, and today it will not be possible to deal with it as extensively as I should have liked. But we shall continue these considerations later on. In these considerations, I should like to give you a basis for the understanding of freedom and necessity, so that you may obtain a picture of what must be considered from an occult point of view, in order to understand the course of the social, historical and ethical-moral life of man.

We emphasized that, as far as the life between birth and death is concerned, we only experience in a waking condition what we perceive through the senses, what reaches us through our sense-impressions and what we experience in our thoughts. Man dreams through everything contained as living reality in his feelings, and he sleeps through everything contained as deeper necessity, in the impulses of his will, everything existing as the deeper reality. In the life of our feelings and of our will we live in the same spheres which we inhabit with the so-called dead.

Let us first form a conception of what is really contained in the life of our senses from an exterior aspect. We can picture the sense-impressions as if they were spread out before us—I might say, like a carpet. Of course, we must imagine that this carpet contains also the impressions of our hearing, the impressions of the twelve senses, such as we know them through Anthroposophy. You know that in reality there are twelve senses. This carpet of the sense impressions covers, as it were, a reality “lying behind”—if I may use this expression (but I am speaking in comparisons). This reality lying behind the sense perceptions must not be imagined as the scientist imagines the world of the atoms, or as a certain philosophical direction imagines the “thing in itself.” In my public lectures I have emphasized that when we look for the “thing in itself,” as it is done in modern philosophy and in the Kant-philosophy, this implies more or less the same as breaking the mirror to see what is behind it, in order to find the reality of beings that we see in a mirror. I do not speak in this sense of something behind the sense perceptions; what I mean is something spiritual behind the sense-perceptions, something spiritual in which we ourselves are embedded, but which cannot reach the usual consciousness of man between birth and death. If we could solve the riddle contained in the carpet of sense perceptions as a first step toward the attainment of the spiritual reality, so that we would see more than the manifold impressions of our sense-impulses—what would we see, in this first stage of solving the riddle, of solving spiritually the riddle of the carpet woven by our senses? Let us look into this question.

It will surprise us what we must describe as that which first appears to us. What we first see is a number of forces; all aim at permeating with impulses our entire life from our birth—or let us say, from our conception—to our death. When trying to solve the riddle of this carpet of the senses, we would not see our life in its single events, but we would see its entire organization. At first it would not strike us as something so strange; for, on this first stage of penetrating into the secret of the sense-perceptions, we would find ourselves, not such as we are now, in this moment, but such as we are throughout our entire life between birth and death. This life, that does not extend as far as our physical body, and that cannot be perceived, therefore, with the physical senses, permeates our etheric body, our body of formative forces. And our body of formatives forces is, essentially, the expression of this life that could be perceived if we could eliminate the senses, or the sense-impressions. If the carpet of the senses could be torn, as it were (and we tear it when we ascend to a spiritual vision) man finds his own self, the self as it is organized for this incarnation on earth, in which he makes this observation. But, as stated, the senses cannot perceive this.

With what can we perceive this? Man already possesses the instrument needed for such a perception, but on a stage of evolution that still renders a real perception impossible. What we would thus perceive cannot reach the eye, nor the ear—cannot enter any sense organ. Instead—please grasp this well—it is breathed in, it is sucked in with the breath. The etheric foundation of our lung (the physical lung is out of the question, for, such as it is, the lung is not a real perceptive organ) that which lies etherically at the foundation of our lung, is really an organ of perception, but between birth and death the human being cannot use it as an organ of perception for what he breathes in. The air we breathe, every breath of air and the way in which it enters the whole rhythm of our life, really contains our deeper reality between birth and death. But things are arranged in such a way that here on the physical plane the foundation of our entire lung-system is in an unfinished condition, and has not advanced as far as the capacity of perceiving. If we were to investigate what constitutes its etheric foundation, we would find, on investigating this and on grasping it rightly, that it is, in reality, exactly the same thing as our brain and sense organs from a physical aspect, here in the physical world. At the foundation of our lung-system we find a brain in an earlier stage of evolution; we might say, in an infantile stage of evolution. Also in this connection we bear within us, as it were (I say purposely, “as it were”), a second human being. It will not be wrong if you imagine that you also possess an etheric head—except that this etheric head cannot yet be used as an organ of perception in our everyday life. But it has the possibility of perceptive capacity for that which lies behind the body of formative forces, as that which builds up this body of formative forces. However, that which lies behind the etheric body as creative force is the element into which we enter when we pass through the portal of death. Then we lay aside the etheric body. But we enter into that which is active and productive in this body of formatives forces. Perhaps it may be difficult to imagine this; but it will be good if you try to think this out to the end.

Let us imagine the physical organization of the head and the physical organization of the lung; from the universe come cosmic impulses that express themselves rhythmically in the movements of the lungs. Through our lungs we are related with the entire universe, and the entire universe works at our etheric body. When we pass through the portal of death, we lay aside the etheric body. We enter that which is active in our lung-system, and this is connected with the entire universe. This accounts for the surprising consonance to be found in the rhythm of human life and the rhythm of breathing. I have already explained that when we calculate the number of breaths we draw in one day, we obtain 25,920 breaths a day, by taking as the basis 18 breaths a minute (hence 18 x 60 x 24). Man breathes in and breathes out; this constitutes his rhythm, his smallest rhythm to start with. Then there is another rhythm in life, as I have already explained before—namely, that every morning when we awake we breathe into our physical system, as it were, our soul being, the astral body and the ego, and we breathe them out again when we fall asleep. We do this during our whole life. Let us take an average length of life—then we can make the following calculation:—We breathe in and breathe out our own being 365 times a year; if we take 71 years as the average length of human life, we obtain 25,915. you see, more or less the same number. (Life differs according to the single human being.) We find that in the life between birth and death we breathe in and out 25,920 times what we call our real self. Thus we may say;—There is the same relationship between ourselves and the world to which we belong as there is between the breath we draw in and the elements around. During our life we live in the same rhythm in which we live during our day through our breathing. Again, if we take our life—let us say, approximately 71 years, and if we consider this life as a cosmic day (we will call a human life a cosmic day), we obtain a cosmic year by multiplying this by 365. The result is 25,920 (again, approximately one year). In this length of time, in 25,920 years, the sun returns to the same constellation of the Zodiac. If the sun is in Aries in a certain year, it will rise again in Aries after 25,920 years. In the course of 25,920 years the sun moves around the entire Zodiac. Thus, when an entire human life is breathed out into the cosmos, this is a cosmic breath, which is in exactly the same relationship with the cosmic course of the sun around the Zodiac as one breath in one day in life. Here we have deep inner order of laws! Everything is built up on rhythm. We breathe in a threefold way, or at least we are placed into the breathing process in a threefold way. First, we breathe through our lungs in the elementary region; this rhythm is contained in the number 25,920. Then we breathe within the entire solar system, by taking sunrise and sunset as parallel to our falling asleep and awaking; through our life we breathe in a rhythm that is again contained in the number 25,920. Finally, the cosmos breathes us in and out, again in a rhythm determined by the number 25,920—the sun's course around the Zodiac.

Thus we stand within the whole visible universe; at its foundation lies the invisible universe. When we pass through the portal of death we enter this invisible universe. Rhythmical life is the life that lies at the foundation of our feelings. We enter the rhythmical life of the universe in the time between death and a new birth. This rhythmical life lies behind the carpet woven by our senses, as the life that determines our etheric life. If we would have a clairvoyant consciousness, we would see this cosmic rhythm that is, as it were, a rhythmical, surging cosmic ocean of an astral kind. In this rhythmically surging astral ocean we find the so-called dead, the beings of the higher hierarchies and what belongs to us, but beneath the threshold. There arise the feelings that we dream away, and the impulses of the will that we sleep away, in their true reality.

We may ask, in a comparison, as it were, and without becoming theological: Why has a wise cosmic guidance arranged matters so that man—such as he is between birth and death—cannot perceive the rhythmical life behind the carpet of the senses? Why is the human head, the hidden head that corresponds to the lung-system, not suitable for an adequate perception? This leads us to a truth which was kept secret, one might say, right into our days, by the occult schools in question, because other secrets are connected with it; these must not be revealed—or should not have been revealed so far. But our period is one in which such things must reach the consciousness of mankind.

The occult schools that were inaugurated here and there keep such things secret for reasons that will not be explained today. They still keep them secret, although today these things must be brought to the consciousness of mankind. Since the last third of the nineteenth century, means and ways were given whereby that which occult schools have kept back (in an unjustified way, in many cases) becomes obsolete. This is connected with the event that I mentioned to you—the event which took place in the autumn of 1879. Now we can only lift the outer veil of this mystery; but even this outer veil is one of the most important pieces of knowledge concerning man. It is indeed a head that we bear within us as the head of a second man; it is a head, but also a body belongs to this head, and this body is, at first, the body of an animal. Thus we bear within us a second human being. This second human being possesses a properly formed head, but attached to it, the body of an animal—a real centaur. The centaur is a truth, an etheric truth.

It is important to bear in mind that a relatively great wisdom is active in this being—a wisdom connected with the entire cosmic rhythm. The head belonging to this centaur sees the cosmic rhythm in which it is embedded, also during the existence between death and a new birth. It is the cosmic rhythm that has been shown in a threefold way, also in numbers—the rhythm on which many secrets of the universe are based. This head is much wiser than our physical head. All human beings bear within them another far wiser being—the centaur. But in spite of his wisdom, this centaur is equipped with all the wild instincts of the animals.

Now you will understand the wisdom of the guiding forces of the universe. Man could not be given a consciousness which is, on the one hand, strong and able to see through the cosmic rhythm, and on the other hand, uncontrolled and full of wild instincts. But the centaur's animal nature—please connect this with what I have told you in other lectures dealing with this subject from another point of view—is tamed and conquered in the next incarnation, during his passage through the world of cosmic rhythms between death and a new birth. The foundation of our lung-system in the present incarnation appears as our physical head, although this is dulled down to an understanding limited to the senses, and what lies at the basis of our lung-system appears as an entire human being whose wild instincts are tamed in the next incarnation. The centaur of this incarnation is, in the next incarnation, the human being endowed with sense perception.

Now you will be able to grasp something else:—You will understand why I said that, during man' s existence between death and a new birth, the animal realm is his lowest realm and that he must conquer its forces. What must he do? In what work must he be engaged between two incarnations? He must fulfill the task of transforming the centaur, the animal in him, into a human form for the next incarnation. This work requires a real knowledge embracing the impulses of the whole animal realm; in the age of Chiron, men possessed this knowledge atavistically, in a weaker form. Although the knowledge of Chiron is a knowledge weakened by this incarnation, it is of the same kind. Now you see the connection. You see why man needs this lower realm between death and a new birth; he must master it; he needs it because he must transform the centaur into a human being.

What Anthroposophy sets forth has been attained only in single flashes outside the occult schools. There have always been a few men who discovered these things, as if in flashes. Especially in the nineteenth century a few scattered spirits had an inkling, as it were, that something resembling the taming of wild instincts can be found in man. Some writers speak of this. And the way in which they speak of these things shows how this knowledge frightens them. High spiritual truths cannot be gained with the same ease as scientific truths, which can be digested so comfortably by the mind. These high truths often have this quality; their reality scares us. In the nineteenth century some spirits were scared and tremendously moved when they discovered what speaks out of the human eye that can look round so wildly at times, or out of other things in man. One of the writers of the nineteenth century expressed himself in an extreme manner by saying that every man really bears within him a murderer. He meant this centaur, of whom he was dimly conscious.

It must be emphasized again and again that human nature contains enigmas which must be solved gradually. These things must be borne in mind courageously and calmly. But they must not become trivial, because they make human consciousness approach the great earnestness of life. In this age it is our task to see the earnest aspect of life, to see the serious things that are approaching and that announce themselves in such terrible signs.

This is one aspect, preparing the way for certain considerations that I shall continue very soon. The other aspect is as follows:—Man passes through the portal of death. Last time I mentioned the great change in man's entire way of experiencing things, by showing you how a connection with the dead is established—what we tell him seems to come out of the depths of our own being. In the intercourse with the dead the reciprocal relationships are reversed. When you associate with a human being here on earth, you can hear yourself speaking to him—you hear what you tell him, and you hear from him what he tells you. When you are in communication with the dead, his words rise out of your own soul, and what you tell him reaches you like an echo coming from the dead. You cannot hear what you tell him as something coming from yourself; you hear this as something coming from him. I wished to give you an example of the great difference between the physical world in which we live between birth and death, and the world in which we live between death and a new birth.

We look into this world when we contemplate it from a certain standpoint. When we look through the carpet woven by our senses, we look into the rhythm of the world—but this rhythm has two aspects. I will show you these two aspects of the rhythm in a diagram, by drawing here, let us say, a number of stars—planets if you like [The drawing can not be rendered.]. Here are a number of stars or planets—the planetary system, if you like, belonging to our Earth. Man passes through this planetary system in the time between death and a new birth. (A printed cycle of lectures contains details on these things.) Man passes through the planetary system. But in passing through the world which is still the invisible world, he also reaches—between death and a new birth—the world which is no longer visible, and is not even spatial. These things are difficult to describe, because when we imagine anything in the physical world we are used to imagine it spatially. But beyond the world that can be perceived through the senses lies a world which is no longer spatial. In a diagram I must illustrate this spatially. The ancients said:--Beyond the planets lies the sphere of the fixed stars (this is expressed wrongly, but this does not matter now), and beyond this lies the super-sensible world. The ancients pictured it spatially, but this is merely a picture of this world.

