The Rudolf Steiner Archive

We will soon depict the scene of the second part of Goethe's “Faust”, which precedes the final scene, which, as you know, has already been depicted. The scene begins with the holy anchorites:

Woods, they sway in,
rocks, they weigh on them,

Goethe calls it “Faust's Ascension” and the scene that now follows is usually called the “Entombment”. But we will begin where, in the broader sense, this entombment of Faust is depicted.

When one comes to the various parts of Goethe's “Faust”, one must repeatedly and repeatedly fall into a certain astonishment at the infinite depth that lies in the second part of Goethe's “Faust”, in particular, deep in that one is dealing with an objectivity in the representation of the spiritual world that can be justified by spiritual science. And it is remarkable that Goethe presented the spiritual world with such objectivity at a time when spiritual science as such did not yet exist. I do not need to dwell at length on the question that was once put to me when I gave a lecture many years ago on Goethe's “Fairytale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily”, and a theosophical authority of the old school asked me whether I thought that Goethe knew everything that was said from the spiritual science to justify the deeper secret of the poem of the green snake and the beautiful lily. I could only reply whether the person in question believed that the plant also knows exactly what the botanist makes about it in order to be able to grow in the right way according to the botanical laws. When one hears such a question, one is usually aware of how clever the questioner feels. But if one thinks such a question through to its conclusion, then one realizes how endlessly foolish people often are, who think of themselves as being so clever. So we need not concern ourselves further with the question of whether Goethe, for instance, also studied spiritual science somewhere in the way we can study it today, even if objections can very easily be made from a point of view that considers this question. We want to go straight to the matter itself.

We are presented with three types of figures in addition to those familiar to us from the rest of the Faust legend. We are presented with three types of figures that have to do with the period of time that elapses between the death of Faust and the ascent of his soul into the spiritual regions. The first type of figures presented to us are the lemurs; the second type of figures presented to us are the thick devils with short, straight horns, and the third are the scrawny devils with long, crooked horns; both types of devils are “of the old devil's grist and grain”.

Now we can ask: What spiritual instinct, what deeper wisdom, would lead us to present these three figures in the Entombment and before the Ascension of Faust? This “Entombment” is introduced in such a way that Faust has grown old in his evolution, and, as Goethe himself stated, has become a hundred years old. So, at the beginning of this scene, we are dealing with the old, hundred-year-old Faust, who is still chained to Mephistopheles, but in such a way that Faust can now believe that Mephistopheles has become his servant. Faust has made the decision to wrest a piece of land from the sea, to cultivate this piece of land, and thereby create the basis for an area that will be beneficial to humanity, where this humanity, part of humanity, can develop in peace and freedom. This land is, so to speak, because it was wrested from the sea by Faust's labor, Faust's creation. It is to be made complete by draining a swamp that is there through a ditch, so that the air will also be purified, so that the health of the people who are to develop in peace and freedom will not be endangered by the polluting vapors of the swamp. Faust now believes that Mephisto has become his overseer in this beneficial work and commands the host that is to perform the last work. Faust has already gone blind, as was shown in the previous scene. So he does not see what Mephistopheles is doing on the external physical plane, and it is understandable that he later confuses the words “digging” and “grave”. While Faust is of the opinion that a ditch should be dug to drain the swamp water into the sea in order to purify the air, Mephistopheles has the grave of Faust dug by his lemurs. As a centenarian, Faust thus still experiences the deception, becomes entangled in the web of lies of Mephistopheles, who has the grave dug and, through the similarity of names, deceives Faust into imagining that a ditch is being dug.

There are already many secrets in it. I do not want to get involved in these things today, perhaps it can be discussed another time. But I would prefer us to make ourselves clear about the nature of these three beings. Right at the beginning of the scene, which takes place in the forecourt of the palace that Faust has built for himself, Mephistopheles appears, as already mentioned, as the overseer of the workers, whom Faust believes he has assembled, while Mephistopheles calls his lemurs. Mephistopheles characterizes the lemurs not in a particular scenic remark, but in the scene itself:

Come, come! Enter, enter!
You shivering lemurs,
Made of ligaments, tendons and bones
Half-natures patched together!

So they are described to us as creatures that are held together only by the ligaments that hold the limbs of the human body together, anatomical tendons and bones. So what is not even present in the human organism in the form of muscles holds these figures together, they are patched together out of it. They are not full-natured, not whole-natured, they are half-natured, since they only have what is not blood, not muscle, not nerve, but what tendons, ligaments and bones are. They are patched together out of it. Furthermore, they are characterized by the fact that they later express themselves in chorus. And what they express indicates two things to us. First, how they actually come to do a job there under the supervision of Mephistopheles; but at the same time, this also tells us something about their nature. The lemurs express themselves in such a way that one hears in their quivering tones:

We will help you immediately,
And, as we have half heard,
There is even a wide land,
We shall get it.

So the lemurs are also deceived at first: they have half heard that they are to be given a wide country. They are to dig the grave according to Mephistopheles' plan. But they have half heard and not fully heard that they are to receive a wide country. To this end, they bring sharpened stakes to work with.

Sharpened stakes, they are there,
The long chain for measuring;
Why we were called upon,
we have forgotten.

It sounds in their half-nature, which is patched together from tendons, ligaments and bones, there is still something that sounds and rattles from a call. But what the content of the call is, what they are actually supposed to do there, they have forgotten. They are truly characterized by this. One can say that they are there, but they do not know why they are there. They know half of it, why they are there, they have heard something, but they do not know what they have heard. They have heard a call, but they have forgotten it again. So there they are in front of us, these lemurs, and Mephistopheles immediately reprimands them. He says: “This has nothing to do with the wide land you wanted; only act according to your own dimensions, according to such dimensions as are appropriate for one who consists only of legs and tendons:

The longest one lies down lengthwise.

So the one lemur has to lie down lengthwise, and now he instructs them how to dig the grave.

In the next chorus of lemurs, we are told that there is still something in them of a half-remembered memory that they were once something like human beings, that they come from something like human beings:

How young I was and live and love,
Methought it was quite sweet;
Where there was cheerful sound and merry mirth,
There moved my feet.

— That is behind them, and only half conscious.

Now the treacherous age has struck me
With his crutch;
I stumbled over the door of the grave,

Why was it open just then!

So they half-remember that they come from dead people. Mephisto first tried to come to terms with them, he needs them first.

Now I ask you to remember that I have indeed said many times that we do not carry our physical bodies with us without further ado, and that we only discard them like an empty shell. It is not only our shell, I often said, it is our tool. It contains the forces through which we are connected to the mineral earth. Now I ask you to consider the following: we are, with our physical body, formed on Saturn, Sun, Moon and Earth, with what we now have between birth and death. Let us imagine all that has been implanted in us by Saturn, Sun, Moon and Earth, I would say, summed up and suggested by everything I am drawing here, and let us imagine that which is incorporated into the earth in that we receive an ego as a tool in the earth, that this ego is incorporated as a physical tool. Let us imagine that within.

During the time on earth, our physical body again receives what was demanded of it on Saturn, what was formed during the time of the sun and moon. But because the I works in it, what the human being has not through Saturn, Sun and Moon, but only through the development of the Earth, is incorporated. This is the external physical expression of the I. From this, the I emerges in death. What remains of Saturn, Sun and Moon has no place in earthly life; it has nothing to do with the forces of earthly development. The physical forces of the evolution of the earth would never have produced our muscles; they had to be produced by the physical forces of the evolution of the moon. But during the evolution of the earth, the impulses of the ego did indeed produce the bones, and the bones only during the Atlantean evolution, through the salt deposits in the Atlantic Ocean, the ligaments, the tendons. All this is integrated only through the forces of the earth. In this way we carry the earth within us, in our bones, tendons and ligaments. The spirit of the earth lives in them. The same forces live in them that are present in all the mineral, natural or technical domains of the earth. In the composition of our bones, tendons and ligaments, everything that can arise from the mineral-physical natural and technical effects of the earth lives. When we now go through the gate of death, we leave behind our Saturn, Sun and Moon parts. These are destroyed by the fact that they cannot exist in the earth. Bones, tendons and ligaments must destroy the forces of the earth itself, regardless of whether the person is buried or cremated; this makes no difference, the special forces of the earth must destroy them.