When man has entered this super-sensible world, in the time between death and a new birth, one can say (although this is also rendered in a picture):—Man is then beyond the stars, and the stars themselves are used by man, between death and a new birth, for a kind of reading. Between death and a new birth, the stars are used by man for a kind of reading. Let us realize this clearly. How do we read here on earth? When we read here on earth we have approximately twelve consonants and seven vowels with various variations; we arrange these letters in many ways into words; we mix these letters together. Think how a typographer throws together the letters in order to form words. All the words consist of the limited number of letters that we possess. For the dead, the fixed stars of the Zodiac and the planets are what the letters—approximately twelve consonants and seven vowels—are for us, here on the physical plane. The fixed stars of the Zodiac correspond to the consonants; the planets are the vowels. Beyond the starry heaven, the outlook is peripheral. (Between birth and death, man's outlook is from a center; here on the earth he has his eye, and from there his gaze rays out to the various points.) It is most difficult of all to imagine that things are reversed after death so that we see peripherally. We are really in the circumference, and we see the Zodiac-starsthe consonants and the planets—the vowels, from outside. Thus we look from outside at the events taking place on earth. According to the part of our being which we imbue with life, we look down on the earth through the Taurus and Mars, or we look through the Taurus, in between Mars and Jupiter. (You must not picture this from the earthly standpoint, but reversed—for you are looking down on the earth.) When you are dead and circle round the earth, you read with the help of the starry system. But you must picture this kind of reading differently. We could read in another way, but it would be more difficult, from a technical aspect, than our present reading system. It is possible to read differently—we could read in such a way that we have a sequence of letters—a, b, c, d, e, f, g, etc.—or arranged according to another system and instead of arranging them in the type-case, we could read in the following way:—If the word “he” is to be read, a ray of light falls on h and e; if “goes” is to be read, a ray falls on g, o, e, s. The sequence of the letters could be there, and they could be illuminated as required. It would not be arranged so comfortably, from a technical aspect—but you can picture an earthly life in which reading is arranged in this way—an alphabet is there, and then there would be some arrangement which always illuminates one letter at a time; then we can read the sequence of the illuminated letters, and obtain as a result, Goethe's Faust for instance.

This cannot be imagined so easily; yet it is possible to imagine this, is it not?

The dead reads in this way, with the aid of the starry system: the fixed stars remain immobile, but he moves—for he is in movement—the fixed stars remain still and he moves round. If he must read the Lion above Jupiter, he moves round in such a way that the Lion stands above Jupiter. He connects the stars, just as we connect h and e in order to read “he.” This reading of the earthly conditions from the cosmos—and the visible cosmos belongs to this—consists in this—The dead can read that which lies spiritually at the foundation of the stars. Except that the entire system is based on immobility—the entire godly system of reading from out the universe is based on immobility.

What does this mean? This means that according to the intentions of certain beings of the higher hierarchies, the planets should be immobile, they should have an immobile aspect; then the being outside engaged in reading would be the only one moving about. The events on the earth could be read rightly from out the universe if the planets would not move, if the planets had an immobile position.

But they are not immobile! Why not? They would be so, if the world's creation had proceeded in such a way that the Spirits of Form, or the Exusiai alone, had created the world.

But the luciferic spirits participated in this work, and interfered—as you already know. Luciferic spirits brought to the earth what used to be law during the Moon-period of the Earth, where several things were governed by the Spirits of Form; luciferic spirits brought this system of movement to the Earth from the Moon-period. They caused the planets' movement. A luciferic element in the cosmic spaces brought the planets into movement. In a certain respect this disturbs the order created by the Elohim; a luciferic element enters the cosmos. It is that luciferic element which man must learn to know between death and a new birth; he must learn to know it by deducting, as it were, in what he reads, that which comes from the movement of the planets, or the moving stars. He must deduct this—then he will obtain the right result.

Indeed, between death and a new birth we learn a great deal concerning the sway and activity of the luciferic element in the universe. Such a thing, like the course of the planets, is connected with the luciferic.

This is the other side that I wished to point out. But from this you will see the connection between the other life between death and new birth, and the present life. We might say that the world has two aspects; here, between birth and death we see one aspect, through our senses. Between death and a new birth we see it from the reversed side, with the soul's eye. And between death and a new birth, we learn to read the conditions here on earth in relationship with the spiritual world. Try to realize this, try to imagine these conditions. Then you will have to confess that it is, indeed, deeply significant to say that the world which we first learn to know through our senses and our understanding is an illusion, a Maya. As soon as we approach the real world, we find that the world that we know is related to this real world in the same way in which the reflection in the mirror is related to the living reality before the mirror, which is reflected in it. If you have a mirror, with several shapes reflected in it, this shows that there are shapes outside the mirror, which are reflected by the mirror. Suppose that you look into the mirror as a disinterested spectator. The three figures which I have drawn here [diagram not available] fight against each other; in the mirror you see them fighting. This shows that the mirrored figures do something, but you cannot say that the figure A, there in the mirror, beats the figure B in the mirror! What you see in the mirror is the image of the fight, because the figures outside the mirror are doing something.

If you believe that A, there in the mirror, or the reflected image of A, does something to B, there in the mirror, you are quite mistaken. You cannot set up comparisons and connections between the reflected images, but you can only say:—What is reflected in the mirrored images points to something in the world of reality, which is reflected. But the world given to man is a mirror, a Maya, and in this world man sees causes and effects. When you speak of this world of causes and effects, it is just as if you were to believe that the mirrored image A beats the mirrored image B. Something happens among the real beings reflected by the mirror, but the impulses leading to the fight are not to be found in the mirrored A and in the mirrored B. Investigate nature and its laws; you will find, at first, that such as it appears to your senses it is a Maya, a reflection or a mirrored picture. The reality lies beneath the threshold which I have indicated to you, the threshold between the life of thought and the life of feelings. Even your own reality is not contained at all in your waking consciousness; your own reality is contained in the spiritual reality; it is dipped into the dreaming and sleeping worlds of feeling and of will. Thus it is nonsense to speak of a causing necessity in the world of Maya—and it is also nonsense to speak of cause and effect in the course of history! It is real nonsense! To this I should like to add that it is nonsense to say that the events of 1914 are the result of events in 1913, 1912, etc. This is just as clever as saying:—This A in the mirror is a bad fellow; he beats the poor B, there in the mirror! What matters is to find the true reality. And this lies beneath the threshold, which must be crossed by going down into the world of feeling and of will—and does not enter our usual waking consciousness.

You see, we must interpret in another way the idea that “something had to happen” or “something was needed;” we cannot interpret it as the ordinary historians or scientists do this. We must ask:--Who are the real beings that produced the events of a later period, which followed an earlier one? The preceding historical events are merely the mirrored reflections—they cannot be the cause of what took place subsequently.

This, again, is one side of the question. The other side will be clear to you if you realize that only a Maya is contained in the waking reality embraced by our thoughts and by our sense perceptions. This Maya cannot be the cause of anything. It cannot be a real cause. But pure thoughts can determine man's actions. This is a fact taught by experience, if man is not led to deeds by passions, desires and instincts, but by clear thoughts. This is possible and can take place—pure ideals can be the impulses of human actions. But ideals alone cannot effect anything. I can carry out an action under the influence of a pure idea; but the idea cannot effect anything.

In order to understand this, compare once more the idea with the mirrored image. The reflection in the mirror cannot cause you to run away. If you run away it displeases you, or something is there which has nothing to do with the reflection in the mirror. The reflection in the mirror cannot take a whip and cause you to run away. This image cannot be the cause of anything. When a human being fulfills actions under the influence of his reflected image, i.e., his thoughts, he fulfills them out of the Maya; he carries out his actions out of the cosmic mirror. It is he who carries out the actions, and for this reason he acts freely. But when he is led by his passions, his actions are not free; he is not free, even if he is led by his feelings. He is free when he is led by his thoughts, that are mere reflections, or mirrored images. For this reason I have explained in my The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity that man can act freely and independently if he is guided by pure thoughts, pure thinking, because pure thoughts cannot cause or produce anything, so that the causing force must come from somewhere else. I have used the same image again in my book The Riddle of Man. We are free human beings because we carry out actions under the influence of Maya, and because this Maya, or the world immediately around us, cannot bring about or cause anything. Our freedom is based on the fact that the world that we perceive is Maya. The human being united himself in wedlock with Maya, and thus becomes a free being. If the world that we perceive were a reality, this reality would compel us, and we would not be free. We are free beings just because the world which we perceive is not a reality and for this reason it cannot force us to do anything, in the same way in which a mirrored reflection cannot force us to run away. The secret of the free human being consists in this—to realize the connection of the world perceived as Maya—the mere reflection of a reality—and the impulses coming from man himself The impulses must come from man himself, when he is not induced to an action by something that influences him.

Freedom can be proved quite clearly if the proofs are sought on this basis:—That the world given to us as a perception is a mirrored reflection and not a reality.

These are thoughts that pave the way. I wish to speak to you about things that lie at the foundation of human nature—that part of human nature that can perceive reality and has not attained the required maturity in one incarnation, but must be weakened in order to become man in the next incarnation. The centaur, of whom I spoke to you, who is to be found beneath the threshold of consciousness, would be able to perceive truth and reality, but the centaur cannot as yet perceive. What we perceive is not a reality! But man can let himself be determined by that part of his being which is no longer, or is not yet, a centaur; then his actions will be those of a free being. The secret of our freedom is intimately connected with the taming of our centaur-nature. This centaur-nature is contained in us in such a way that it is chained and fettered, so that we may not perceive the reality of the centaur, but only the Maya. If we let ourselves be impelled by Maya, we are free.

This is looked upon from one side. From the other side we learn to know the world between death and a new birth. That which otherwise surrounds us as the universe shrivels up, and enables us to read in the cosmos; the physical letters are a reflection of this. The fact that languages contain today a larger number of letters (the Finnish languages has still only twelve consonants) is due to the different shadings; but, essentially, there are twelve consonants and seven differently shaded vowels. The various shadings in the vowels were added by the luciferic element; what causes the vowels to move corresponds to the movement of the planets.

Thus you see the connection of that which exists in human life on a small scale; the connection between the reading of the letters that are here on the paper, and that which lives outside, in the cosmos. Man is born out of the cosmos, and is not only the result of what preceded him in the line of heredity.

These are some of the foundations that will enable us gradually to reach the real conceptions of freedom and necessity in the historical, social and ethical-moral course of events.

If we wish to understand what lies at the foundation of the two impulses that penetrate so deeply into human life—that of the so-called free will and of the so-called necessity—then we must add still other thoughts to the various ideas already gained as a foundation. This I will do today, in order that tomorrow we may be in a position to draw the conclusion, or inference, in regard to the concept of free will and necessity in the social, ethical-moral, and historical processes of human life. In discussing such things it becomes more and more evident that people—especially modern people—strive to embrace the highest, most important and significant things with the most primitive kinds of thoughts. It is taken for granted (I have often mentioned this) that certain things must be known in order to understand a clock; someone who has not the slightest idea of how the wheels of a clock work together, etc., will hardly attempt to explain, on the spur of the moment, the details of a clock's mechanism. Yet we wish to be competent judges of free will and necessity in all situations of life without having learned anything fundamental about these things. We prefer to remain ignorant concerning the most important and most essential things, which can only be understood if we consider their whole relationship to human nature, and we wish to know and judge everything imaginable of our own accord. This is particularly the desire of our times. When it is shown that the human being is a complicated being, organized in manifold ways, a being that penetrates deeply, on the one hand, into all that is connected with the physical plane, and on the other, into all that is connected with the spiritual world, then people often object that such things are dry and intellectual, and that the most important and essential things must be grasped in quite another way.

The world will have to learn (perhaps just the present catastrophic events may teach us something) how much lies hidden in man and in his relationship with the course of the world's evolution. For years we have emphasized that we can differentiate roughly in man what we may call his physical nature, or his physical body; his etheric body, or the body of formatives forces, as I have called it; his astral body, which is already psychic; and the actual ego.

We have emphasized recently from the most varied points of view that—in reality—man, as he lives between waking and sleeping, in his usual waking day-consciousness, has some knowledge only of the impressions given to him by his senses, and of his thoughts; but he dreams away the real contents of his life of feeling, and sleeps away the real contents of his life of the will. Dream and sleep stretch into the world of waking life; during our usual waking consciousness, our feeling life is hardly more than a dream, and the real contents of our will reach our consciousness just as little as a dreamless sleep. Through our feelings, through the contents of our will, we dive down into the world (we have pointed this out specially during these considerations) in which we live together with the dead, in the midst of the Beings of the higher Hierarchies, the Angeloi, the Archangeloi, Archai, etc. As soon as we live in a feeling—and we live constantly in feelings—all that lives in the kingdom of the dead lives with us in the sphere, or in the realm of feeling.

Now something else must be added to this. In the life of ordinary waking consciousness we speak of our ego. But in reality we can only speak of this ego in a very unreal sense as far as our usual waking consciousness is concerned. For what is the real nature and being of this ego? The usual waking consciousness cannot gain knowledge of this. When the clairvoyant dives down consciously into the true being of the ego, he will find that the true ego of man is of a will-like nature. What man possesses in his everyday consciousness is only an idea of the ego. This is why it is so easy for the scientific psychologists to do away entirely with this ego although, on the other hand, this is really nonsense. These scientists and psychologists say that the ego develops gradually and that the human being acquires this ego in the course of his individual development. In this way he does not acquire the ego itself, but only the idea of the ego. It is easy to eliminate the ego, because for the everyday consciousness it is merely a thought, a reflection of the true, genuine ego. The real ego lives in the world in which the true reality of our will also lives. And what we call our astral body, what we designate as the actual soul life, lives in the same sphere as our life of feelings. If you bear in mind the things that we have thus considered, you will see that we dive down with our ego and our astral body into the same region that we share with the dead. When we penetrate clairvoyantly into our true ego, we are also among the egos of the dead, as well as among the egos of the so-called living.

We must realize such things quite clearly, in order to grasp to what an extent man lives, with his everyday consciousness, in the so-called world of appearance, or in Maya, as it is called by a oriental term. We are consciously awake in the world of our senses, in the world of our thoughts; but the sense impulses give us only that portion of the world that is spread out as Nature. And our world of thoughts gives us only that which is in us and corresponds to our own nature between birth and death. That which is our eternal nature remains in the world that we share with the dead. When we enter the life of the physical plane through incarnation, it remains indeed in the world in which also the dead live.

In order to understand these things fully we must grasp thoughts which are not so easy to digest (but these things must be said because they are so)—thoughts that cost us an effort to think out. Man has no such thoughts in the course of his everyday waking consciousness. He prefers to limit his knowledge to that which is stretched out in space and that which takes its course in Time. A frequent pathological symptom is this one: to imagine even the spiritual world spatially, although these thoughts may be nebulous, thin and misty; yet we somehow wish to imagine is spatially; we wish to think of souls flying about in space, and so on. We must go beyond the ideas of space and time to more complicated ideas, if we really wish to penetrate into these things. Today I wish to draw your attention to something that is very important for the understanding of the whole of human life.

Let us bear in mind once more the fact that—roughly speaking—we possess this four-fold nature—the physical body, the body of formative forces or etheric body, the astral body, and the ego.

Now, when someone speaks from the standpoint of the usual waking consciousness, he may ask:—How old is a person—How old is a certain person A? Someone may give his age, let us say 35, and he may believe that he has made an important statement. In stating that a certain person is 35 years old he has, in fact, said something of importance for the physical plane and for the usual waking consciousness; but for the spiritual world, in other words, for the etheric being of man, this implies only a part of the reality. When you say: I am 35 years old—you only say this in regard to your physical body. You must say: My physical body is 35 years old—then this will be correct. But these words express nothing at all as far as the etheric body, or the body of formative forces is concerned, and nothing at all as far as the other members of the human being are concerned. For it is an illusion, it is indeed quite fantastic to think that your ego, for instance, is 35 years old, when your physical body is 35 years old. You see, here we must bear in mind different speeds, different rapidities in the development of the various members.

The following figures will make you realize this. A human being is, let us say, 7 years old; this means nothing less than this:--his physical body has reached the age of 7 years. His etheric body, his body of formative forces, is not yet 7 years old, for his body of formative forces does not maintain the same speed as the physical body and has not yet reached this age. We are not aware of such things just because we imagine time as one continuous stream, and thus we cannot form the thought that different things maintain different speeds within the course of time. This physical body that is 7 years old has developed according to a certain speed. The etheric body develops more slowly, the astral body still more slowly, and slowest of all, the ego. The etheric body is only 5 years and 3 months old when the physical body is 7 years old, because it develops more slowly. The astral body is 3 years and 6 months old, and the ego, 1 year and 9 months. Thus you must say to yourself—when a child is 7 years old, its ego is only 1 year and 9 months old. This ego undergoes a slower development on the physical plane. On the physical plane this ego develops at a slower pace; it is a slower pace, the same pace that we find in our life with the dead. Why do we not grasp what takes place in the stream of the experiences of the dead? Because we do not grow accustomed to the slower pace of the dead, and do not admit this into our thoughts and especially into our feelings, in order to hold them fast.

Hence, if someone is 28 years old as far as his physical body is concerned, then his ego is only 7 years old. As far as your ego is concerned, which is the essential part of your being, you thus maintain a much slower pace in the course of development than that of the physical body. You see, the difficulty consists in the fact that, generally, we consider speed, or velocities, merely as outer velocities. When things move one beside another, we say that one thing moves more quickly and the other one more slowly because we use Time as a comparison. But here the speed within Time is different. Without this insight into the fact that the different members of the human being have different speeds in their development, it is impossible to grasp the connections with the true deeper being of man.

From this you will see how in everyday consciousness people simply throw together entirely different things contained in human nature.

Man consists of this four-fold being, and the four members of this being are so different from one another that they even have different ages. But man is under a great illusion in making everything depend on his physical body. He says something that has absolutely no meaning whatever for the spiritual world, in stating that his ego is 28 years old, when he is 28 according to his physical body. His statement would only have a meaning if he would say:—My ego is 7 years old—in the case of the ego, a year is naturally four times as long as in the case of the physical body. One might also say that the age of the four different members of the human being must be reckoned according to four entirely different measurements of time; for the ego, a year is simply four times as long as for the physical body.

Pictorially you might conceive this as a projection from the physical plane—for instance, one human being may normally become 28 years old, while another child may grow more slowly and after 28 years be like a child of 7. Thus the whole matter appears at first like an abstract truth. But it is a fundamental reality in man. Just consider that our ego is the bearer of what we call our understanding, or our thinking consciousness of self. When our understanding and our conscious thinking are within our ego, then this understanding and conscious thinking are really essentially younger than we ourselves apparently are, according to our physical body. This is indeed so.

But this will show you that when a human being of 28 gives the impression of one whose understanding has developed to the age of 28, only one fourth of this understanding is really his own. It cannot be helped; when we have a certain quantity of understanding at 28, only a quarter of this is our own; the rest belongs to the universe, to the world in which we are submerged through our astral body, through our etheric body, and through our physical body. But we only know directly something of these bodies through ideas, through sense perceptions, in other words, again within the ego. This means that during our development as human beings between birth and death we are indeed mere apparitions of a reality. We make the impression of being four times as clever as we really are. This is true. All we possess, in addition to this one fourth, we owe to what holds sway in the historical, social, and moral processes within that world we dream away and sleep away. Dream and sleep impulses, which we have in common with the universe, seethe up, above the horizon of our being and fructify this fourth part of our understanding and soul, and make it four times as strong as it really is.

You see at this point arises the illusion concerning the freedom of man. Man is a free being; he is, indeed. But only the real, true man is a free being. That fourth part, of which I have just spoken, is a free being. Other beings play into the remaining three fourths; these cannot be free. This gives rise to the delusion in regard to freedom so that we continually ask:—Is man free or is he not free? Man is free when he connects this idea of freedom with the one fourth of his being, in the sense in which I have just explained it. If the human being wishes to have this freedom as an impulse of his own, then he must develop this fourth part in a corresponding, independent way. In usual life, this fourth part cannot assert itself, for the simple reason that it is overpowered by the other three fourths. In the remaining three fourths is active all that man calls his desires, his appetites, his emotions and passions. These slay his freedom, for what is contained in the universe in the form of impulses works through these desires, emotions and passions.

Now the question arises:—What shall we do to make this one fourth of our soul-life, which is a reality within us, really free? We must place this one fourth in relationship with that which is independent of the remaining three fourths.

I have tried to answer this question philosophically in my The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, by attempting to show how man can only realize the impulse of freedom within himself, when he places his actions, his deeds, entirely under the influence of pure thought, when he reaches the point of transforming impulses of pure thought into impulses of action, into impulses which are not in any way dependent upon the outer world for their development. All that which is developed out of the outer world does not allow us to realize freedom. Only that which develops in our thinking, independently of the outer world, as the motive of our actions, enables us to realize freedom.

Where do such motives come from? Where does that which does not come from the outer world come from? It comes out of the spiritual world. The human being need not be clairvoyantly conscious in every situation of life of how these impulses come from the spiritual world; they may nevertheless be within him all the same. But he will necessarily conceive these impulses in a somewhat different way than they must be conceived in reality. When we rise in clairvoyant consciousness to the first stage of the spiritual world, we come to the imaginative world; the second stage is the world of inspiration, as you know; the third stage, the world of intuition. Instead of allowing the impulses of our will or of our actions to rise out of our physical body, our astral body, and etheric body, we can receive them as imaginations, behind which stand inspirations and intuitions. That is, if we receive no impulses from our bodies, but only from the spiritual world. This does not need to be the conscious clairvoyant perception: “Now I will something and behind this stand intuition, inspiration, and imagination.”—but, instead, the result appears as an idea, as a pure thought, and has the appearance of an idea created within the element of fantasy. Because this is so, because such an idea, which lies at the foundation of free actions must appear to everyday consciousness as an idea created out of the element of fantasy, I call it moral fantasy in my The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. (That which lies at the foundation of free actions.) What, then, is this moral fantasy? This moral fantasy is the reverse of a mirrored reflection. What lies spread out around us as the outer physical reality is a mirrored reflection; physical reality sends us reflections of things. Moral fantasy is the image, through which we do not see. For this reason, things appear to us as fantasy. Behind them, however, stand the real impulses—imagination, inspiration, intuition—which are active. When we do not know that they are active, but only receive the influences into our usual consciousness, then this appears as fantasy. And these results of moral fantasy, these incentives to action, which do not lie in desires, passions and emotions—are free. But how can we attain them?

Moral fantasy can also be developed by a human being who is not clairvoyant. Everything that implies a real progress for humanity has always been born out of moral fantasy, insofar as this progress lay within the ethical sphere. The point in question is that man first develops a feeling, and then an enhanced feeling (we shall hear immediately, what is to be understood exactly by “enhanced feeling”)—that he is not merely here on this earth in order to accomplish things which concern him personally, or individually, but in order to accomplish things through which the will of the Time Spirits can be realized.

It appears as if something quite special were implied when one says: Man must realize the will of the Time Spirits. But a time will come when people will understand this much better than now. And a time will come when the contents of human teaching will not be that of the present. At present only ideas dealing with nature can be conveyed even to the most educated people; for what is imparted to people in regard to ethical and social life is in most cases an unreal, schematic abstraction; indeed, the greatest abstraction.

In this connection we have not yet attained what earlier ages already possessed. Only with great difficulty can a modern man immerse himself in earlier times. Earlier times possessed myths—myths that were connected with the vital life of the people, myths that penetrated into poetry, into art, into all manner of things. In Greece one spoke of Oedipus, of Hercules, and of other heroes, one tried to emulate those who had done things which were exemplary deeds, and first deeds, and one wished to tread in their footprints. Everyone wished to tread in these footprints. The thread of ideas, the thread of thought and feeling, led backwards. One felt at one with those long dead. What went out as an impulse from those who had died was told in myths; and these men lived in experiencing, in becoming one with the impulses of these myths.

Something similar must again be created and will be created if the impulses of spiritual science are rightly understood. Except that, in the future, souls will gaze forward much more than backward. The contents of public teaching must be that which binds human beings together with the creative activity of the Time, and above all, with the impulses of the Time Spirit, the corresponding Being from the Hierarchy of the Archai, concerning whom I have said, in an earlier description, that the so-called dead, as well as the living, are connected with him. People will learn in the public teaching of the future the meaning of such a period of culture as the one that began in the 15th century and closed the Greco-Latin period; in this fifth post-Atlantean period people will learn to know the real intentions of the universal World-All. They will take up the impulses of this fifth post-Atlantean period and they will know:—This must be realized between the 15th century and one of the centuries in a coming millennium. They will know: We belong to our period of culture in such a way that the impulses of this coming age stream through us. In future, even the children, as they learn to name the flowers and the stars (they do this less today—but it is at least something outwardly real) will learn to take up the real, spiritual impulses of the period. First they must be educated to do this. What is told as “history” today must first cease to be called “history.” In not too distant a future, instead of speaking of all the things contained in history as it is told today, people will speak of the spiritual impulses standing behind the historical evolution, impulses which are dreamed by human beings. These are the spiritual impulses that call man to freedom, and make him free, because they raise him to the world from which intuition, inspiration, and imagination come. For what happens outwardly on the physical plane, what constitutes outer history (I have explained this even in public lectures) loses its meaning as soon as it has occurred; in reality it does not justify our saying that the former event is always the cause of the latter. There is nothing more senseless than to recount history by describing, for instance, the deeds of Napoleon at the beginning of the 19th century, and then assuming that the events after Napoleon's exile are the consequence of Napoleon's actions. Nothing is more senseless than this! Descriptions of Napoleon imply exactly the same, as far as reality is concerned, as the description of a human corpse three days after death, as far as the dead man's life is concerned. What is now called “history” is a “corpse-history” compared with reality, even though this “corpse-history” has a great importance in the minds of many people.

What happens outwardly becomes a reality only when it is revealed in its development from spiritual impulses. Then it will be seen clearly that a human being's deeds, let us say, in a certain decade of a certain century, are the consequence of what he experienced before entering into his incarnation on earth; they are in no sense the consequence of events that occurred in the course of decades of physical experience on the earth, and so on. Spiritual Science, in the meaning of Anthroposophy, will have to bring more depth and more life—especially in regard to historical, social, and moral life—into the sphere of history above all. When this knowledge of the spiritual impulses will have become one of the essential demands of our time—it will then correspond to the living reality of the myths in ancient times—it will permeate human beings with impulses leading them to deeds and actions that will make them free. These things must first be understood; they will indeed influence real life when this understanding spreads over an ever-wider sphere.

But these considerations will show you something else besides. You will realize that the impulses of feeling, the impulses of will, which place us within the same sphere of life as the so-called dead, are a higher and more intensive reality than the one we know through our waking consciousness, in the form of ideas and sense impressions. For this reason, what has just been brought forward as a demand of our age, as something that must become an object of public teaching, can only be truly fruitful when it is grasped not merely with the understanding, but goes over into the impulses of feeling and into the impulses of will.

This can only come about when spiritual science is really seen as a reality, and not simply as a teaching. spiritual science is easily looked upon merely as a teaching, as a theory; but spiritual science is not a mere teaching, a mere theory, spiritual science is a living Word. For what is given out as spiritual science is the revelation from the world which we share with the higher Hierarchies and with the so-called dead. This very world speaks to us through spiritual science. And he who really understands spiritual science knows that the soul music of the spiritual world continues to resound in spiritual science. What we read, not from the dead letters, but from the real happenings in the spiritual world, can indeed permeate our feeling with true life, when we grasp spiritual science in this sense, as something which speaks to our inner being from out the spiritual world. I have emphasized at different times how the matter stands, when I described how, on the one hand, since 1879, spiritual life has the opportunity of streaming down to the physical plane in an entirely new way, and how, on the other hand, it must indeed face an opponent in the Spirits of Darkness, of whom we have spoken. Everything must still be achieved, before the content of spiritual science really enters the life of our feeling and will. And this can be achieved when certain things change fundamentally, in regard to which modern man has reached a cultural blind alley.

Something else must also work its way through; namely, evolution must develop in such a way that, on the one hand, the events of history may be compared to a growing tree (I have already used this picture during these considerations): but when the leaves have grown as far as the periphery, the tree ceases to grow. Here the dying process begins. It is the same with historical events. A certain group of events takes shape—let us describe it quite schematically:—Certain historical events have their roots. A definitive group of historical events may have their roots in the last third of the 18th century. I shall speak of this more clearly tomorrow. Other influences are added to these in the course of the 19th century, and so on. But you see, these historical events expand and reach their extreme boundaries. In this case the boundary is not the same as in the case of a tree or a plant, which does not grow beyond its periphery; but here a new root of historical events must begin. For decades, already, we have been living in a time in which such new historical events must spring out of direct intuition. But in the historical life of man, illusion can easily spread also over these things. To be sure, you can watch the growth of a plant, which grows according to its inner laws until it reaches a certain periphery and cannot grow beyond it. But now you can call forth an illusion—you can take wires, hang paper leaves on them, and give yourself the illusion that the plant continues to grow up to this point.