Thus, because Faust has died, that which is subject to the special forces of the earth is handed over to the earth, to that earth to which all dead people are also handed over, insofar as they are made of bones, tendons and ligaments. A deep spiritual insight into nature is expressed in this formulation that Goethe gave to this scene, an infinitely deep knowledge of nature! For one should not believe that one has exhausted what remains of us when one says: Well, the physical body falls away from us, and our soul — as we have always described it — continues into the spiritual worlds. — No, there are secret spiritual forces in the whole physical body that remain on the earth. The earth can only retain that which it has produced itself, but it retains only the forces from bones, tendons and ligaments. Bury the human being and let him decay, burn him - in the earthly body itself, despite decay or burning, what remains for all future is always present in the forces in bones, tendons and ligaments! We hand over our skeleton, so to speak, to the earth, and it remains there until the earth itself has reached the goal of its evolution. Our skeleton is taken up by the skeletons of all those who have died before us, and enters into the community of those who have died before us. It would be a superficial view to say: “Everything is transitory here.” Only the form is transitory. The forces that prevail in them are contained in the earth's activity. And if you take the physical forces at work on earth today, if you look straight into the earth, the forces in it that have come about because people have been buried in the earth, or because they have somehow been destroyed, their bodies have somehow been destroyed. The forces that formed the human being are now in the earth, working in the interior of the earth, they are there, they are preserved.

So we can say: Mephisto is initially faced with the task of dealing with the path of the physical body, with the path, with the paths that the physical body wants to take. - That's where he needs the lemurs, I would say, who are not ghostly, but under ghostly beings, phantom beings that are always united with the earthly body as the remains of dead people. He needs them.

Do you know what would happen if what has been ours since Atlantean times were to disappear in our bones, tendons and ligaments? Even today the earth would be close to it, and it would soon be more likely that all people would be born with so-called “English limbs,” with weak and powerless limbs. People would be born rickety, because the earth only has a certain amount of the strength that lies in our bone movements and tendon development. And what we give back in death always goes into later human bodies in a mysterious way. Otherwise, people would be born rickety. And if one is born rickety, it is a sign that one has not entered into a right relationship in one's total karma with those forces that the earth gives again and again and again, and receives back again and again from the bones, tendons and ligaments of humanity.

Thus an infinitely deep, spiritual thought of nature is expressed in the fact that Mephisto has summoned these underworldly spectres, these pure phantom beings, in whose ranks Faust's phantom also enters. We must, of course, grasp the scene quite spiritually. The interpreters of Faust always believed that there were bone men walking around. But they are only the forces that lie in the bones, tendons and ligaments, the supersensible forces. The scene is to be grasped entirely spiritually, only through spiritual vision, in the manner of spiritual vision. These lemurs have what is in man in that he has an I. But the I is outside. But the I is outside. So all the qualities that only came in through the I are gone, are only half present, only echoes. Therefore they are there and also not there. We human beings are only there when we send our I into our bones, tendons and ligaments. They no longer have that. We only understand what we have heard when we send our ego through our bones, tendons and ligaments. They only have the echo; they hear and do not know what they hear; they have heard a call and have only half heard it, have forgotten it because the memory lies in the system that is put together by bones, tendons and ligaments. So, because Mephistopheles first has to deal with the paths that Faust's physical body takes, he, who is a spirit but wants to assert his rights on earth, naturally comes into the necessity of having to deal with the lemurs, as they are meant here, because from them he could snatch the spiritual part of Faust's physical body. After all, the physical body is also based on a spiritual one. He could grasp this spiritual.

Now, to understand the whole, let us recall something we can find in the chapter of the book 'How to Know Higher Worlds?' where the Dweller of the Threshold is mentioned. There you will find that when a person undergoes higher spiritual development, the individual powers that are otherwise united in him in ordinary human knowledge, diverge. I characterized them there according to their abilities. Will, feeling and thinking go their separate ways, each becoming something in itself. Mephisto, who remained behind on the lunar evolution with his own nature, was still familiar with the lunar evolution. That is how you have to understand him. He, Mephisto, is familiar with the lunar development in his practical view of life. But even in the atavistic view of the moon, the limbs of the human being were still separate and not yet united by the ego. So if Mephisto, in his way, wants to grasp the spiritual essence of Faust, he must actually grasp it in its threefold nature. He must grasp it as the spiritual essence of the physical body; there he must deal with the lemurs. Then he must want to grasp it as the second link in the etheric body, which separates soon after death. He is familiar with that, so he must want to grasp it. And then he must want to grasp it in what passes over into the spiritual world and has detached itself from the etheric body. What has been united through the ego does not yet correspond to his realm; he is not yet at home there, Mephisto; the separateness still exists. So he must instinctively attach importance to achieving what the spiritual is of the physical body; there he must let the lemurs work. Now, because he only knows the soul in separation, he wants to catch for himself - he does not know what - the etheric body, which leaves the human being through the lower limbs. So he puts the Dickteufel there to catch the etheric body for him. Then - he does not know how it should be. Perhaps he can grasp Faust's spiritual essence at the third link, at that which wants to ascend into the spiritual world? That is where he places the Dürrteufel. And so he wants to grasp Faust's spiritual essence. But he must, I would say, with devilish instinct, bring together the threefoldness that can convey to him the physical body directly in its spirituality – etheric body, soul-spiritual –.

Etheric body - you see, physics cannot quite cope with the ether that is present because the ether has a strange property that distinguishes it from ordinary materiality. It is not heavy, it has no weight. The usual gravity of the earth cannot hold the ether. Mephisto wants to hold it. He wants to hold it through spiritual beings. Because the ether has already become spiritual, it should also be held by spiritual beings. To do this, he needs the thick devils, who, as spiritual beings, have a certain heaviness. They must therefore be thick-bellied creatures with huge, thick bodies – small, of course, because if they were towering, they would reach too far into the upper regions. They must be designed to be small and stout, their spiritual nature must be earthly, their spiritual nature must be such that it can sustain on earth that which seeks to fly spiritually.

They must therefore be small and stout, and everything in them that is the physiognomic expression of humanity must be clumsy. They must have enormous strength in their somewhat stocky bodies. Therefore, the limbs that are more spiritualized are small; in reality they would have to have small hands, stumps, arm stumps. It is difficult to portray, can only be portrayed if the actors make every effort to move only the lower part of the arms; of course, this must be practiced and learned. But the nose, too, is difficult. It is developed, the nose that has become a horn in the devils, it is difficult; so it is, together with the forehead, the heavy organ that does not connect man with the air, but that works and is formed by its own weight.

Mephisto needs such creatures to be able to hold back the etheric body, which we know takes a different path because it is not weighed down by the earth, in the rest of the earth. He must therefore hire them so that when the etheric body appears from the lower regions of Faust's body, they can grasp it. Therefore he hires them:

Fresh meat! Double your step,
You gentlemen from the straight, crooked horn,
From the old devil's grist and grain
You bring the hellish maw at the same time.
Hell has many a maw! many!
According to rank and dignity, she devours;
But in this last game, too, one will

Canines gape; from the gorge's vault
The fire stream wells up in rage,
And in the boiling smoke of the background
I see the flame city in eternal glow!

This is, of course, the same flame city that appears in Dante!

The red surf... and so on.

Here they come, the fat devils with short, straight horns! He now describes them:

Now, bloated villains with fire cheeks!

So they are in the state in which the lunar creatures still breathed fire. They are “pot-bellied villains with fire-cheeks” who “are really fat from the brimstone of hell”.

Block-like, short, never moving necks!

So everything is immobile; mobility is already semi-spiritual. They are all clumsy and awkward, all so that they force the spirit into heaviness, because they are supposed to hold the light ether. And there he posts them:

Here below lurks, whether it glistens like phosphorus:

- whether the etheric body comes out, which they are supposed to catch —

That is the little soul, Psyche with the wings,

- he sees it as the soul! —

You pluck it out, and there is a nasty worm;

So he wants the etheric body in the form of a dragon, doesn't he.

With my stamp I will seal her,
Then away with her in a fiery whirlwind!

He says very aptly now, by placing the devil's advocate there:

Pay attention to the lower regions,
you windbags, that is your duty;
Whether she likes to live there,

You can't really know.

How should he know, since he has the three members of the soul; he does not really know what to start with!

She likes to be at home in the navel,

That is the region where the etheric body must leave the person first.

Take care, for she will wipe you out there.

So there we have the fat devils with short, straight horns who want to try to shape the spiritual so that it develops earthly heaviness.

Mephisto wants to conquer the third part through the Dürrteufel. They must be very thin guys, again difficult to represent! Very thin, and all spiritual, so nose and forehead together to a horn united, which overcomes the matter as possible, in devilish way overcomes, so crooked and long, because they should achieve it, to become quite spiritual, to overcome the earth heaviness completely. Therefore, they are “Firlefanze”, as spinning tops, move quickly like spinning tops. They must now be employed to catch that which goes into the spiritual world - the third. So they are supposed to chase after the forces that develop precisely out of heaviness, so to speak. That which they are not supposed to get into the heaviness of the earth, they are supposed to develop, like a spinning top, counter to the heaviness, through their long, flexible limbs, which should actually grow out of them. That is how they should develop. That is how Mephisto sets them up:

You winged giants of Firlefanze!
Reach into the air, try without rest;
Arms straight,

— straight means long in this case, that they become thin and long.