Such wires do indeed exist where historical events are concerned. While historical events should long ago have adopted another course, such wires are there instead; except that in historical evolution these wires are human prejudices, human indolence, which continue to maintain, on dead wires, what has died long ago. Certain people place themselves at the ends of these dead wires—in other words, at the outermost ends of human prejudice—and these people are often considered historical personalities; indeed, the true historical personalities. And people do not realize to what an extent these personalities sit on the wires of human prejudice. One of the most important tasks of the present is to begin to understand how certain personalities who are looked upon as “great” are, in reality, merely hanging on the wires of human prejudice; this is indeed one of the chief tasks of the present.

In the background of all these considerations stands a question which is looked upon in the present age in the light of materialism, and which is far more materialistic in its fundamental conceptions than can be imagined. This question refers to the origin of certain historical events. People speak of historical necessity; namely, that the events which took place, for instance, in the past year, were historically the result, as it were, of events which took place in the preceding years.

What I characterize here as “historical” reaches, of course, into everything that proceeds out of human actions—that is, into social life and civilized life in general. The materialistic conception does not only consist in leading spiritual phenomena back to the sphere of natural science or to a material cause, but it also consists in many other things. The materialistic conception would like to investigate the idea of free will in a full light. It would also like to interpret the events taking place in the course of history in the same way in which it contemplates scientific matters; namely, that a preceding cause always produces, with a certain necessity, something which follows it as an effect. Then people say, and believe they are thinking very clearly when they say this, that all events, also those that have broken into our world-happenings with such a catastrophic force, are a necessity.

In this sense, that is, in the meaning of scientific necessity, this is perfect nonsense, although the expression—all events are a necessity—is justified in other directions. If you consider the things that passed before our souls yesterday—namely, the complicated organization of human nature, you will gain an insight, not only with your understanding but also with your feeling, into the depths of the universal order of laws. You will also gradually lose the habit of thinking that this reality can be embraced in abstract scientific ideas limited to strict laws. Then your gaze will fall on certain phenomena in Nature that reveal many things, if they are looked upon in their true light. For instance, a phenomenon like the following one: Every year a great number of life-germs develop in the ocean, germs which do not become living beings. The life-germs, or eggs, are laid—and perish. Only a small part of these grow into real living beings. This, of course, does not only happen in the wide ocean, but in the whole of Nature. Consider how many life-germs are supposed to become living beings, even in the short space of one year! How much is meant to become alive and does not attain life, when eggs are laid which do not develop! Must we not say that all these germs of life contain causes that do not produce effects? Indeed, anyone who does not consider Nature with theoretical prejudices, especially not with the precise theoretical opinion that every cause has its effect and every effect has its cause—anyone who considers Nature in an unprejudiced way will find that there are countless things in Nature which must be designated, in the fullest meaning of the word, as causes, although they do not produce effects such as should be the case if the causes would live themselves out completely. There are countless instances where life is interrupted, as it were, and does not attain its goal.

This is something that you can see outside in physical Nature. If the spiritual investigator asks himself what corresponds to this in the spiritual world—he will find something very strange. He will find something which corresponds, in a certain sense, exactly to this standing still of life in Nature, but in the way in which spiritual things correspond to things in Nature. Many considerations have shown us that often, not always, the spiritual must be characterized as follows:—Its qualities are the exact opposite of the qualities to be found in Nature—they are the exact opposite. Just as we have seen natural causes that bring about no results—that is, the process is interrupted and what is inherent in the cause (“inherent” is one of the worst possible words for the comprehension of reality) does not develop further—so spiritual investigation shows us that effects arise in the spiritual world; we can say just as little that these are determined by causes, as in the cases which we have just characterized. Yet here we have effects.

Let us ask concretely:—What does the spiritual investigator see when the eye of his soul sees such repressed processes of life? The physical eye sees that eggs, or germs, perish in this case, but the eye of the soul, or of the spirit, sees that where such eggs apparently perish, something endowed with being arises in an earlier stage, in a stage which is not as yet material. If we wish to investigate what really happens in such a case in which material causes have, as it were, no results, then we must dream in a cosmic sense, if I may use this expression. In our usual consciousness we can only dream egoistically. When we dream at night, our dreams are connected with the organism; in our dreams we are not connected with the surroundings. If we are connected with the surroundings and develop the same forces that we develop otherwise in dreams, we experience in the form of imaginations. What is kept back in the processes of Nature and does not reach the stage of physical living beings, becomes something which can very well be experienced in the consciousness of imaginative thought. Beings arise from such repressed life-germs that are only accessible to imaginative thought.

If we would not dream as human beings, but as beings belonging to the Hierarchy of the Angeloi, we could dream of them. In fact, if I may use ttii.s expression, the Angeloi dream of the beings that rise up every year in great numbers from the sea and from the earth, as elementary forms; these are nothing but the products of the life-germs that have apparently perished.

If you try to picture this very vividly, you can see a kind of elementary life rising out of the earth; in this elementary life we ourselves are embedded with our own soul. But we are in this elementary life more intensely still, for we take part in the process I have just mentioned. As human beings we participate very intensely in this process, and also the animals take part in this. How? Well, there is no difference between that which happens when a certain quantity of fish eggs are laid in the sea—eggs that do not develop and only give rise to elementary existence—and that which happens when we see the seeds growing out of the earth, let us say wheat. How many grains of wheat are predestined to become wheat halms,¹ and yet they do not grow into halms because we eat them! In this case we ourselves and our processes are linked up with the universe; we connect ourselves with what arises as elementary existence.

In the grains of wheat and in other products that we use for our food, we interrupt the progressive process. We do not allow the life germs to become real beings, but through our own existence we cause that, which was destined for something else, to become an elementary process, which can be seen only through imagination. But the reality that lies at the foundation of this imaginative life takes place because we ourselves are placed into the process and participate in it. From the grains of wheat or rye, from everything else in Nature which we consume in this way, from all this, an elementary life arises. This elementary life permeates us. We take up this elementary life and are placed within it.

You have here the foundation of elementary life. We can, as it were, exist only because we interrupt another progressive process and spiritualize it. Even when we eat, we spiritualize a process that would otherwise take a purely material course.

The opposite is to be found in the spiritual world. There we find effects which have no causes, for instance, like a moving billiard ball which moves because another one hits it these effects exist as it were without a cause, no cause can be indicated in their case; when we contemplate such things, the idea of cause and effect loses its meaning. Effects arise in the life of our soul and spirit, effects from the spiritual world, of which we cannot say that they have been caused. We face the elementary results (which arise as it were in the form of vapor from the processes just described) with desires arising from necessities of life. We must eat; hence we must spin ourselves into these elementary processes. Just as we face such elementary processes with a certain lust, or desire, so we face spiritual effects, which are in a certain sense devoid of causes, with antipathy, inasmuch as we are human beings on the physical plane. Inasmuch as we are physical human beings, we strive to prevent these effects from the spiritual world from entering into us.

If you try to grasp this somewhat subtle thought, you will see that we are, as it were, surrounded by a spiritual will, which strives to enter into us; at first we do not face it with desire; we are not even inclined to accept it. It is as if will motions were constantly floating around us in the air, motions which we reject. When the clairvoyant consciousness develops, it soon comes into the insight that imaginative things surround us and that we are hindered by inner obstacles from taking up this imaginative element.

Let us consider this imaginative element as a reality. Just as here on the earth a certain number of life-germs perish every year, so do spiritual imaginative things live in the world that always surrounds us as a spiritual world; they can indeed be reached through imagination, but through our human disposition we place obstacles in the way. These obstacles are not to be looked upon in an abstract way, or in general; they must be grasped as concrete and differentiated obstacles. What develops every year from physical life as an ascending elementary life, develops spiritually at some other time. Then it descends and becomes something that we reject in another period. These periods of time are not very regular, for there are times in which the spiritual life surges around us very strongly and many things wish to come to us. There are other times in which the spiritual air around us is not so full. We may take up a more or less receptive attitude, although generally speaking we do not feel inclined to take up this imaginative kind of existence that can be reached only through imagination. But certain conditions may enable us to take up a receptive attitude—we shall still speak of this—or we may take up an entirely rejecting attitude.

Let us suppose that in a certain period of time many such Beings are there, Beings who wish, as it were, to approach man in a spiritual way, and that man is disinclined to accept them. What will happen? It then happens that by rejecting these spiritual beings who wish to come to him, man creates the possibility (he creates the opportunity within mankind itself) for a continuation of the old processes within him, processes that have withered, and continue to spin their dry threads, so that they produce dead results instead of bringing about a living result. It is just the same as if a plant that has reached the end of its life were not taken away, but were to continue as a dried-up, lifeless plant to the damage of its surroundings.

In the course of historical events this takes place in the following way:—An age approaches—the beginning of the 20th century was essentially such an age—in which spiritual Beings wait, as it were, to approach man, an age in which man is called upon in every way to open his soul to new revelations. Yet he does not take up these new revelations, but rejects them. Then the old continues to spin beyond its limits, for this old needs to be fertilized anew through man. This does not happen. What has not been fertilized continues to spin on in a dry and barren way and this causes such events as the present catastrophic one.

One of the most important causes to be found in the spiritual world is the fact that, as the 20th century approached, evolution took a course that made human beings oppose the new revelation, for reasons which we shall still discuss. One might say that the spiritual world was full of all that was offered to mankind in the form of new spiritual knowledge, new spiritual impulses, yet mankind rejected this. Why? Undoubtedly such things are connected with conditions of human evolution. We know that the materialistic age had to come—it has its good qualities from certain other aspects. The materialistic age came, and one of its consequences was that man formed ideas which were connected only with one side of human nature. Think of what we discussed yesterday.

Yesterday we said that the human being, consisting of four members, physical, etheric, and astral body and ego (roughly speaking) is really of a different age, as far as each one of these members is concerned. When a human being is 28 years old, he is 28 only as far as his physical body is concerned (I said this yesterday); as far as his so-called etheric body is concerned he is 21; as far as the astral body is concerned, 14; and as far as the ego is concerned only 7 years old. Yesterday's considerations can very well show you this. A human being of 28, is really 28 years old only as a physical human being. The ego lives in him, for instance (without considering the other members) and lives more slowly, so that it is still a child of 7 years when the human being has reached the age of 28. When a man is 28 years old according to his physical body, this child of 7 is indeed connected with quite different worlds from the one where scientific necessity is to be found. But in the materialistic age man has become accustomed to form only those ideas that can be applied to the relationship of the physical body with its surroundings, and everything is judged according to this. The human being, such as he stands in the world, is really a complicated being, as we have seen yesterday from many aspects. What a human being believes that he knows about himself, what he says about himself in our materialistic age, is only a quarter of all that concerns man. It is only that part which concerns the physical body. We can speak of a scientific necessity only in regard to the relationship of the physical body with its surroundings. Of what must we speak when we consider, for instance, what is contained, as a child of 7, in a man of 28 (without taking into consideration the other members)? Here we must speak of something quite different, something from which this illuminated age, this infinitely clever age, has turned away completely. Strange as it may sound to a modern human being, we must speak in this case of wonders, of miracles. Wonders in the sense in which people often imagine them, or as they are imagined by people who like to go to spiritistic séances, are things which cannot be considered by a real spiritual science. Wonders lie in entirely different spheres; wonders lie in spiritual happenings. Just as necessities lie in the outer events of Nature, so do wonders lie in spiritual events. No human being who enters the physical world from the spiritual world, and proceeds to a physical incarnation, is a physical necessity. He is a necessity only inasmuch as he himself determines this necessity, because he has taken the superconscious decision in the spiritual world to connect himself with a certain hereditary stream. The cause need not lie in father and mother; they merely provide an opportunity. The appearance of every human being in the physical world is a miracle, a wonder. The entrance into the physical world of the human being that is 7 years old when the physical body is 28 is always a true wonder, and in respect to this, every question from a scientific point of view concerning the "cause" is nonsense. It is nonsense to ascribe to heredity that part in us which lives so slowly that it is only 7 years old, when we are 28. If we really want to find out its origin, and ask whence comes that which is only 7 years old when we are 28, we reach the spiritual world, the world that we share with the so-called dead, and in which we lived before descending to our body. Men who were able to think in an unprejudiced way could, indeed, form thoughts concerning such things, even though with great difficulty in our materialistic age.

Think how much Goethe occupied himself with scientific thoughts and how exemplary his scientific thoughts are. He had, as you know a constant longing to go to Italy before he ever saw Italy. And when he finally saw the great works of art in Italy which gave him a conception of the creative artistic activity of the Greek, he wrote to his friends at Weimar: “Here is necessity—here is God.” He wrote of a necessity that is not the one of natural science. His previous scientific thoughts gave him an inkling of the other necessity—the necessity that shines from the spiritual world and is the same as wonder, or miracle. This is what he felt when he saw Italy.

But our age is an illuminated one; our contemporaries are very clever. For this reason they have not only rejected the unjustified conception of “wonder,” but have banished wonder as such even from the spiritual world. But to banish wonder from the spiritual world implies nothing less than to do everything possible in order to misunderstand the spiritual world thoroughly. For the things coming from the spiritual world appear to us only as effects; if we look for the causes we cannot find them. For a spiritual investigator, this is an unquestionable truth. At the end of the 19th century men had no feelings of wonder and reverence for that which sought to come to them as a revelation from the spiritual world; this lack of feeling had increased to such an extent that there was an aversion to such revelations. For these revelations come to man in the same measure in which he develops reverence for all that is profound in the world.

That which can enter into the world's order of laws as wonders may also not take place—not be there. This dulling of human feelings in respect to wonder is the consequence of the omissions in the age approaching the 20th century. If we wish to speak of the causes of our present catastrophic events, we will find that these causes are not things done by human beings. Instead these causes are sins of omission. This is the essential point.