The arms are stretched, the claws are sharply pointed,

– so long claws instead of fingers come out –

so that you can catch the fluttering, the fleeting.

– the soul that goes to the spiritual worlds –

She must feel ill at ease in the old house,
And the genius

- in contrast to the etheric body: the genius, which is always soul-spiritual -

And the genius, it wants to get out right at the top.

There you can see how, according to the way man is constituted, the function of the lemurs on the physical body, the thick devil on the etheric body, the dry devil for the spiritual-soul is sharply, clearly outlined!

Now the heavenly host is approaching, the heavenly host, that is, the beings who belong to the spiritual worlds. And the matter is presented in such a way that none of those who can serve Mephisto – the lemures, the thick- and scrawny devils – achieve anything. The heavenly host is coming:

Follow the messengers,
heavenly relatives,
slow flight;
forgiving dust,
animating dust;
to all natures
friendly traces
work in floating
its dwelling train.

These are beings that have not experienced the earthly either, but do not claim to have an effect on the earthly sphere, but only on the spiritual and mental aspects of the human being. Mephistopheles is out of place, he has remained a ghost, a moon ghost, and has an effect on the earth. They have remained in their own sphere. They must therefore appear to him as beings who have not even become human, but are still pre-human, immature, less than children.

I hear discordant notes, nasty strumming,
From above it comes with unwelcome day;
It is the mischievous, girlish banging,
As sanctimonious taste may love it.

And so on. Of course, Mephisto is well aware of the close kinship between him and the angels as spiritual beings. They have both remained spiritual beings. That is why he calls them devils in his own way, but devils in disguise.

They are devils, but in disguise.

Now the battle begins between the host of angels and the demons and goblins down there who are striving for Faust's soul. Mephisto is standing there and must take part in this battle. He instructs his devils because he senses something. What does he actually sense? Yes, he knows the trinity as a soul quality. But that is not capable of grasping the I-unity. He does not believe that in Faust the I-unity is so strong that it holds the trinity together. That is his great error. While he is actually always talking about the trinity of the soul, the unity of the soul is asserted at this moment from the spiritual world, holding everything together. If this unity, this unity of the ego, were not there, the lemures would be able to draw the soul of the physical body to themselves, without it having remained connected to the whole world, to the whole cosmos. The Dürrteufel would be able to grasp the soul, the genius. But because they are held together by the ego in the human being between birth and death, each one goes its way: the body to the earth, the etheric body to the etheric region, that which is soul to the spiritual region, but they remain destined for each other. There remains a connection. And as soon as the connection, which is brought about by the character of the ego, is there, the devil can do nothing. But he is positioning himself quite correctly.

Why do you cower and flinch? Is this the custom of hell?

— the thick-skinned and scrawny devils sense that a different element is coming.

So stand firm and let them scatter.

They scatter roses, namely, as a symbol of spiritual love coming from above.

To his place, every Gauch!
They think, with such flowerbedecking
They can snow in the hot devils;
That melts and shrivels at your breath.

Now they begin, because he commands them:

Now blow, Püstriche! —

Now they blow away the love torment that surrounds them. This is a hot glow for them, which they cannot endure. Now they blow, but they blow too hard because they cannot find the right measure. They have not been taught about what is formed through the evolution of the earth.

— Enough, enough!....

That you never know the right measure!

He also only knows them insofar as he observes them on earth; he does not know them from his own nature, the right measures. But because he was with Faust for so long and saw what Faust needed, he recognizes the measures of men again for a while.

— Enough, enough!
Before your breath the whole flight pales. —
Not so violently! Shut your mouths and nostrils!
Truly, you have blown too strongly.
That you never know the right measure!
That not only shrinks, it browns, dries, burns!
It is already floating along with poisonous clear flames;
Brace yourselves against it, press close together! The strength goes out! All courage is gone! The devils scent the flattery of strangers.

To him, love is only flattery, he turns everything into something purely selfish. And so we see how, through this struggle that unfolds here, how in the imagination – for the whole thing takes place in the imagination of Mephisto, who for a while transports himself back to his old time on the moon – how, for the imagination of Mephisto, the possibility presents itself that he could have the soul in its trinity, while it was actually snatched from him by the unity.

The interesting thing is that in this scene in particular we also find an awareness of the inner spiritual evolution of humanity. Think of what I have often said, that only a certain narrow-mindedness can believe that as far back as people go, they have always looked the same; so spiritually, one imagines the Romans, Greeks, Egyptians, all more or less the same as present-day people, while great developments have been undergone. People who only think about the last few centuries know nothing about what human beings have gone through in the course of the centuries in evolution. But spiritual beings notice this because they look at things spiritually. And so it is so wonderful that we can see from Mephisto's words here to Faust precisely what he, Mephisto, who is of course an old fellow, has gone through the whole evolution of the earth — you know how he says at one point that he once found “crystallized human race”! — yes, Mephisto sees how it has changed:

The body lies, and the spirit seeks to flee;
I quickly show it the blood-written title.

So, what does he actually want? Faust has died. He wants the soul, of which he only recognizes the trinity. We remember that Faust made a contract with Mephisto, even written in blood, a contract. What does Mephisto actually want, MephistoAhriman? What does he want? He wants to invoke his contract. If he shows the contract at the moment when the soul comes out, he believes that the soul cannot escape him. Well, I would rather not speak further on this point in view of some contemptuous words that have been spoken in this troubled time. Since our friends are already being accused of not thinking clearly about contracts, I do not want to develop a contract theory now that could be exploited in turn. Perhaps it could even be said, if I do not take the side of Mephisto in this scene, but rather the side of Faust: Faust would be a real Pan-Germanist in terms of his view of contracts! I do not want to talk further about the plight one could get into, because either one would have to take sides for Mephisto-Ahriman, or one would expose oneself to danger because Faust does not go into the blood-written title, to chalk this up to us as a pan-Germanistic view. So we prefer to remain silent about all the deeper wisdom that would have to be developed if one were to talk about Faust and Mephisto's contract. Let's leave it!

But evolution with its inner meaning comes to us in the words of Mephisto, who points out that times change and with them the impulses that are in the development of humanity. In the past, when the old times were there, he still understood quite well how to catch souls – today we call it superstition, but we know that they were somewhat clairvoyant times. Then the souls were still easily accessible in their trinity; then he could still catch the souls if the matter was well prepared – and after all, he prepared them quite well in Faust. But now, as the fifth post-Atlantic period approaches and the unity of the soul is being established through the ego, he has not yet undergone his full training.

But unfortunately we now have so many means
to withdraw souls from the devil
we come up against the old ways,
we are not recommended

The little people never sense the devil,
even when he has them by the collar.

There he is, but he is not recommended. And so he gets the helpers he needs, who he believes can help him get what he wants: the soul in its trinity. But the fact that it no longer exists in its trinity, in its original form, allows it to slip through his fingers.

It is a curious thing with this Mephisto-Ahriman. The beings that belong to the spiritual world come down into his spheres, and - yes, he actually falls in love with these beings. Goethe quite rightly describes a love scene between Mephisto and the angels. The devil has understanding. And a love affair between Mephisto and the angels is truly an absurd love affair, that is what Mephisto also calls it, it is truly an absurd love affair. But how is it that this absurd love affair can still affect him? That feelings of love arise in him at all? If he had not lived at Faust's side for so long and wanted to beguile Faust by stimulating such feelings in Faust in a particularly enticing way, they would not have crossed over to him. And so here again you have a deep wisdom, a wonderful wisdom. The devil actually has no erotic or other love in the earthly sense. He doesn't have it. Love affair is of course absurd for him, because we know that the earth is the cosmos of love. He is from the cosmos of wisdom. But he is out of place, he wanders around on earth and always wants to incorporate the earth into his realm. This means that he repeatedly finds himself in a position to incorporate into himself qualities that are developed on earth and that no longer fit his nature. In order to gain a soul, he must prepare this soul for the devil, that is, make it suitable for the qualities that Lucifer implanted at the beginning. But in doing so, he himself becomes infected by these qualities and once again makes himself incapable of keeping this soul. You see here in the big picture what happens on a small scale. Imagine that man is also capable of arousing passions, but if he develops them to a certain point, they destroy his organism at the same time. So you can only do it to a certain point. The devil must, as it were, vampirically absorb human qualities into himself so that he can arouse the passions in Faust. But in doing so, he destroys his own true devilish nature. This is how the absurd affair with the angels comes about, and he becomes inattentive and does not even realize that the angels are snatching his soul away. This darkening of consciousness, this transition of consciousness into the subconscious, had to occur in him.