In lectures which I have held repeatedly in past years, I have pointed out that an excellent philosopher lived in the middle of the 19th century, Karl Christian Planck. In many places I have seized the opportunity of drawing attention to Karl Christian Planck, because he wrote a book that is, as it were, his philosophical, literary testament. This book sketches the details, even the spiritual details, of the present world catastrophe. Indeed, one may say that he describes them in advance. The book was written in 1880. Why? Because Karl Christian Planck belongs to those spirits who saw at the right time what was taking place. If you have a house that begins to grow dilapidated, it must be repaired in time. If you wait until it cannot be repaired any more, it falls together and the catastrophe occurs. Our present catastrophe is nothing but a collapse. If we look at it from a real aspect it is a collapse. The right time to bring about what might have taken place instead was during the decades 1870, 1880 of the past century. Men like Karl Christian Planck, who pointed out what was bound to come, never become—as we all know—leading personalities in outer life. When a leading personality is sought, when a statesman or someone similar must be found, one does not naturally turn to those who know something in the sense of Karl Christian Planck! These cannot be used—is it not so? Instead one chooses others, who very often can do nothing to repair and support the falling house. If we only look into the backgrounds of life, it can be proved historically (Karl Christian Planck is not the only one, there are many others) that the revelations from the spiritual world were given to many men at the right moment—the revelation of the event which mankind was facing. There might still have been time to avert the course of such an event. Of course, no one listened to Karl Christian Planck, and even now, who listens to those who speak of what must be said years before the catastrophe takes place, if this is to be averted?

Unfortunately we must say that the way in which humanity has lived through this catastrophic event up to now clearly shows that if it lasts another four years, human beings will have grown accustomed to it and will accept it as they accept normal life. Indeed, this has progressed to a high degree. He who understand the times, however, asks today:—What must take place? For, if something does not take place, the consequences will necessarily arise after decades, because something was left undone at the right time.

But what should take place according to the present conditions of time cannot be discovered in the surrounding physical world. If we wish to hear the right things it is, indeed, necessary today to listen to those who are able to speak out of the spiritual world. Of course, in less important things, events take place more quickly. One may say, in five years perhaps, human beings will recognize that they ought to have listened to many things, and they might already have known many things, if they had listened at the right moment. But they do not like to hear these things. They only like to hear things that show visible signs in the outer physical world. But this physical world has no significance for the historical course of events. It does not show the impulse, the motive force behind events. That which is to be the starting point and impulse for events in the social and ethical life must come from the spiritual world.

In our age humanity should be educated to understand a very great event in the course of human evolution, namely, to believe in free will also in historical evolution. At a certain point of spiritual life humanity today should be led with the greatest force to believe in freedom or free will—and wonder is identical with this. This point lies in the conception of the Christ impulse, of the Mystery of Golgotha. In earlier times humanity took an entirely different attitude toward the Mystery of Golgotha, and the more we go back in history the greater we find this difference. We have often spoken of this. Today it is not possible for human beings—especially for those human beings who are most advanced in the sense of the spirit of the age—to understand the Event of Golgotha as an historical event resembling other historical events. As a foundation for the argument to be dealt with here, I only need to point out that the significance of the Gospels as historical documents has, as you know, been shaken. We cannot consider the Gospels as historical documents in the same way in which we consider the documents concerning Socrates, Plato, Alcibiades, or Caesar as historical documents. We cannot, according to methods of historical research, consider the Gospels or the other writings in the New Testament dealing with the Event of Golgotha, as documents in the same sense. The way of thinking adopted in modern historical research loses every possibility of considering the Gospels as historical documents and of looking upon the Event of Golgotha, described in the Gospels, as an historical event, in the sense in which other historical events and facts are historically proved. It is not possible to speak of Christ Jesus as an historical personality in the same way in which one speaks of Charlemagne as an historical personality, according to so-called historical sources.

He who sees through such things will realize that the time has come in which those who love truth and try to understand things through truth must say that what used to be considered as historical sources for the Mystery of Golgotha has been shaken, owing to the attitude adopted by modern historical investigation. One must, indeed, be very dull—for instance like Adolph Harnack, the famous theologian, to stand up again and again and state that what can be asserted concerning Christ Jesus on a quarto page constitutes an historical document in the meaning of modern history! Of course, these things standing on a quarto page are just as little historical documents as the Gospels—according toe Harnack—are historical documents. But an attempt like the one of Harnack (to which hundreds and hundreds of others may be added) is connected with the lack of truthfulness of our age in regard to such things; it is never willing to draw radical conclusions, nevertheless just these are the right conclusions.

The conclusion which must be drawn is that, in accordance with what lies before us, we must confess that it is impossible to find Christ Jesus if we seek him in an outward historical way; we cannot find him in this way. We must find him through spiritual investigation. But in this way we shall surely find him. We shall find the historical event of Golgotha. Why? Because the historical event of Golgotha occurred in human evolution through freedom—freedom of will, in a much higher sense than in the case of other historical events; and because this free event must approach the human being in our age in such a way that nothing compels him to accept it as valid; instead he must accept its validity through inner freedom. Events that can be proved historically cannot be accepted freely. Events for which there is no outer historical proof are accepted for spiritual reasons, and on a spiritual foundation we are free. One becomes Christian through freedom, and in our modern age we must understand, above all, that one can be a Christian in a real sense only through complete freedom and not through the compulsion of historical documents. The task destined for our age is that Christianity shall gain the truth through which it will become the great impulse for the human understanding of freedom. That this shall be understood belongs to the fundamental truths of our age—then an insight must be gained into the fact that the evidence for Christianity must be sought in the spiritual world.

If this insight becomes as intense in human nature as it should become it will produce further insight—it will give rise to other things. What it should produce first of all is that man should learn to answer for himself this question:—How shall I make myself more receptive for the recognition of that which is not forced upon me from the physical world, against which I may at first even feel an aversion, an antipathy? What makes me more inclined toward this?

I am not led by personal vanity or conceit, but only because I wish to bring a concrete example. I have pointed out again and again, on similar occasions, that I began my literary career by refraining, at first, from setting forth my own opinions; instead everything which I set forth was connected with Goethe's spirit, in a conscious retrospect of a spirit who ascended to the spiritual kingdom of the so-called dead, already in the year 1832. But read what I wrote in connection with Goethe, in the time that preceded my The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. The so-called Goethe investigators study these books chiefly with respect to the question, whether or not they render Goethe's opinions. They find Goethe-opinions only if the writer is a literary "ruminant," in other words, if he ruminates what Goethe said during his incarnation up to 1832. I was always of the opinion that schoolmasters, and also I myself, really need not repeat what Goethe said, for Goethe himself said far better what he wished to say. It is always better to read Goethe's own works than the opinions of schoolmasters, even when they are such excellent schoolmasters as, for instance, Lewes, who wrote the famous Goethebiography. What I tried to write is based on the inspiration of a Goethe who is no longer on the earth—It is the continuation of his ideas in a certain sphere after death. I wrote what could be written out of a certain feeling of a living relationship with so-called deceased souls. I mention this as an example and indeed not out of conceit and vanity, but because it is connected with the question as to what human beings must do in order to become more receptive for that which comes out of the spiritual world.

Human beings must seek a connection with the dead; they must find the way into the worlds where the dead live, but in a sensible, sound way, in a really fitting way and not spiritistically. The dead continue to speak after their death and we have seen that what they say, and what they send down as impulses, is alive. It is alive, not in the experiences we gain through our sense and not in our thoughts, but in our feelings, and in the reality of the impulses of our will. This is where it lives. But then we must also find within us that which inclines us to approach the spiritual world. Antipathy for imaginations is connected with unbelief in the possibility of being able to approach the spiritual world—antipathy for imaginations which wish to enter from the spiritual world in the form of impulses permeating our actions, and wish to enter also the social events and the moral, ethical events in human evolution. They alone can make human beings free.

Two things are needed in our age: To realize that the acknowledgement of the Mystery of Golgotha must be a free deed of the human soul and to penetrate wholly into this truth. And then, to seek in a real way the bridge to the dead, not merely in an abstract way, or in an abstract faith. In our age there is a great aversion also to this. People do not see at once through all that speaks against it. What ideal have human beings today, as far as social life is concerned? They think: “We are clever people; we were born and went to school—and that is why we are so clever; we are clever human beings, and consequently we know very well what must happen in social life. We call together meetings, elect officers, councilors, parliaments, and whatever all the rest may be called. There people discuss what must happen in social life. Naturally, for we are clever; and when such clever people as those of the present age come together, the right things must result”—This is the idea, but it is based on an assumption which is not correct—namely, that people know right away what is right.

Have you met anyone who knows what is the right thing for the year 1917 (the year of this lecture)? Not those who are now twenty years old, and love to sit in Parliament in order to talk and determine what is the right thing for 1917! Those who died long ago know this best of all. We should ask them what attitude we should adopt. This answers to a great extent the question as to how we can improve our social life—When we learn to consult the dead.

As physical human beings up to the end of our life, we know as a rule only what is convenient to us personally. Only when we are dead does our knowledge become really mature. Then it is mature to such an extent that it can really be applied to social life. But one must not think that the dead can have a direct influence, as it were, physically in the course of events, more or less like physical human beings. The dead know more than the living what must happen socially, but human beings must listen to them. And the human beings living on the physical plane must be the instruments carrying out the knowledge of the dead. Modern human beings must learn above all to become instruments. But—let us use this expression even though it is an unpleasant one—parliaments where human being will strive to let the dead be heard also will not exist for a long time to come. But no well-being can come in certain spheres unless the dead are consulted, unless social life is spiritualized also from this direction. Before believing that the knowledge gained here on earth through birth, surroundings, and schooling is ripe for social impulses, we should penetrate into that which has really become ripe for social impulses—the wisdom of those who have already laid aside the physical body, a wisdom which can reveal significant points of view if we really investigate it. Just imagine how much deeper the life of feeling becomes, what a deepening the human soul experiences, when that which I have now expressed in the form of thoughts becomes feeling, and when the ancient myths which connected human beings with their ancestors are replaced by the link which I have mentioned—when a concrete spiritual life will again permeate our spiritual atmosphere, and what can thus be grasped through spiritual science, in the form of thoughts, passes into the soul and feelings, and human beings will really live in this!

• 1. haulm: stems of beans and peas and potatoes and grasses collectively as used for thatching and bedding.

In the lectures given during this week there lies much which can lead us to understand the nature of man in its connection with the historical evolution of humanity in such a way as to enable us to gradually form a conception of necessity and free will. Such questions can be less easily decided by means of definitions and combinations of words than by bringing together the relevant truths from the spiritual world. In our age humanity must accustom itself more and more to acquire a different form of understanding for reality from the one so prevalent today, which, after all, holds to very secondary and nebulous concepts bound up with the definitions of words. If we consider what certain persons who think themselves especially clever write and say, we have the feeling that they speak in concepts and ideas which are only apparently clear; in reality however, they are as lacking in clarity as if someone were to speak of a certain object which is made, for example, out of a gourd, so that the gourd is transformed into a flask and used as such. We can then speak about this object as if we were speaking of a gourd, for it is a gourd in reality; but we can also speak of it as if it were a flask, for it is used as a flask. Indeed, the things of which we speak are first determined by the connections we are dealing with; as soon as we no longer rely upon words when we are speaking, but upon a certain perception, then everyone will know whether we mean a flask or a gourd. But then we may not confine ourselves to a description or a definition of the object. For as long as we confine ourselves to a description or definition of this object it can just as well be a gourd as a flask. In a similar way, that which is spoken of today by many philologists—persons who consider themselves very clever—may be the human soul, but it may also be the human body—it may be gourd or it may be flask. I include in this remark a great deal of what is taken seriously at the present time (partly to the detriment of humanity). For this reason it is necessary that a striving should proceed from anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, for which clear, precise thinking is above all a necessity, a striving to perceive the world not in the way in which it is customary today (not by confusing the gourd and the flask) but to see everywhere what is real, be it outer physical reality, or spiritual reality.

We cannot in any case arrive at a real concept of what comes into consideration for the human being when we hold only to definitions and the like; we can do so only when we bear in mind the relationships of life in their reality. And just where such important concepts as freedom (free will) and necessity in social and moral life are concerned, we attain clarity only when we place side by side such spiritual facts as those brought out in these lectures, and always strive to balance one against the other in order to reach a judgment as to reality.

Bear in mind that over and over again—even in public lectures and also here—I have brought out with a certain intensity, from the most varied points of view, the fact that we can only rightly grasp what we call concepts when we bring them into relation with our bodily organism, in such a way that the basis of concepts in the body is not seen in something growing and flourishing, but just the opposite—something dying, something in partial decay in the body. I have expressed this in public lectures by saying that the human being really dies continually in his nervous system. The nerve-process is such that it must limit itself to the nervous system. For if it were to spread itself over the rest of the organism, if in the rest of the organism the same thing were to go on that goes on in the nerves, this would signify the death of man at every moment. We may say that concepts arise where the organism destroys itself. We die continuously in our nervous system. For this reason spiritual science is placed under the necessity of pursuing other processes besides the ascending processes which natural science of today considers authentic. These ascending processes are the processes of growth; they reach their summit within the unconscious. Only when the organism begins to develop the processes of decline does the activity of the soul appear which we designate as conceptual or indeed as perceptive activity of the senses. This process of destruction, this slow process of death, must exist if anything at all is to be conceived. I have shown that the free actions of human beings rest upon just this fact, that the human being is in a position to seek the impulses for his actions out of pure thoughts. These pure thoughts have [the] most influence upon the processes of disintegration in the human organism. What happens in reality when man enacts a free deed? Let us realize what happens in the case of an ordinary person when he performs an act out of moral fantasy—you know now what I mean by this—out of moral fantasy, this means out of a thinking which is not ruled by sense-impulses, sense-desires and passions—what really takes place here in man? The following takes place: He gives himself up to pure thoughts; these form his impulses. They cannot impel him through what they are; the impulses must come from man himself. Thoughts are mere mirror-pictures, they belong to Maya. Mirror-pictures cannot compel. Man must compel himself under the influence of clear concepts.

Upon what do clear concepts work? They work most strongly upon the process of disintegration in the human organism; they bring this about. So we may say that on the one side the process of disintegration arises out of the organism, and on the other, the pure deed-thought (Tat-Gedanke) comes to meet this disintegrating process out of the spiritual world. I mean by this the thought that lies at the basis of deed. Free actions arise by uniting these two through the interaction of the process of disintegration and willed thinking.