Since we will have the performance today, I cannot say more. I think that enough has been said for the time being to convey a little of the understanding of the trinity inherent in this scene. I think we see, especially when we devote ourselves to such a contemplation, how infinitely deep that is of which Goethe says that he has secretly incorporated it into the second part of 'Faust'.

Those people who were able to evoke in themselves the idea that spiritual wisdom is at work through the evolution of humanity, that it has only receded somewhat in our time, that this spiritual wisdom often only a shadow in all kinds of legitimate or illegitimate occult societies, such people, as isolated individuals, always knew what profound wisdom is contained in Goethe's “Faust,” real wisdom, concrete world wisdom. That is why they have expressed themselves in this sense. And one such man dedicated a short poem to the memory of Goethe at the Feast of St. John in 1880, a poem in which he wanted to express how much he felt at one with him in spiritual wisdom, a man who, due to the erudition of the materialistic age, actually had very little of Goethe in him, very little of substance. And since spiritual science had not yet been born when this man wrote, he only had a vague feeling that this spiritual science lives in Goethe like an instinct. The Faust commentary that he wrote as a result, Oswald Marbach, did not become significant. But in the poem that he dedicated to the great mason's wisdom festival, the Manenfest, to the manes of Goethe — as one used to say in the past when speaking of the immortal part of man, the Manen, the same spirit lives that lives in the Manas – it shows that, as it were half-consciously only in lonely souls, there was always the connection with the great that lived in Goethe's poetry. And so he, who felt connected with the Manes of Goethe, with the individuality of Goethe, says at the Feast of St. John, the masonic feast in 1880:

To you, brother, father, exalted master!
To you, to whom we now, for over a century,
As a sign of our most loyal love in the alliance of free spirits,
We extend our tightly entwined hands; —
To you, the greatest of spirits and the freest of the free!
To whom we aspire to be like; —
We consecrate ourselves to you! We consecrate our sons to you,
That our building may one day be crowned with perfection!

You have striven as we have; but your striving
For self-knowledge, which leads to wisdom,
Was always inspired by the most vital life,
By strength of the creator, which proceeds to action,
To works that lift themselves up to the light,
Around which the splendor of beauty spreads eternally:
You wrestled with God like Israel,
Until you, as victor, conquered yourself!

What mysteriously unites us with you
Will not be revealed to the uninitiated by a single word;
But let it be proclaimed loudly before all the people
Through the purest love, tireless deeds,
Through clear light that ignites spirit in spirit,
Through eternal life's evergreen seeds. —
Onward, O Master! Wherever You have gone,
We follow You with the most ardent longing.

May there come a time again when such words may and can be truth!

after a eurythmic presentation of the scenes “Midnight” and “Entombment”

Once again we have allowed a piece of Goethe's 'Faust' to pass before our minds. In the last lecture here, I tried to develop some of the spiritual-scientific principles that can help us understand it when I spoke about the nature of the lemurs, the fat and scrawny devils. On such occasions, we always try not just to seek out something for the understanding of this poetry, but to gain something from the poetry in terms of general spiritual significance, to look into those true realities that Goethe tried to reach with his “Faust”.

Today I would like to tie in a few observations with what has just passed before our soul. It may seem significant to us that this scene, which we have just seen come to an end, is not the last scene of Goethe's “Faust”, but that, as we know, it is followed by that other scene that we performed here some time ago. You remember: mountain gorges, forest, rock, solitude, holy anchorites, chorus, echo, forest that staggers along and so on, where we are led through the devout meditation of the Pater ecstaticus, Pater profundus, Pater Seraphicus, through the chorus of the blessed boys , where we meet the angels again, who in the scene we saw today carry Faust's immortal into the upper regions, where we also meet the trinity of the penitent women, Doctor Marianus, and Mater gloriosa as Gretchen's guide until the final chorus, the actual mystical chorus:

All that is transitory
is but a parable.

All this follows on from the scene we have seen today, which depicts the battle of the spirits of light with the spirits of darkness for the soul of Faust.

When attempting to explain Faust, one often proceeds from scene to scene, sometimes even from sentence to sentence, without asking the questions that could be asked and that would actually shed light on this great, powerful work of literature. Today we have seen how Faust's burial took place, how Mephistopheles-Ahriman has lost his game, how the soul has been carried up into the spiritual regions. From a certain point of view, one might ask: Could the Faust epic not actually end here? Do we not now basically know everything that it is about? Do we not know that Mephistopheles has lost his wager, that all the efforts he has made throughout the lifetime of Faust, which he has been able to accompany, are lost, that Faust's soul has been accepted into the region of light, that thus the words spoken by Lessing with regard to a Faust epic vis-à-vis the spirits of darkness: “You shall not win” have been fulfilled? Could we not believe that with this everything is actually over, that the Faust epic has found its end? — The question presents itself to our soul: Why then does the conclusion known to us now follow on from what we have seen today? — And by raising this question and then dealing with its answer, one touches on significant secrets of human life in its connection with the whole world. The fact that Goethe shaped this conclusion of Faust as he did shows precisely how deeply he penetrated into the foundations of his life in an age when spiritual science had not yet come into being, and into the secrets of human existence. Much, much lies in the scene that was presented today, and even more lies in the fact that this scene is followed by other final scenes. Much of it proves that Goethe knew the deepest secrets of existence, but that he was also compelled to present the secrets of existence in such a way that they are only accessible to those who want to delve deeper into spiritual life, into its essence. Quite deliberately, Goethe expressed much of it in veiled terms, as he himself said, enwrapped in the poetry of Faust. Much of what is said in veiled terms, so to speak, triggers hatred and opposition in dull-witted people who, out of fear and laziness, do not want to approach the knowledge of the spiritual world. However, as a result, Goethe's Faust poetry has remained more or less misunderstood for eighty-four years and will only gradually, when we can live towards the future, reveal itself to humanity in its depths. Yes, it can be said that spiritual scientific knowledge will only be able to trigger those artistic perceptions that can convey an understanding of the Faust poetry.

Let us first look back at the hauntingly impressive scene in which Faust beholds the four gray women: Want, Guilt, Hardship, and Worry. Let us be clear about the fact that Faust has this experience with the four gray women at a moment when he has gone through many, many spiritual life experiences, or rather, life experiences that have evoked spiritual understanding in him. Goethe imagines his Faust in the time that is presented for Faust through this final scene, having reached the age of one hundred. Today, Faust first stood before us with all the spiritualized experiences in his soul, as he stands on the balcony of his home, which he created at a workplace from which he wanted to do work for the human future. We look at his soul in such a way that all his feelings of satisfaction, all that he has been able to achieve for humanity by wresting a free country from the sea for free men, are summarized in his soul.

The stars hide their gaze and glow,
The fire sinks and burns low;
A chilling wind fans it,
Bringing smoke and haze to me.
Offered quickly, too quickly done!

Now, seemingly before his eyes, but in reality in an inner vision, what the appearance of the four gray women forms:

What floats in the shadows?

We have to imagine that through the deepening that Faust's soul has experienced, this soul has become capable of having the vision of the four figures — of lack, of need, of worry, of guilt — from the deep inner source itself. This “scene at midnight” is an inward experience in the truest sense of the word, an inward experience as it is evoked in Faust by the soul slowly beginning to detach itself from the body. For that is the strange mystery that Goethe quite evidently intended, that from the moment the three gray women speak the words:

The clouds roll by, the stars fade away!
Back there, back there! From afar, from afar,
Here comes he, the brother, here comes he, the - death,

— that from this moment on, death already really spreads over Faust's life. And we only understand this scene correctly if we think of Faust from then on as a dying man, as one in whom the soul is slowly detaching itself from the body. And it would be wrong to think that what follows is meant to be merely realistic in terms of the external senses. It is not. As we see Faust in the room of his palace, where worry has entered, we find, as he sits there, that the soul has already loosened itself to a certain extent from the body, that the experiences of physical life merge with the experiences that the soul has when it has already loosened itself from the body. And only then do we understand the strangely interwoven sentences when we consider this interplay of the spiritual world, in which Faust is already empathizing through his loosening soul, this interplay of the spiritual world with the physical-sensual world, in which Faust is still, because the soul is loosening, has not yet detached itself. Lack, guilt, and need were powerless; they were only the heralds of death. But the consuming worry remains where the vision is transformed in such a way that it is already the vision of the soul released from the body:

Four I saw coming, three only going;
I could not understand the meaning of the speech.
It sounded as if it said - distress,
A gloomy rhyming word followed - death.
It sounded hollow, ghostly muffled.

If one knows what Goethe felt when he heard the word gespensterhaft (ghostly), he who felt much more concretely than today's dull materialists, then one does not take such a word

It sounded hollow, ghostly muffled

not light, but important and essential, and seeks the feeling that Goethe had when he put these words into the mouth of Faust. Among other things, Goethe uses a beautiful word in which he expresses the following. He says: “Sometimes life seems to me as if distant past events were entering into the present consciousness, and then everything that is distant in the past appears like a ghost that has entered the present.” Goethe had a very concrete concept of what he called ghostly. Visionarily, millennia-old times of his own life stood before him, which he often believed he saw moving into his present life like ghosts. These are not assertions that I make out of arbitrariness; this can be strictly proven from what Goethe himself expressed when he spoke intimately about the experiences of his inner life.

Now the views and thoughts that Faust has, half in the spiritual world and half still living on the physical plane, flow together. If you could imagine the interplay between these two worlds, that is what it is like for Faust. He is now experiencing something that can actually only be experienced in this interplay between the two worlds, which would not have developed if he had distanced himself more from his physical body. He still feels bound by the events of the beyond to the events of physical life:

I have not yet fought my way into the open.

And now for the remarkable speech, which to many will seem like a mere contradiction, but which becomes understandable if one understands the experience to take place between physical life and spiritual life. The spiritual world sought to reach Faust throughout his life. Spiritual science in the true sense did not exist at that time. He tried to recognize the spiritual world by means of magic inherited from the Middle Ages, the same magic that brought him into contact with Ahriman-Mephistopheles in the way we have often discussed, and also in the last lecture. This magic, by which he entered the spiritual world, cannot be separated from Mephistopheles. If you look back at what happened around Faust, you will see everywhere that Mephistopheles has set the magical actions in scene. We cannot hope that Faust wants to hold on to this magic now that he is already halfway into the spiritual world:

Could I remove magic from my path,
Unlearn spells altogether.

Those spells that he has drawn from old books and that have already become Luciferian and Ahrimanic because they have been preserved from ancient times. In this way, he now finds, when he really enters the spiritual world, that what he has achieved was not what he was looking for after all. And now he looks back. He begins to look back, as one does when one's soul is relaxed. Now he begins to look back at the life that has just passed. The moment stands vividly before him, the moment before he reached for the medieval books, before he uttered the fateful word:

That is why I devoted myself to magic.

He has been protected by good powers that have guided him mercifully in the sense of the “Prologue to Heaven” from the fruits of that magic that he would have had to pluck if these merciful workings of special powers had not passed through his path through life. Now he already sees into the spiritual world, now he knows differently. This plays a role. With the present knowledge, he would make the path different:

If I, nature! were a man alone before you,
it would be worth the effort to be a human being.

He could not say this earlier, before he had loosened his soul from his body, not in this way. Then he had to go the whole way of error. Now he looks back and sees that it was indeed the path through the darkness of Mephistopheles. He looks back first to the time in his life when Mephistopheles had not yet crossed his path:

That was I otherwise,

— a man alone

eh' I's in the dark sought,
With sacrilegious word me and the world cursed.
Now the air is so full of such spooks,
that no one knows how to avoid it.

The full weight of what has happened now weighs on his soul.

Even when a day smiles at us with clear reason,
the night entangles us in dream images;
we return joyfully from the young meadow,

— so he has spent his life, half naked in the physical world, half already - albeit in the physical body -— transferred by Mephistopheles to the spiritual world, looking into the spiritual world, but always having to return to the physical world, because Mephistopheles cannot find it, nor can he convey it, the access, because he cannot properly find the connection.

A bird caws; what does it caw? Misfortune.

Only superstition can be found on this path.

Entwined by superstition morning, noon, and night –
It lends itself, it shows itself, it warns –
And so, intimidated, we stand alone.

But the path of superstition has always mixed with the strong path that Faust was able to walk through his own strong nature. And now he has the vision that could remain with him as his soul loosens more and more: the vision of worry. And try to feel how Goethe also lets the highest in language resonate in his words here. One would like to say that the whole of world history lies on our soul when we feel the weight of these words. Worry creeps in. Is anyone there? Faust asks.

Is anyone here?

The answer sounds:

The question demands yes!

Not a simple answer: Yes! The question demands Yes! I said: The whole of world history forces its way into our soul through the arrangement of the words. For how could one think of those magnificent scenes, where before the court Christ Jesus is asked: “Is it you, the Son of God?” He does not answer simply: Yes – but: “You say it!”

Now it is not expressed in an abstract word whom Faust is now experiencing:

I am here.

But it is in him. It is basically a soliloquy. And it is a deep soliloquy. Only gradually will humanity learn, through inner experiences, the full weight of this soliloquy. With what is to be given to humanity as spiritual science, insights will also come to humanity that will be linked to deep, deep feelings and sensations about life, feelings and sensations that the dull, dull materialism dreams of, nor does the easily acquired worldview that believes that everything has been gained with sentences that characterize the physical or spiritual-real. We have such sentences. We know that they have been achieved through difficult inner experiences. We keep them in our souls, we carry them with us through life. But they are not what they can and must truly be for the human soul if they are not accompanied by all possible moods, by those moods that often make our soul life appear as if it were living over an abyss. And when we have attained spiritual knowledge, we can never lose the concern that comes over us about the relationship of spiritual knowledge to the whole reality of life. Man must feel, especially when he enters the spiritual world, that it is a platitude to speak of it in false asceticism, that this earthly life is only a low one that one would most like to cast off. Man feels the whole deep meaning of this earth-life for eternity precisely through spiritual realizations: that this earth-life must be gone through in order that that which exists can be incorporated into the impulses which we carry through death into the sphere of eternity. But how could it be otherwise than that at the end of a life of trial, just at such a moment, when the soul is loosened, man becomes aware, in serious, grave concern, of what may become of his life just experienced, when he now has to go through the spiritual world with his soul, what the fruits of this life just lived may be. Faust has struggled through much, much. But he is great because now, when he has just entered the spiritual world and is half in it and half still feeling back to his physical existence on earth, he knows in the very significant comparison that arises between the physical and the spiritual in such a life-and-death situation:

I have only run through the world;
I seized every desire by the hair,
What was not enough, I let go,
What escaped me, I let go.
I only desired and only accomplished
And wished again, and so with might
stormed through my life; first great and mighty,
but now it goes wisely, goes deliberately.

Feel the harmony that now arises in his soul: how he has passed through the small and the great world, as it says in “Faust”, and with an overall view that is just opening up, as in the moment he feels a flood of spiritual illumination in his vision, he can survey with wisdom and deliberation all that he has gone through in the rush of the floods of life. And now: what does he see? What does he begin to see? —- He begins to see what he has experienced in the circle of the earth. Think back to what we have discussed about the review that overtakes the soul, which is now slowly overtaking Faust, at the beginning of the life after death. Think of this review. He sees his life on earth. He sees it in such a way that he has to say to himself:

The circle of the earth is well enough known to me.

What he had experienced on earth, he now sees. He is already halfway into the spiritual world. You can feel the words in this mood:

The view to the other side has vanished.

That is what one can say when looking back on earthly life. This is not a philosophical confession of materialism, but an immediate experience after death has already taken hold of the soul. Dopes who have become Faust commentators have interpreted this passage as if Faust, in his old age, were once again reverting to a materialistic creed. But now, in this situation, Faust would truly be a fool if he wanted to look back on life and now, with a blink, see that spiritual world, which is often described here by those fools who build this spiritual world in such a way that they simply write about their own kind, as is done in many confessions. He wants to stand firm on the result of his life. And now words of deep significance are actually falling, before which every semblance of materialism must fade, must fade completely. The vague mystics, those dreadful mystics who always speak of wanting to merge with the universe, of wanting to grasp eternity mystically in the chaotic darkness of the universe, which they call universal light, want to wander into eternity. The one who wants to grasp the spiritual life in a concrete way grasps it where it can be grasped in its concreteness. He does not become a fool, losing himself in vague distances that actually contain nothing but emptiness and empty space, and into which the soul dreams itself away. He will not be seduced into roaming into such eternities, but will grasp knowledge concretely. That which he recognizes can be grasped:

Thus he walks along the day on earth.