I have said that the process of disintegration is not caused by pure thinking; it is there in any case, in fact it is always there. If man does not oppose these processes of disintegration with something coming out of pure thinking, then the disintegrating process is not transformed into an up-building process, then a part that is slowly dying remains within the human being. If you think this through, you will see that the possibility exists that just through the failure to perform free actions man fails to arrest a death process within him. Herein lies one of the subtlest thoughts which man must accept. He who understands this thought can no longer have any doubt in life about the existence of human freedom. An action that is performed in freedom does not occur through something that is caused within the organism but occurs where the cause ceases, in other words, out of a process of disintegration. There must be something in the organism where the causes cease; only then can the pure thought, as motive of the action, set in. But such disintegrating processes are always there, they only remain unused to a certain extent when man does not perform free deeds.

But this also shows the characteristics of an age that will have nothing to do with an understanding of the idea of freedom in its widest extent. The age running from the second half of the 19th century to the present has set itself the particular task of dimming down more and more the idea of freedom in all spheres of life, as far as knowledge is concerned, and of excluding it entirely from practical life. People did not wish to understand freedom, they would not have freedom. Philosophers have made every effort to prove that everything arises out of human nature through a certain necessity. Certainly, a necessity underlies man's nature; but this necessity ceases as disintegrating processes begin, as the sequence of causes comes to an end. When freedom has set in at the point where the necessity in the organism ceases, one cannot say that man's actions arise out of an inner necessity, for they arise only when this necessity ceases. The whole mistake consists in the fact that people have been unwilling to understand not only the up-building forces in the organism, but also the disintegrating processes. However, in order to understand what really underlies man's nature it will be necessary to develop a greater capacity to do this than in our age. Yesterday we saw how necessary it is to be able to look with the eye of the soul upon what we call the human Ego. But just in our times human beings are not very gifted in comprehending this reality of the Ego. I will give an illustration.

I have often referred to the remarkable scientific achievement of Theodor Ziehen “Die physiologische Psychologie”—“Physiological Psychology.” On page 205 the Ego is also spoken of; but Ziehen is never in a position even to indicate the real Ego, he merely speaks of the Ego-concept. We know that this is only a mirror-picture of the real Ego. But it is particularly interesting to hear how a distinguished thinker of today—but one who believes that he can exhaust everything with natural scientific ideas—speaks about the Ego. Ziehen says:

It will perhaps occur to you that the Ego-concept which is expressed in the small word “I,” is a very complex threefold entity containing thousands and thousands of partial concepts. But I beg you to ponder this, the word is indeed short, but its conceptual content must be complex, as shown by the fact that each one of you would be at a loss if he were asked to render in thoughts the content of his so-called Ego-concept.

And now Ziehen attempts to say something about the thought-content of the Ego-concept. Let us now see what the distinguished scholar has to say concerning what we must really think when we think about our Ego.

You will immediately think of your body, [you notice that he says—you will think of your body] of your relationships to the outer world, [connection with the outer world] your family and personal relationships, [in other words you will soon begin to think of your bank account and to count your money!] of your name and title.

Now the distinguished scholar emphatically points out that we must also think of our name and of our title if we are to grasp or to encompass our Ego in the form of concept.

..... Your principal inclinations, predominating ideas and finally your past, and thus prove to yourself how extremely complex this Ego-concept is. Indeed, the reflective human being reduces this complexity of the Ego-concept to a relative simplicity by placing his own Ego as the subject of his feelings, thoughts and movements, against the outer objects and other Egos. Of course, this contrast and this sharpening of the Ego-concept has also its deeper scientific and philosophical basis, but considered purely psychologically this simple Ego is only a theoretical fiction.

Thus “this simple Ego” is only a “theoretical fiction” that means a mere fantasy-concept, which constructs itself when we put together our name, title, or let us assume our rank and other such things also, which make us important! By means of such points we can see the whole weakness of the present way of thinking. And this weakness must be held in mind the more firmly because of the fact that what proves itself to be a decided weakness for the knowledge of the life of the soul is a strength for the knowledge of outer natural scientific facts. What is inadequate for a knowledge of the life of the soul, just this is adequate for penetrating the obvious facts in their immediate outer necessity.

We must not deceive ourselves in regard to the fact that it is one of the characteristics of our times, that people who may be great in one field are exponents of the greatest nonsense in another. Only when we hold this fact clearly in mind—which is so well adapted to throw sand in the eyes of humanity—can we in any way follow with active thought what is required in order to raise again that power which man needs in order to acquire concepts that can penetrate fruitfully and healingly into life. For only those concepts can take firm hold of life as it is today, which are drawn out of the depths of true reality—where we are not afraid to enter deeply into true reality. But it is just this that many people shun today.

At present people are very often inclined to reform the spiritual reality, without first having perceived the true reality out of which they should draw their impulses.

Who today does not go about reforming everything in the world—or at least, believing he can reform it? What do people not draw up from the soul out of sheer nothingness! But at a time such as this only those things can be fruitful which are drawn up from the depths of spiritual reality itself. For this the Will must be active.

The vanity that wishes to take up every possible idea of reform on the basis of emptiness of soul is just as harmful for the development of our present time as materialism itself. At the conclusion of a previous lecture I called your attention to how the true Ego of man, the Ego which indeed belongs to the will-nature and which for this reason is immersed in sleep for the ordinary consciousness, must be fructified through the fact that already through public instruction man is led to a concrete grasp of the great interests of the times, by realizing what

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struction man is led to a concrete grasp of the great interests of the times, by realizing what spiritual forces and activities enter into our events and have an influence upon them. This cannot be accomplished with generalized, nebulous speeches about the spirit, but with knowledge of the concrete spiritual events, as we have described them in these lectures, where we have indicated, according to dates, how here and there certain of these powers and forces from the spiritual world have intervened here in the physical.

This brought about what I was able to describe to you as the joint work of the so-called dead and of the so-called living in the whole development of humanity. For the reality of our life of feeling and of will is in the realm where the dead also are. We can say that the reality of our Ego and of our astral body is in the same realm where the dead can also be found. The same thing is meant in both cases. This, however, indicates a common realm in which we are embedded, in which the dead and the living work together upon the tapestry which we may call the social, moral, and historical life of man in its totality; the periods of existence which are lived through between death and a new birth also belong to this realm. We have indicated in these lectures how between death and a new birth the so-called departed one has the animal kingdom as his lowest kingdom, just as the mineral kingdom is our lowest kingdom. We have also pointed out in a certain way, how the departed one has to work within the being of the animal kingdom, and has to build up out of the laws of the animalic the organization that again forms the basis for his next incarnation. We have shown how as second kingdom the departed one experiences all those connections which have their karmic foundation here in the physical world and which, correspondingly transformed, continue within the spiritual world. A second kingdom thus arises for the departed one, which is woven together of all the karmic connections that he has established at any time in an earthly incarnation. Through this, however, everything that the human being has developed between death and a new birth gradually spreads itself out, one might say, quite concretely over the whole of humanity.

The third kingdom through which the human being then passes can be conceived as the kingdom of the Angels. In a certain sense we have already pointed out the role of the Angels during the life between death and a new birth. They carry as it were the thoughts from one human soul to another and back again; they are the messengers of the common life of thought. Fundamentally speaking, the Angels are those Beings among the higher Hierarchies of whom the departed one has the clearest living experience—he has a clear living experience of the relationships with animals and human beings, established through his karma; but among the Beings of the higher Hierarchies he has the clearest conception of those belonging to the Hierarchy of the Angels, who are really the bearers of thoughts, indeed of the soul-content from one being to another, and who also help the dead to transform the animal world. When we speak of the concerns of the dead as personal concerns, we might say that the Beings of the Hierarchy of the Angels must strive above all to look after the personal concerns of the dead. The more universal affairs of the dead that are not personal are looked after more by the Beings of the Kingdom of the Archangeloi and Archai.

If you recall the lectures in which I have spoken about the life between death and a new birth, you will remember that part of the life of the so-called dead consists in spreading out his being over the world and in drawing it together again within himself I have already described and substantiated this more deeply. The life of the dead takes its course in such a way that a kind of alternation takes place between day and night, but so that active life arises from within the departed. He knows that this active life which thus arises is only the reappearance of what he has experienced in that other state which alternates with this one, when his being is spread out over the world and is united with the outer world. Thus when we come into contact with one who is dead we meet alternating conditions, a condition, for instance, where his being is spread out over the world, where he grows, as it were, with his own being into the real existence of his surroundings, into the events of his surroundings. The time when he knows least of all is when his own being that is in a kind of sleeping state grows into the spiritual world around him. When this again rises up within him it constitutes a kind of waking state and he is aware of everything, for his life takes its course within Time and not in space. Just as with our waking day-consciousness we have outside in space that which we take up in our consciousness, and then again withdraw from it in sleep—so from a certain moment onward the departed one takes over into the next period of time the experiences which he has passed through in a former one; these then fill his consciousness. It is a life entirely within Time. And we must become familiar with this.

Through this rhythmic life within Time, the departed enters into a very definite relationship with the Beings of the hierarchy of the Archangeloi and of the Archai. He has not as clear a conception of these Archangeloi and Archai Beings as of the Angels, of man, and of the animal; above all he always has this conception that these Beings, the Archai and Archangeloi, work together with him in this awaking and falling asleep, awaking and falling asleep, in this rhythm which takes place within the course of time. The departed one, when he is able to do so, must always bring to consciousness what he experienced unknowingly in the preceding period of time; then he always has the consciousness that a Being of the Hierarchy of the Archai has awakened him; he is always conscious that he works together with the Archai and Archangeloi in all that concerns this rhythmic life.

Let us firmly grasp the fact that just as in a waking state we realize that we perceive the outer world of which we know nothing during sleep, just as we realize that this outer world sinks into darkness when we fall asleep, so in the soul of the so-called dead lives this consciousness—Archai, Archangeloi, these are the Beings with whom I am united in a common work in order that I may pass through this life of falling asleep and awaking, falling asleep and awaking, and so forth. We might say that the departed one associates with the Archangeloi and Archai just as in waking consciousness we associate with the plant and mineral world of our physical surroundings. Man cannot however look back upon this interplay of forces in which he is interwoven between death and a new birth. Why not? We may indeed say, why not, but just this looking back is something which man must learn; yet it is difficult for him to learn this owing to the materialistic mentality of today. I would like to show you in a diagram why man does not look back upon this.

Let us suppose that you are facing the world with all your organs of perception and understanding. This will give you a conceptual and perceptive content of a varied kind. I will designate the consciousness of a single moment by drawing different rings or small circles. These indicate what exists in the consciousness during the space of a moment. You know that a memory-process takes place when you look back over events—but in a different manner than modern psychologists imagine this. The time into which you can look back, to which your memory extends, is indicated by this line; it really indicates the space which here reaches a blind alley. This would be the point in your third, fourth or fifth year that is as far back as you can remember in life. Thus all the thoughts which arise when you look back upon your past experiences lie within this space of time. Let us suppose that you think of something in your thirtieth year for instance, and while you are thinking of this you remember something that you experienced ten years ago. If you picture very vividly what is actually taking place in the soul you will be able to form the following thought. You will say, if I look back to the point of time in my childhood which is as far back as I can remember, this constitutes a “sack” in the soul, which has its limits; its blunt end is the point which lies as far back in my childhood as I am able to remember. This is a sort of “sack” in the soul; it is the space of time which we can grasp in memory. Imagine such a “soul-sack” into which you can look while you are looking back in memory; these are the extreme limits of the sack which correspond in reality to the limit between the etheric body and the physical. This boundary must exist, otherwise ... well, to picture it roughly, the events that call forth memory would then always fall through at this point. You would be able to remember nothing, the soul would be a sack without a bottom, everything would fall through it. Thus, a boundary must be there. An actual “soul-sack” must be there. But at the same time this “soul-sack” prevents you from perceiving what you have lived through outside it. You yourself are non-transparent in the life of your soul because you have memories; you are non-transparent because you have the faculty of memory.

You see therefore—that which causes us to have a proper consciousness for the physical plane is at the same time the cause of our being unable to look with our ordinary consciousness into the region that lies behind memory. For it does really lie behind memory. But we can make the effort to gradually transform our memories to some extent. However we must do this carefully. We can begin by trying to keep before us in meditation with more and more accuracy something which we can remember, until we feel that it is not merely something which we take hold of in memory, but something which really remains there. One who develops an intensive, active life of the spirit will gradually have the feeling that memory is not something that comes and goes, comes and goes—but that memory contains something permanent. Indeed, work in this direction can only lead to the conviction that what rises within memory is of a lasting nature and really remains present as Akashic Record, for it does not disappear. What we remember remains in the world, it is there in reality. But we do not progress any further with this method; for merely to remember accurately our personal experiences, and the knowledge that memory remains—this method is in a higher sense too egotistical to lead farther than just to this conviction. On the contrary, if you were to develop beyond a certain point just this capacity of looking upon the permanency of your own experiences, you would obstruct all the more your outlook into the free world of spirit. Instead of the sack of memories, your own life stands there all the more compactly and prevents you from looking through.

Another method may be used in contrast to this; through it, the impressions in the Akashic Record become remarkably transparent, if I may use this expression. When we are once able to look through the stationary memories, we look with a sure eye into the spiritual world with which we are connected between death and a new birth. But to attain this we must not use merely the stationary memories of our own life; these become more and more compact, and we can see through them less and less. They must become transparent. And they become transparent if we make an ever stronger attempt to remember not so much what we have experienced from our own point of view, but more what has come to us from outside. Instead of remembering for instance what we have learned, we should remember the teacher, his manner of speech, what effect he had upon us and what he did with us. We should try to remember how the book arose out of which we learned this or that. We should remember above all what has worked upon us from the outer world. A beautiful and really wonderful beginning, indeed an introduction to such a memory, is Goethe's Wahrheit and Dichtung (his autobiography) where he shows how Time has formed him, how various forces have worked upon him. Because Goethe was able to achieve this in his life, and looked back on his life not from the standpoint of his own experiences, but from the standpoint of others and of the events of the times that worked upon him, he was able to have such deep insight into the spiritual world.

But this is at the same time the way that enables us to come into deeper touch with the time which has taken its course between our last death and our present birth.

Thus you see that today I am referring you, from another point of view, to the same thing to which I have already referred—to extend our interests beyond the personal, to turn our interests and attention not upon ourselves, but upon that that has formed us, that out of which we have arisen. It is an ideal to be able to look back upon time, upon a remote antiquity, and to investigate all the forces that have formed these “fine fellows”—the human beings.

Indeed, when we describe it thus, this offers few difficulties; it is no simple task, but it bears rich fruit because it requires great selflessness. It is just this method that awakens the forces which enable us to enter with our Ego the sphere which the dead have in common with the living. To know ourselves, is less important than to know our time; the task of public instruction in a not too distant future will be to know our time in its concrete reality, not as it now stands in history books ... but time such as it has evolved out of spiritual impulses.

Thus we are also led to extend out interest to a characteristic of our age and its rise from the universal world process. Why did Goethe strive so intense to know Greek art, to understand his age, through and through, to weigh it against earlier ages? Why did he make his Faust go back as far as the Greek age, as far as the age of Helen of Troy, and seek Chiron and the Sphinxes? Because he wished to know his own age and how it had worked upon him, as he could know it only by measuring it against an earlier age. But Goethe does not let his Faust sit still and decipher old state-records, but he leads him back along paths of the soul to the impulses by which he himself has been formed. Within him lies much of that which leads the human being on the one hand to a meeting with the dead, and on the other hand with the Spirits of Time, with the Archangels (this is now evident through the connection of the dead with the Archangels). Through the fact that man comes together with the dead, he also comes in touch with the Archangels and with the Spirits of Time.

Just the impulses that Goethe indicated in his Faust contain that through which the human being extends his interest to the Time Spirit, and that which is preeminently necessary for our times. It is indeed necessary for our times to look in a different way for instance upon Faust. Most of those who study Faust hardly find the real problems contained in it. A few are able to formulate these problems, but the answers are most curious.

Take for example the passage where Goethe really indicates to us that we should reflect. Do people always reflect at this point? Yet Goethe spares no effort to make it clearly understood that people should reflect upon certain things. For instance you know that Erichtho speaks about the site of the Classical Walpurgis-night; she withdraws and the air-traveler Homunculus appears with Faust and Mephistopheles. You will recall the first speeches of Homunculus, Mephistopheles and Faust. After Faust has touched the ground and called out. “Where is she?”—Homunculus says:—

It's more than we can tell
But to enquire would here be well.
Thou 'rt free to hasten, ere the day,
From flame to flame, and seek her so:
Who to the Mothers found his way,
Has nothing more to undergo.

Homunculus says:—

Who to the Mothers found his way,
Has nothing more to undergo.

How does he know that Faust has been with the Mothers? This is a question which necessarily arises; for if you will look back through the book you will find that there is nowhere any indication that Homunculus, a distinct and separate being from Faust, could have known that Faust had been with the Mothers. Now suddenly Homunculus pipes out that, “Who to the Mothers found his way, has nothing more to undergo.” You see, Goethe propounds riddles. With clear-cut necessity it ensues that Homunculus, if he is anything at all, is something within the sphere of consciousness of Faust himself, for he can know what is contained in the sphere of Faust's consciousness only if he himself belongs to this same sphere of consciousness.

Call to mind the various expositions we have given of Faust:—how Homunculus is really nothing else than what must be prepared as astral body, in order that Helen may appear. But for this reason he is in another state of consciousness; his consciousness is spread out over the astral body. When we know that Homunculus comes within the sphere of Faust's consciousness we can understand his knowledge. Goethe makes Homunculus come into existence because, through the creation of Homunculus, Faust's consciousness finds the possibility of transcending itself as it were, not merely of remaining within itself, but of being outside. He, too, is where Homunculus is to be found; Homunculus is a part of Faust's consciousness. Goethe as you see takes alchemy very seriously. There are many such riddles in Faust which are directly connected with the secrets of the spiritual world. We must allow Faust to work upon us so that we become aware of the depths of spiritual reality which are really contained in it. We can only understand a man like Goethe when we realize on the one hand, that he had studied what had formed him really as if he had viewed it from outside, as can be seen in his autobiography (Wahrheit and Dichtung)—and that on the other hand, he knew that this must lead back to distant perspectives, to distant connections with the dead. Faust enters the life of very ancient civilizations of humanity, the life of spiritual Beings lying far back in the past.

Automated Translation

One thought will probably lie near at hand for all of you; it may be clothed in this question: “How did it happen, in consequence of the events which we have been considering, that the materialistic mode of thought assumed precisely the form in which we observe it to-day, permeating all human impulses of our time?” With open mind we must observe the ingredients that have entered into the spiritual life of modern time. We must not be influenced, in so doing, by what the orthodox historian describes as ‘historic necessity.’ We must turn our attention to those events that can explain and illumine what is actually experienced.

Among all the important transformations that have taken place in the new epoch of humanity, we must also include one that was, in a sense, an echo or aftermath of earlier transformations. I refer to the last third of the 18th century, when European humanity finally lost the last vestiges of an understanding for the Mysteries. In recent lectures I have cursorily referred to the fact that in the 18th century there still existed such a mode of thought as that of Louis Claude de Saint Martin, whose ideas gained influence in wide circles—not only owing to himself but owing to the prevailing impulse of the time during that century.

In the 19th century, on the other hand, Saint Martin's ideas and ways of thought receded altogether. We need only remember one feature of his mode of thought, and we shall observe at once how radically it differs from all that our own time, for example, is able to think and feel. In his important work, Des Erreurs et de la Vérité, he speaks among other things of a certain event in earthly evolution—an event that took place, however, before Man became physically Man. Looking backward as it were, he speaks of a deeply significant cosmic transgression—if we may call it so on the part of mankind as a whole, before man ever entered into physical heredity. This is significant, for we here see that those who shared Saint Martin's way of thinking still had a wider horizon. They were still able to look beyond the physical world of humanity, into the purely spiritual. Thus it was possible for them to speak of such things, the connection of which with the evolution of humanity differs from anything that could be contained in the mere physical domain. A follower to some extent of Jacob Boehme, Louis Claude de Saint Martin had a few disciples, it is true, scattered throughout the civilised world, even as late as the 19th century—nay, even on into the most recent period. But the prevailing consciousness of the time, during the 19th century, cannot be said to have been influenced by any such impulses as occur in his writings. The open outlook, above all, into the Spiritual World, which we find here and there in his work, was utterly lost to the 19th century.

Such teachings as Saint Martin's were, in reality, the very last relics of an ancient Mystery-wisdom. To understand, however, even in an outer historic sense, how such a mode of thought as we find in Saint Martin was supplanted, we must not put the question thus: “Who was it who disseminated doctrines calculated to supplant his ways of thinking?” No, we should rather frame it thus: “In what personality does the sum-total of those impulses, whereby the humanity of the 19th century became so utterly materialistic, find the most characteristic expression?”

To understand what was really happening, we must realise that by this last transformation, at the end of the 18th century, the understanding of the Mysteries was completely lost to humanity. Thus, in the 19th century, only a very few people—only a very few human souls—knew anything of the deep importance and influence of the Mysteries.

The personality to whom I refer—though he is only the typical expression of the prevailing Zeitgeist of the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries—is Dupuis; and his important work, whereby the death-blow, so to speak, was dealt to the understanding of the Mysteries, is entitled Origine de tour les Cultes. This book came out in the year 1794.

When we conceive the outlook of men in the 19th century, we generally think of natural-scientific materialism. This natural-scientific materialism however, if I may say so, assumed the character and stamp which the 19th century impressed on nearly all human activities. I mean, what we found most characteristically expressed in the ‘bon Dieu citoyen’—the words with which Heinrich Heine greeted Jesus. I mean the character of bourgeois Philistinism. Materialism too was steeped, by the 19th century, in the channels of Philistinism. Philistine limitation was the essential characteristic of 18th century materialism. To understand the root-nerve of the 19th century, we must look for this impulse of Philistinism everywhere, Dupuis' materialism, on the other hand, was in a sense not yet Philistine; there was a certain grandeur and freedom about it, reaching far beyond Philistine, middle-class limitations. His was in a sense a heavenly—a celestial materialism; he still had the courage to conceive a more thorough-going materialistic theory than all the learned and brilliant men of the 19th century.

Dupuis got behind certain things—at least, he thought he got behind them. And the way he did so is extremely interesting. We must not forget that he was a man of genius. Already in the 1780's he had set up a kind of private telegraphic apparatus, with which he used to telegraph, from his own house, to a friend, Fortine, who lived at a considerable distance. When the Revolution broke out, he was afraid his telegraphic communications might appear suspicious; therefore he destroyed his machines, and the whole thing was forgotten. Of course, I do not say he had an electric telegraph; nevertheless, the principle of the telegraph was thoroughly carried out by him.

Dupuis was also a Commissary of Public Education in France at the end of the 1780's. Leaving Paris when the Revolution broke out, he was elected very soon after as a member of the National Assembly; and on his return, he played no little part in the Convention, and subsequently in the Council of Five Hundred. He belonged, as a rule, to the moderate parties. We must imagine what was living in Dupuis, as an impulse that passed from him to many other souls; but it is still more important for us to realise that the Time itself was possessed with this impulse, which only found its most characteristic expression in him.

What Dupuis perceived was the following. He made a study of ancient myths and legends—say, the Hercules legend, or the legend of Isis and Osiris, or of Dionysos, He studied these ancient myths, which, as we know, are only veiled statements of the truths of the Mysteries. Take, for example, the Hercules myth. Dupuis observed the Twelve Labours of Hercules. Following up the Labours in detail, he perceived that certain things which occur in the narrative justify one in assuming a connection between the passage of Hercules through his twelve Labours and the Sun's revolution through the twelve Signs of the Zodiacs. Dupuis studied these things quite consciously and carefully, and as a result he evolved the following theory:—In antiquity there were certain persons, so-called priests of the Mysteries, whose aim it was to keep the broad masses of the people as quiet and docile as possible, in order to rule and guide them easily. Therefore they told, to certain of the people, the myth, for example, of a Hercules who lived once upon a time; whom man should emulate, with whom he should associate his labours. In like manner, other myths were told—the Isis and Osiris myth, for instance. Within the Mysteries, however, in their own circle, the priests—according to Dupuis—knew that it was so much ‘eye-wash.’ They knew that such a person as Hercules or Osiris or Isis had, of course, never existed; they knew that all that goes on the Earth is brought about by the material heavenly bodies and their constellations. The myths are only veiled descriptions of the events in the sky. According to the ancient Mystery-priests—so said Dupuis—that which takes place on the Earth depends on the Sun's passage through the twelve Signs of the Zodiac, or on the passage of the Moon through the twelve Signs of the Zodiac. The priests were well aware what these celestial processes bring about on Earth. They knew that the material process which finds expression in the starry constellations—the material process in the outer cosmos—is the real cause of plant-growth and of human progress, human fertilisation, and so on. The priests were well aware of all these things. Far from believing that there were any other spiritual Powers here at work, they were ‘enlightened’ enough to believe in the mere play of material forces in material celestial space. But, for the common folk, they clothed these facts of astronomy in myths, believing, as they did, that this was necessary to delude the people; for only by such means could they be ruled and guided.

Thus, for Dupuis, the Mysteries were so many lie-factories, instituted for the purpose of clothing in suitable language, for the credulous and 'stupid' populace, what was well known to the priests themselves, namely that it is the material processes in the Heavens which bring about other material processes here on the Earth. In Dupuis' work, Origin de tons les Cultes, we find for example the following sentence: Truth knows no Mysteries. All Mysteries without exception belong to the realms of error and deceit ... Their origin—namely, the origin of the Mysteries—must be looked for outside the realms of truth and reason; offspring of night, they flee the light of day.

No doubt it was only a small minority who read such writings, but that is not the thing that matters. The point is that such things take effect; the point is simply that they are there. When they are voiced by an individual like Dupuis, it only means that he has the special faculty to formulate them. These things began to work from the end of the 18th century onward; and they worked on throughout the 19th.

Now we must bring forward something of the real historic truth, as against the things Dupuis discovered with such genius when he laid the foundations of his celestial materialism—for so we may justly describe it. After all, the Philistine scientists of the 19th century only looked for the material processes in the atoms; they remained in the earthly realm. Dupuis was bold enough to propound heavenly materialism; to conceive all that is working towards the Earth from the Cosmos as material influences of the stars and constellations, and to describe the so-called ‘Spiritual’ as so much ‘eye-wash’—the mere aftermath of the conscious deception which was practised by the priests of the old Mysteries.

This conclusion above all was drawn by Dupuis in his important and famous book:—All the great figures, in reality, are none other than facts of Astronomy, welded together and appropriately garbed for the edification of the common people. Hercules is the Sun, his twelve Labours are the passing of the Sun through the twelve Signs of the Zodiac. Isis is the Moon; what is narrated of her is the passage of the Moon through the Zodiac. Dionysos—in that great cosmic poem with its 48 cantos—is only a description of the Sun in its passage through the Signs of the Zodiacs. And so on ... the Christians merely put Christ in the place of Hercules, Dionysos and Osiris. Christ too is none other than a mask for the Sun. The priests knew well enough that the real thing is the Sun; but, for the common folk, they needed the story of the Nazarene—Christ Jesus, the Sun of the New Testament, by contrast to Hercules, Dionysos and Osiris, the Suns of the Old Testament.

Truly, a radical destruction of all religious ideas is contained in Dupuis' work, Origine de tous les Cultes.

The general consciousness commonly remains behind,—does not pursue these radical changes. Hence it came that in the 18th century very few people clearly perceived that these thoughts were in the air—if I may use the trite expression. Nevertheless, they left them in the air. Few, no doubt, had the courage to rise to the clear-cut conclusions of Dupuis. But these thoughts were contained in the spiritual consciousness of all educated people. And it was under the pressure of these thoughts that all the theological absurdities of the 18th century developed. The underlying fact is nothing else, than that Dupuis had pointed out to those that were of a like mind:—Just as little as Hercules or Osiris existed as physical and human personalities ; just as they were only Suns, so likewise, Christ never was a physical personality, but a Sun. It was under the pressure of this thought that for the later theologians of the 19th century Christ gradually vanished into thin air. Then they began to take the greatest pains to make the ‘bon Dieu citoyen’ of Nazareth presentable. The liberal Philistines dressed him up as a humane ethical preacher; the Social Democrats as a Social Democrat, and so on ; the psycho-pathologists as a madman or an epileptic. Thus, each one in turn set him forth under the pressure of these thoughts.