Consider how wonderful this sentence becomes when one considers that it marks the beginning of the retrospective view of earthly life: the vision walks along the day on earth. Now he has arrived at the point where he can find the right relationship to those haunting ghosts to which Mephistopheles has seduced him here.

When ghosts haunt,

– now in retrospect

he goes his way;
In walking on, he finds torment and happiness,
He! unsatisfied every moment.

We have to imagine the not yet fully completed, but now incipient review, that review, which is still full of the concern, through which fruits from the experienced earth day can be carried into the spiritual world. And always like this: over, over. Spiritual experience, but because he still clings to the body, also physical experience, so we find Faust. Care still holds him to the physical body. He is meant to enter consciously into the spiritual world, made conscious precisely by the burden of care. That is why he grows into the spiritual world in such a way that, while already bearing the spiritual world in his soul, he still believes that he can command the physical world. Those people who hold the banal contemporary view that man has always been essentially as he is now, do not know that many Greeks died as Faust dies, or rather, as Goethe had Faust die. We can prove from Greek literature that this death was almost a desirable one for the Greeks, like reliving some of the physical existence, while the soul has already been released. In Sophocles you can find words that suggest how the Greeks saw something special in such a death, not a sudden death, but a slow dying, in which consciousness is already dimming for the physical world, but what enters physical consciousness as twilight is gradually illuminated to see fully into the spiritual world. And Goethe did indeed try to incorporate much of the Greek element into the second part of his Faust. We may well imagine that he wanted something of what could be characterized as if he had wanted to depict Faust as a dying Greek. Thus, what he puts into the words in terms of feeling flows over from the spiritual world, even when he is still commanding here. And we can follow this further, follow how Goethe consciously presents what I have been talking about.

You saw Faust arrive at the scene where his grave is already being dug. Again, one can say that those commentators who accuse Goethe of bad taste by having the grave dug while Faust is still alive are not very tasteful themselves! That would, of course, be mere bad taste. We see the dying Faust. Then it is not bad taste, but a wonderful imagination, when we see the grave dug not only by the dying Faust but also by those half-spiritual creatures, the lemurs, of whose nature I spoke recently. But how does Faust speak? Well, I will first pass over the words that he speaks as he gropes his way out of the palace and toward the doorpost. I will draw your attention to the words that Faust speaks when he gives the order, so to speak, to dig the ditch that will divert the polluting swamp. At first, one might think that everything is meant physically. But Goethe was well aware that Faust speaks half out of spiritual consciousness, and that is how he wants these words to be understood. And what is revealed from this physical-spiritual, spiritual-physical consciousness? First of all, a wonderful sense of well-being in Faust. Consider what Faust says:

A swamp extends along the mountains,
Polluting everything already achieved;
To strip the foul pool too,
The last would be the highest achievement.
I open spaces for many millions,
Not to dwell securely, but actively and freely.

Beautiful, but now other words follow:

Green the field, fruitful; man and herd

At once at ease on the newest earth,

Immediately settled on the strength of the hill,

Which the bustling, industrious people have rolled up.

— these words are consciously set down, consciously out of the physical-spiritual, spiritual-physical. The paradisiacal land is the play of the spiritual into physical consciousness, then back into the physical again:

There is a raging flood right up to the edge.

Of course, it also means the external situation, but the fact that the words are chosen is something that Goethe was fully aware of when he did it.

Community pride rushes to close the gap.

And now some strange words:

Yes! I am completely devoted to this idea,
That is the ultimate wisdom:
Only he deserves freedom and life
Who must conquer it daily.
And so, surrounded by danger,
Spends childhood, manhood and old age his active years.
I would see such a teeming mass, standing on free ground with a free people. For a moment I would dare to say: Stay, for thou art so fair! The trace of my days on earth cannot perish in the eons of time.

One must hear this word repeated over and over again as a beautiful word that Faust utters because he feels: You have done something for the common good, you have worked. — And now he is overcome by the tremendous feeling of how this will continue to work through eons, how he has, as it were, founded his fame in his deeds, and he surrenders to his sense of well-being. It is often quoted. I have even heard it quoted by people who wanted to say something nice to someone else and quoted these words. You can also say: “The trace of my days on earth – that is, of your days on earth – will not perish in aeons.” And yet, however much this is understood as a beautiful saying, let us be clear about it: it is a purely Luciferic saying, a feeling of well-being in fame. We feel once more how Faust's soul is completely seduced by Lucifer, not only contemplating his deeds, but also feeling his glory through the aeons in a wildly spiritual and selfish way. This egotism grows to gigantic proportions and is still sealed:

In the anticipation of such sublime bliss
I now enjoy the highest moment.

Truly, the devil is no drip. After such a Luciferian outburst, one might well think that the devil had him, for it is once again a completely Luciferian blissful feeling, a supreme eternal desire. And we must not think of the stupid devil, but of the clever Mephistopheles-Ahriman, when he now says, which is quite appropriate:

No desire satisfies him, no luck is enough for him,
So he continues to court after changing forms;
The poor man wishes to hold on to it.

The soul has completely loosened itself, but has separated from the body with a Luciferian quality. It connects quite well with the no less inwardly voluptuous words that Faust utters as he steps out of the palace and gropes his way along the doorjamb:

How the clatter of spades disgusts me!
It is the crowd that indulges me.

One should not think that it is not tempting to think again in this last moment that the crowd indulges you! The Luciferic temptation is there once more, clearly there. And Mephistopheles is not stupid if he believes that now is the moment to follow up on that conversation in which Faust signed over his soul to him. They have conversed with each other: we recall the first part, where Faust, not yet out of the half-won spiritual consciousness, but out of the physical consciousness, said the words:

First thou dost smash to ruin this world,
The other may arise thereafter.
From this earth my joys gush forth,
And this sun shines upon my sorrows;
When I can part myself from them,
Then may what will and can come to pass.
I will hear no more about it,

I have only been running around the world.

Mephistopheles says:

In this sense you can dare.
Connect yourself; you shall in these days
With joy my arts see,
I give you what no man has seen.

Faust:

What do you want, poor devil?
Was a human spirit, in its lofty striving,
Ever grasped by your kind?
But you have food that does not satisfy,
You have red gold that, without rest,
Like mercury, melts in your hand,
A game in which one never wins,
A girl who, at my breast,
With eyes already bound for the neighbor,
The beautiful gods of honor
That, like a meteor, disappear?
Show me the fruit that rots before it's broken,
And trees that turn green every day!
I'm not deterred by such a task,

Mephistopheles replies,

I can serve you with such treasures.
But, my good friend, the time is also coming
When we may feast on something good in peace.

And now the weighty words that Faust speaks:

If I can ever rest content on a lazy bed,
then let it be now around me!
If you can ever flatter me,
so that I may please myself,
you can betray me with pleasure;
that shall be the last day for me!
I offer the wager!"

Well, how is that not fulfilled? Fullest enjoyment, even in the anticipation of eternal fame, is there now.

Mephistopheles:

Top!

Faust:

And blow upon blow!
I shall say to the moment:
Stay, yet! Thou art so fair!

— Does he not say it? —

Then you may bind me in fetters,
Then I will gladly perish!
Then may the death knell toll,
Then you are free of your service,
The clock may stand still, the hands fall,
Let the time be past for me!

Mephistopheles:

Consider it well, we will not forget it.

And he does not forget it. He says it now, Mephistopheles, after Faust has enjoyed the highest moment:

No pleasure satisfies him, no luck pleases him,
So he continues to court changing forms;
The poor man wishes to hold on to the last, poor, empty moment.
He who so vigorously resisted me
Time becomes master, the old man lies here in the sand.
The clock stands still.

The situation has been completely fulfilled; for Faust says:

The clock may stand still, the hand may fall.

Mephisto:

The clock stands still –

The chorus of lemurs:

Stand still! She is silent as midnight.
The hand falls.

What was predicted when the bet was made has come to pass. Mephistopheles can accept that his work is done:

He falls, it is done.

From the mouth of Mephistopheles the words of the cross: “It is finished!” But immediately the chorus of the lemures, who give the voice of the earth:

It is past.

This fits dreadfully into the soul of Mephistopheles. He has said, “It is finished.” The chorus of lemurs answers him, “It is over.” That is the tremendous difference. Over – he does not want the word:

Over! A stupid word.
Why over?
Gone and pure nothingness, complete monotony!

These words are the key to what it is all about. Initially, Mephistopheles is talking to his lemurs; he believes it is done, but it is only over. And now he turns his attention to himself. He wants to understand the contradiction: done, over – he wants to understand it.