Now you may place this beside the other important truth which I have told you, namely that man really dreams historic evolution. Then you will well be able to conceive that thoughts like the above—even where they are not radically expressed—play their part in the dreams of men.

Over against it, as I said, we must now set forth the real historic truth. Look back into the ancient Mysteries—those that had their origin in the 3rd post-Atlantean epoch. Wherever these Mysteries appear, we see that esoteric as well as exoteric truths were represented. What then was esoteric, what was exoteric? This question must be applied especially to those Mysteries whose origin goes back into the 3rd post-Atlantean epoch. Esoteric—in the ancient Mysteries to which I now refer—was all that relates to physical science—to the manipulations, the technique of science. The science of religion was never esoteric in those ancient times; we give ourselves up to an utterly false belief if we imagine that the ideas about God and the Gods were esoteric in those old Mysteries. What they preserved as esoteric were the facts they knew about certain matters which we nowadays investigate in our chemical laboratories and clinics. That which related to outer physical science was in the main kept esoteric. It was this that the esotericists held to be dangerous. Never, in the Mysteries of those ancient times, did they conceive a religious truth to be in any way dangerous. Whatever they represented in matters of religion they expounded quite openly. Not so what we to-day call Chemistry, Physics and Mathematics. The latter were strictly preserved and guarded; they held their hands over these sciences, and were only willing to pursue them in the severely limited circle of those who took on the obligation to keep these truths within the Mysteries. They had to make this promise under very stringent oaths indeed.

Then came a time when the Mysteries changed their policy—albeit only in a certain sense—as regards the teachings over which they held their hand. This is the case in all those Mysteries whose origin mainly goes back into the 4th post-Atlantean epoch (reaching on, therefore, into the 15th century A.D.). During this time, it was the custom in the Mysteries to keep secret not so much physical science, but what we may describe—in a certain aspect—as a kind of symbolic treatment of the mathematical, and indeed, the intellectual sciences generally. I mean for instance all that is connected with such things as circle, triangle and spirit-level—in short, all that is mechanical, mathematical and intellectual knowledge. These things they tried to keep within the walls of certain Brotherhoods, whose members were laid under strict obligation not to betray the truths they there learned about the circle, the triangle, the spirit-level, the plumb-line and so forth. In other respects they gradually grew more lenient. Namely, in keeping esoteric the truths of physical science they grew more lax. These truths gradually penetrated out of the Mysteries, into the general consciousness of the public.

You may object: “What, after all, had the Mysteries of the 3rd post-Atlantean epoch to keep secret? Surely very little! Science was in its swaddling-clothes; there was practically no Chemistry. They knew nothing at all of the great world of facts which has been so gloriously discovered in our time.” Well, if you judge so, you are merely repeating what's usually said to-day. Yet even ordinary outer history should make one hesitate to pronounce such judgments. Having discovered gunpowder as a result of their external science, the Europeans were naturally, nay indeed, justly proud. But it soon emerged that the Chinese had had gunpowder in very ancient times; and, for that matter, the art of printing, and many other inventions. One might adduce numerous instances where the accepted notion on these matters becomes very shaky, to say the least.

The plain truth is that in ancient times (to mention radical matters at once) such principles as that of the airship or of the submarine were known. Only, as forming part of physical science, they were kept strictly secret. They were withheld from the general populace; were not released from the Mysteries. In other words (for it comes to the same thing) the results that could have been attained by such knowledge were not made use of in the general social order.

It is an amateurish idea, for the Mysteries of the 3rd post-Atlantean epoch, not to relate the concept of ‘esoteric’ and ‘exoteric’ to these things, but to imagine that the Mysteries of that time contained within them specially mysterious and hidden truths on matters purely spiritual.

Afterwards, in the Middle Ages, they endeavoured to withhold a certain aspect of mathematical and mechanical knowledge, not letting the people in general gain access to it.

These things had their good meaning and their real value in those olden times. With the approach of modern time they gradually lost their value. As I have often said, the life of the Mysteries cannot be continued in the same way as before. Nay, in the present—the 5th post-Atlantean epoch—it is in many respects no longer even allowable (no longer allowable, I mean, over against the higher spiritual Powers) to keep certain matters quite esoteric. The ‘esoteric’ nowadays would consist in certain psychological truths. In very ancient times it was the physical truths; then it became the intellectual; to-day, as I said, it would be certain psychological truths—truths of the soul-life. These truths, however, are only kept under lock and key nowadays by Brotherhoods such as those of which I told you, when I described the general world-situation of to-day as proceeding from certain dark Brotherhoods, whose origin, you will remember, I characterised last year.

Now the question arises: Why did the old Mystery-priests keep back what we may call physical science? The reason is deeply connected with the evolution of mankind. As I have often pointed out, humanity has indeed undergone an evolution, passing from form to form—from one form to another. The time in which the Mystery of Golgotha took place is, in reality, the greatest transition-time of all Earth-evolution. External history is of course unaware of this fact; indeed, it is ignorant of some of the actual facts connected with this transformation.

In olden times, my dear friends,—especially in the times that went before the Mystery of Golgotha—the human being received quite special forces when he reached the age of 14 or 15, over and above the forces he possessed in earlier childhood. At the 14th or 15th year of life, in those olden times, man received forces which have been lost to mankind since the Mystery of Golgotha. These forces are no longer there; or they are only there in a backward, atavistic manner;—no longer as normal forces of human nature generally.

The forces which the human being thus received when he became about 14 or 15 years old were simply there in his environment inasmuch as he himself was there. Moreover, they were such as could unite with the processes of physical manipulations. When a man to-day combines oxygen and hydrogen—well, he simply combines them, and he gets water. Nothing that flows out from man himself enters into the process. In those ancient times it was very different. Something that flowed out from man did indeed enter into it and became united with it. Man himself partook in the process. Laboratory manipulations became real magic by virtue of these forces which were developed in the human being at the 14th or 15th year of life.

It was for this reason that the Priests of the Mysteries had to keep the outer manipulations secret. For the outer manipulations would have become magical manipulations, simply by virtue of the then prevailing properties of man. Magic would have been spread abroad everywhere; and, needless to say, it would only too easily have become what is called ‘black magic.’ Therefore at that time it was necessary to veil certain truths of physical science in the deepest secrecy. It was necessary, simply on account of the prevailing human nature.

The forces man then received about the 14th or 15th year of life have gradually been lost. It was with the 15th century that they disappeared almost entirely. That is why many things that were written before the 15th century A.D. are no longer intelligible at all to-day, save with the help of Spiritual Science. For in these olden times, the moment a man set to work with any physical manipulations (such as are done nowadays quite commonly in our laboratories),—the moment he did so, he gave occasion for certain Luciferic elemental beings to arise at the same time. At any rate, he could give occasion for this. These Luciferic elemental beings were thoroughly effective; and, if engendered, would have played their part in the social life of men, if these things had not been kept secret.

(Such an epoch as the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century had least of all any idea of the true facts of human evolution. The men of that time had not the vaguest notion. Hence, all that proceeded from their blank ignorance was gathered up in such statements as that Truth knows of no Mysteries, or that all Mysteries belong to the realms of error and deceit.)

Human beings had to be preserved, so to speak, from any immediate knowledge of physical secrets, Moreover, not only had they to be preserved from such physical manipulations as are normally carried out to-day in our laboratories. They also had to be preserved from a purely physical knowledge of Astronomy. Therefore the spiritual counterpart of such knowledge was given out in the form of myths and legends. It was a necessary requirement of the time. But the times have now changed, and greatly so. Mankind to-day is not exposed to those Luciferic elemental spirits of whom we may speak in this connection. But in compensation for this, human beings are exposed all the more strongly to certain Ahrimanic elementals. Ahrimanic elemental spirits come into being to-day with a like necessity, as the aforesaid Luciferic beings did in antiquity. Only they come into being in a very different way—out of quite other forces and impulses in human nature. To-day (I am not merely referring to science, but to the social life, which concerns all people, not only the so-called educated people),—to-day a great number of things are working in social life; things which are simply there because man has acquired purely mechanical, technical, physical, chemical thoughts, and the like;—in a word, because he possesses a certain range of physical science. Man to-day is acquainted with and makes use of machines; moreover, he applies a certain mechanical technique to the financial affairs of the world. He thinks mechanically, the whole world over. Once more, I am not merely referring to the mechanical theory of the universe. (What I now refer to concerns every human being, down to the simplest peasant in the remotest Alpine hut. He, of course, knows nothing of mechanical science; but the medium in which he lives is permeated with such thoughts, and that is the thing that matters. Now just as in antiquity the mechanical, physical, chemical manipulations became mingled with a Luciferic force, so to-day (when they can no longer be held in reserve) they become mingled with Ahrimanic forces. And this is due to a certain specific circumstance. There is a Law, according to which all that proceeds from a mechanical, chemical, physical way of thinking can in a peculiar way be fertilised by that which proceeds from a partial human nature. I refer to the following fact. The thoughts which relate to chemical, physical, mechanical, technical, even financial matters are being thought nowadays by people who are still immersed, for instance, in a national habit of thought. (Other things too come into play in this connection.) Now the thoughts in themselves are incompatible with this; they do not agree with it. Or a man thinks physical, mechanical or chemical thoughts nowadays, in such a way that the brain which is thinking these things is at the same time filled with a national outlook; the national outlook works upon the things which he is thinking, of physical, chemical, mechanical and technical matters; and works so as to fertilise Ahriman. (And by this union of a national mentality with international physical science, Ahrimanic elemental spirits come into being in our environment to-day. For by their nature, such thoughts and manipulations as are contained in modern chemistry, physics, technics, mechanics, even finance and commerce, are only compatible with a non-national way of thinking.

This is a deeply significant secret, which we must know if we would understand the texture of modern life. It lies not in the possibility of the Time to hold these things in check by any other means than by knowledge. The leaders of the ancient Mysteries sought to restrain the corresponding evils by practising secrecy. To-day the very opposite must happen: the evil must be checked and balanced by the widest possible spread of spiritual knowledge,—for spiritual knowledge works in the opposite direction. Humanity, in this respect, has undergone a complete inversion. In the old time, certain matters of physical science had to be held back behind the barriers of the Mysteries. To-day, Spiritual Science must be spread as far and wide as possible. Only by this means can we drive out what works in the direction I have just indicated.

For the most part, humanity to-day has not an inkling of what it means to be nationally-minded on the one hand, while on the other hand one is trying to pursue international physics. These things, however, meet in human nature; they fertilise one another in human nature, and lead to Ahrimanic formations in our time, just as in ancient times they led to Luciferic. Mankind to-day have no other alternative—either they must leave off the pursuit of all that belongs to Physics, Chemistry and the like; or else they must become truly international in their way of thinking.

The people of to-day have as yet no inkling of the existence of such Laws, intimately connected as they are with the general life of mankind. Yet this very truth is beating against the doors of our consciousness at the present moment of evolution, and, for the well-being of this present evolution, it must gain entry. The powers most hostile to human progress are opposing these truths above all,—misleading the people of to-day to lay the most radical stress on the idea of nationality. Such things ought to be pointed out in our time, for they contain the truth; and they, perhaps, alone are able—just because they contain the pure and real truth—to heal humanity from the nonsense that figures in so many heads today. Unbelievable as it may seem, there are still many people who appear capable in our time, both in theory and practice, of not perceiving how the opposing powers of the age have artfully contrived, for instance, to produce the incarnated nonsense, and call it Woodrow Wilson. Not only what I have told you now, but many other things, are connected—essentially connected—with what is thus named and characterised.

He who lets pass through his mind all the religious systems that were right and justified before the Mystery of Golgotha, and recognises them in their real depths, knows that they all had the definite impulse to preserve men from contact with those powers who if they were not combatted would work in the way I have just described. It was one of the cardinal impulses of the old religious systems to preserve man from the harmful effects of the forces that emerged in the fourteenth or fifteenth years of life, in relation to outer physical manipulations. That their action in this respect was justified, the ancient priests of the Mysteries were able to perceive from one definite fact, namely this:—When they were initiated in holy ancient Mysteries and were thus enabled to communicate with the dead, then they discovered the great thankfulness of the human being after death, for such measures as they had taken. The dead proved thankful, above all, for the fact that before their passage through the Gate of Death they had been saved from contact with these forces.

And the analogy exists to-day. He who becomes acquainted with the life of the human soul between death and new birth, knows how thankful the dead are if they were able to be preserved during their life from these extreme aberrations of mankind,—the separatism of groups, the strait-jacketing of men into national groups for example, and the like.

The old religions had to restrain and regulate and give the proper form to certain forces that emerged in the fourteenth or fifteenth year. With the Mystery of Golgotha, the Christ-force entered the evolution of mankind. ‘In the Beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and a God was the Logos’:—It is an indication of the Word, the incarnated Logos, who, among all the other impulses, has also the impulse to overcome every separate and special logos—all that arises from human nature into the human larynx, the creator of words, severing men into divided groups over the Earth, even through the creator of words in man.

Just as the old Gods had to overcome those other forces, likewise the Power of the Logos has to overcome the special, separating forces that are connected with the development of the word—that is, with language. To the human beings of that moment who were far more advanced than were the subsequent writers on the Christ-impulse, it was not the mere word that mattered; and when they used a word, they did so with a specific object. Notice, when the writer of St. John's Gospel used the word ‘Word’ itself, when he used this word and no other, he did so with the very aim which I have now described.

These things are intimately connected with the evolution of mankind. The evolution of mankind is calling out to be recognized in its deeper forces. That, once and for all, is the task of our time. We therefore will now study, above all, the things that are connected so significantly with the great and thoroughgoing transformation which was inaugurated for mankind at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, and from which in the sequel many other, smaller transformations have ensued.