Gone and pure nothingness, perfect sameness!
What is the point of eternal creation!
To sweep away the created to nothing!
“There it is over!” What can be read in it?
It is as good as if it had not been,
And yet it goes in circles as if it were.
I would have loved the eternal emptiness for it.

As I said, these words contain what we are looking for. That Goethe chose such words, that he built the scene from the enjoyment of the highest moment, as it is presented, that he lets Mephistopheles converse with the lemurs in this way, testifies that Goethe was able to express something very profound, something so profound that even today it can only be touched upon, because it is this that determines why the last scene must follow. If the matter were as many commentators on Faust have supposed, that Mephisto has simply misunderstood, been tricked, then the last scene would truly be superfluous. Then the matter would be simple enough, then it would be that Faust had not thought that there could be such a high enjoyment as that which is expressed in the words:

Not in the aeons can the trace of my days on earth

Mephisto had not thought of that either; neither of them had thought of that. Neither of them had thought that Faust would ever say to the moment: “Stay, you are so beautiful.” But because it is something higher to feel the moment in this way, the stupid devil is cheated out of his wager: that is more or less how the interpreters of Faust explain it all together. — Well, then the devil would have lost the soul, the angels would have captured it — everything would be in order. We didn't need the last scene. And Goethe certainly wouldn't have written it, because he was a man of poetic economy. But you don't understand Faust if you take it so superficially. You only understand it if you fully realize: Yes, here Goethe wants to allow a Luciferian seduction, even when Death is already fully present, to approach Faust once more, a genuine Luciferian seduction. — And Lucifer is there again in the moment when Faust speaks:

In the anticipation of such supreme bliss
I now enjoy the highest moment.

Now follows the actual entombment and Mephisto's preparation to capture the soul with the demons. The angels arrive and triumph over the demons. The soul seems to be delivered and is carried away, but the poem is not over. What is actually going on? Yes, Goethe could not say what was going on there offhand. But there are many words in the poem through which he has made himself clear enough for those who want to understand. But the idea that is so easily formed of that choir of angels that is advancing to take the soul is not correct. It is not entirely incorrect that the angels who arrive are all too proud and now consider themselves the fullest spirits of light, and the devils – the fat and the scrawny devils – only despise, and now only consider themselves quite pious, so very good, so very pious. Goethe already indicated that he did not want to have the presentation just like that, by having Mephisto, who he truly does not depict as a completely stupid devil, say the words that are interspersed at one point:

The priestly mien will not dress you at all,

and especially the significant word:

They are devils, too, but in disguise.

They are also of Lucifer's race. This is not there for fun! As far as can be said at all, to what extent it is serious, we will continue to consider the matter tomorrow.

Today and tomorrow, I will attempt to say something about certain relationships between human beings and the spiritual worlds, proceeding from the Faust poem. It may be assumed by anyone who really delves into the Faust poem with the tools of spiritual science that Goethe actually wanted to say something of the deepest that he had gained through his long life on earth as his world view in these last scenes in particular. In this case, world view is also meant to imply that Goethe, as if instinctively, as if as a matter of course, wrote these scenes in such a way that one can really feel his position in them, also in relation to the development of humanity, to the impulses of the development of humanity, as far as they were accessible to his knowledge. When spiritual scientific ideas are applied to the figures that Goethe created in his Faust poem, then this must naturally be understood in a very definite way. It would be quite wrong to think that Goethe first took these ideas as a basis and then, as one hangs up clothes on a coat rack, hung up the speeches of the characters and their characteristics. That is not the case. When we speak as we now wish to speak about these figures from Goethe's Faust, we must bear in mind that Goethe knew these figures face to face, so to speak, and characterized them as he was able to, but that spiritual science can justifiably go into the matter in even greater depth. If you meet a person whom you are seeing for the first time, you will not immediately be able to discern everything that is in his soul. Nevertheless, this is in his soul. If you now describe the person after the first encounter with this person, it may be that you only describe a few sides of the person, perhaps something that is purely external. But it is still this person whom perhaps you yourself, if you have seen him often, or someone else who is able to see deeper into the soul, would then have to characterize with much deeper ideas. If I therefore begin by posing the question: What is this Mephistopheles in Goethe? — so that I may be able to express what is significant in connection with the Faust legend today and tomorrow, this is not to be imagined as if Goethe had had in his consciousness the ideas that I must develop for you when I speak of Mephistopheles. Goethe simply characterized the Mephistopheles as he knew him, but that is why the Mephistopheles remains as he really is, a definite figure, who can also be characterized by spiritual-scientific ideas; and it is precisely the significant thing that one can look deeper into the individuality of Mephistopheles or other figures in the Faustian legend through these spiritual-scientific characteristics.

In the sense of spiritual science, one must in any case imagine such a figure as Mephistopheles as, in a sense, having remained on the old moon development. That is the prerequisite, so to speak, the spiritual-scientific prerequisite, that Mephistopheles is a being that has not undergone the corresponding form of development, which it could have undergone from the moon, or perhaps from the sun to the earth, or through the moon to the earth. But even if he confronts us – admittedly in a spiritual and visionary way – even if he confronts us, this Mephistopheles, in the earthly form of a human being, we would still be mistaken if we were to interpret him as saying, for example, that he is more developed than human beings on the moon. He stands quite decidedly higher on earth, Mephistopheles, than man stands on earth, with regard, of course, to his development, not with regard to the talent for evil. You can, if you want, call it lower that Mephistopheles has this genius for evil. But he is a being, so to speak, of a higher hierarchical order than man is, that is, after all, self-evident. If we were to go back to the old moon development, we would find that man, in his moon development, is clearly below the development of Mephistopheles, the being from which Mephistopheles on earth has become. Thus we must seek a higher being in Mephistopheles, a being that has simply been left behind with higher abilities on the lunar evolution than man has ever had. How could we, I would like to say, still make it clear through an analogy how such a being is actually constituted?

Let us assume that we look at our present development on earth. We also find during our present development on earth that some people are further along in their development than others. There are people who are decidedly further along in their development than others. Indeed, during earthly development we speak of certain people who have undergone initiation, who, while this is not yet the case for the general public in the present earthly cycle, already look into the world that lies beyond the threshold. Of course, there is also a corresponding progressive development for such advanced people. But even these people can, in a sense, lag behind on the stages of their earthly development and live their lives in such a way that, when the Jupiter development becomes acute, they say: “If everything followed the path of regular world development, we would now be going through this or that on Jupiter, but we don't want that, we remain at the point we reached during our earthly development.” The point of view is perhaps a higher one than could have been attained by people during the development of the earth; the point of view is such that the Jupiter development is perhaps already anticipated during the development of the earth. But these beings – in this case they are human beings – still lag behind in terms of the stage they had reached on Earth, and so they enter the Jupiter evolution with a Jupiter evolution that they had already undergone during their time on Earth. Thus they are behind in relation to their own measurements, but not behind in relation to the general evolution. They just do not go through the evolution as people on Jupiter will go through it; they remain earthly beings, earthly people, but they already carry the Jupiter evolution within them from the Earth.

You must be quite clear about the fact that the various evolutionary processes are really quite complicated, and that such evolutionary processes as I have just characterized actually exist. And if you now transfer what I have said from Jupiter-Earth to Earth-Moon, you will get a rough idea of what Mephistopheles, who appears in Goethe's “Faust,” is like. He can be counted among the Ahrimanic hierarchies because he had already anticipated human evolution on earth during the old lunar period, but now he adjusts himself to the earth in such a way that he does not bring earthly reason, earthly understanding, earthly individuality into the earthly evolution as they are given by the earth, but as he had anticipated them on the old moon and accepted them. This is why he feels so extraordinarily superior to the man Faust in 'Prologue in Heaven'. He is superior to the man Faust, because in Goethe's sense, the man Faust is supposed to be a real earthly human being who is not only retarded in the region of the dull-witted, but who relies entirely on earthly forces, on earthly impulses, for what he has to develop in his soul. Faust is an earthly human being, an earthly fighter. Mephistopheles appears to him as a lunar man, who naturally feels vastly superior to him because he has already adopted reason and science in the spiritual regions of the moon, which otherwise only people on earth have. Therefore, of course, Mephistopheles can only be a spiritual being. If he were to take on human form like any other human being, then he would also have to adapt to the evolution of the earth. But he does not. Thus we see in Mephistopheles a being who can feel himself to be extraordinarily superior to man on earth. But since the possibility of having moral impulses only arises during earthly development - remember the lectures we have just given in these weeks -; since human-moral impulses only arise during the earthly period, namely everything that arises from the impulse of love, Mephistopheles, who has retained his lunar development, does not have these impulses of love without further ado. He simply does not have them. He is therefore a spiritual being that belongs to a hierarchy, which, because it has held back and also rose very high in earlier developmental epochs, has a certain height out of its entire being.

Let us contrast this Mephistopheles with the higher angels. Let us assume that a present-day angel were to stand beside Mephistopheles, that is to say, a being that is now an angel. What kind of being is this, that is now an angel? It is a being that has to descend during the Jupiter evolution in order to perform services for Jupiter humanity during the Jupiter evolution, which other beings - let us say, for example, archangelic beings - perform for present-day earthly humanity. So this is a being, such an angelic being, which, by its very nature, because it is spiritual, is, when it simply stands next to Mephistopheles, less advanced in evolution than Mephistopheles himself, or rather the hierarchy to which he belongs. In terms of intellectuality, the angelic beings will only be able to achieve during the Jupiter development what Mephistopheles has already achieved through his hierarchy – albeit not through himself, if we regard him as a moon man, as a moon initiate – on the moon. One could say that Mephistopheles' immediate superior is even an extraordinarily high-ranking being, albeit one that is lagging behind in evolution. This being is so highly developed that a being of the rank of, say, the archangel Michael feels himself to be beneath the immediate superior of Mephistopheles. These evolutionary processes complicate the ranking of spiritual beings. A being like Mephistopheles has developed very far during the lunar evolution. This puts it ahead of the usual angelic evolution, the normal angelic evolution. But a being like Mephistopheles has remained a spirit. Because it is a spirit, it has something in common with the usual angelic evolution. After all, angels are spirits too. So we can say: From the Mephistophelian point of view, Mephistopheles is quite right when he speaks of the angels as “immature people”. They really are immature in relation to him, a people who, in the development he values most highly, have not progressed as far as he has.

Now, of course, there are also all possible stages of evolution in the hierarchy of the angeloi. Here, too, we can assume a normal stage of evolution for the development of the angels. But we must assume - this is a fact - that certain angels have also remained behind, that they have, if I may use the expression, lost themselves in Lucifer. Certain angels fall behind in their normal development and become Luciferized. These are the ones that do not go along, but remain at earlier stages. The angels that became Luciferized in this way, or had already become Luciferized before the Lemurian Earth period, now occupy a very special position. After all, how did they achieve this, that they were able to become Luciferized back then? It was about to happen – if I am to express myself popularly, even if only approximately, because it cannot be otherwise – that the group of beings that was human was about to undergo its moon development. Now what is called the Luciferic seduction occurred through spiritual entities that had become Luciferized. This Luciferization led certain beings during the Lemurian evolution to bring about that which you know from Occult Science. Then again, the Ahrimanic evolution during the Atlantean time led to that which you also know from Occult Science and from lectures that have been given recently. So we have to say: During the ancient Lemurian period, a certain impulse emanated from the Luciferic side, in which all beings that had previously Luciferized were involved for humanity. This impulse consists in the fact that man descended further into the material during the development of the earth than he should have done in the progressive development, that his desires, instincts and passions became, one might say, entangled in the material development. A counterweight had to be provided. And this counterweight was provided by the Ahrimanic development, so that man hovers in balance between the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic development. But all this, that man thus hovers in balance between the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic development, is in a certain higher style, in a certain higher sense again the plan of progressive evolution, lies in the plan of progressive evolution.

Having recapitulated this for you, you can say to yourself: Faust, the right man for the earth, will face Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces. And the Ahrimanic forces that confront him are shown to you by Goethe particularly in the Mephistopheles whom he places at Faust's side as the representative of the Ahrimanic force. We have already discussed why Goethe refrained from clearly emphasizing how the Luciferic impulses approach Faust. But everywhere – as I have indicated – it shines through that Goethe actually placed Faust in the middle between the Mephistophelian and the Luciferic forces. I have repeatedly emphasized that Goethe, in his time, could not yet be completely clear about the relationship of the human Faust to Ahriman-Mephistopheles and to Lucifer, because spiritual science did not yet exist as it does today. But he had a certain instinctive recognition that Faust is confronted with these two types of impulse.

Now we ask ourselves: What is it that Mephistopheles himself or his relatives wanted with people? What Mephistopheles wanted with people is really nothing more than something that would have made people on earth impossible, really impossible. For what has only occurred on earth is reproduction through the sexes of man, through the male-female. Mephistopheles, as a true initiate of the moon, who is only retarded, cannot stand this at all, and that is what he actually regards as his task: to eliminate the possibility of having humanity on earth through sexual reproduction. It should not exist on earth. So let us summarize this precisely: the normal development of man on earth consists in the human race reproducing itself on earth through the sexes. But Mephistopheles wanted to remain on the lunar development. He therefore did not want love to lead to the love of the sexes on earth. Mephistopheles is the enemy of the love of the sexes on earth. He is the most determined enemy. He therefore feels – and Goethe characterizes this quite correctly – extraordinarily called upon to reduce to absurdity everything that somehow leads to sexual love. What he wants to bring about in the relationship between Faust and Gretchen — just read the Gretchen scenes carefully and you will see that he wants to prevent all sorts of things that are the duty of Ahriman-Mepbistopheles. But he does not want the love between Faust and Gretchen, the real human love on earth, to arise; he does not really want to tolerate it in either Faust or Gretchen. On the other hand, he is really present in the play when the homunculus is created in the laboratory. And you know from earlier presentations that I have given from 'Faust' that the homunculus is created in order to become a creator of a human being — Helen — out of nature, without sexual love. Mephistopheles sets himself the task, not of creating a humanity in the sense of progressive development, which on earth comes about through sexual love, but of creating a different kind of being through the powers assigned to Ahriman, a being that is not in the sense of the human race destined for the earth. Because if you think of anything other than this homunculus, think of Euphorion, think of the whole way that Helen comes up again, Mephistopheles is at play everywhere. But nowhere should anything of regular sex love come into consideration. So the role that Mephistopheles is assigned is already very well done and can be fully justified from the point of view of spiritual science. There is tremendous depth in it.

And now take the strange word that immediately follows the heavenly host:

I hear discordant notes, nasty strumming,
From above it comes with unwelcome day;
It is the mischievous, girlish bumbling,
As sanctimonious taste may love it.
You know how we, in deeply wicked hours,
Conspired to destroy the human race:

He accuses the angels of knowing that they were watching when Mephistopheles and his companions plotted the destruction of the human race. Now he says something else, adopting the language of earthly man, as it were:

The most shameful thing we have invented,

— the most shameful thing is precisely this destruction of the human race. It is called the most shameful.

In order to make progress with our understanding – it is of course extremely difficult to approach these things, because Goethe wanted to express his deepest human, spiritual feeling and perception in them – in order to make progress, we need to consider the following. You are aware, are you not, that there is — for us at least — a spiritual science, even if it is only at the beginning of its development today. You also know that there has always been something like this, even if in earlier times it was attained in a different way, as true knowledge of the world that goes beyond appearances and penetrates to reality. Now you also know that in a certain way, especially in older times, the spiritual knowledge that was preserved in the mysteries was carefully guarded and that it was based on real knowledge of the world. This spiritual knowledge was only imparted to those who showed their maturity for it. If we now ask ourselves what kind of special kind of knowledge this actually was, this special kind of spiritual knowledge that was imparted in the mysteries, it is best to compare our fifth post-Atlantic period with previous periods, the Greco-Latin, Egyptian-Chaldean and so on. And if, on the basis of this comparison, we ask ourselves how the whole conception of the world has changed through man from earlier epochs, from earlier cultural epochs into our cultural epoch, It is truly the case that something important and significant has taken place in the evolution of humanity, that it is a fable convenante if one believes that one only needs to know about the development of humanity what the trivial story, what is today called history, tells. The earlier cultural ages were quite different from how they were imagined according to ordinary history, which is a fable convenante. Just consider the depth of such a saying as I have quoted:

Oh Sun, a king of this world,
Luna receives your gender;
Mercury copulates you quickly.
Without Venus' favor, you achieve nothing,

Whatever Martian is chosen as a husband.
Jovis G'nad is not lost on you;
So that Saturnus, old and decrepit,
Proves to be many-colored.

There is an enormous depth of malapropism in such a saying, but this depth was once there. People once saw into these realities, even if only through the results of atavistic clairvoyance, which were also pointed to in such sayings, for example. The fifth post-Atlantic period emerged from this knowledge of the basis of existence. It has strayed in two directions. I have characterized one of these, so to speak, through the initiation of the fifth post-Atlantic period, which I have described through Baco von Verulam, through Lord Bacon. There we have the longing to treat everything that goes beyond the perceptible as mere idols. You know, Bacon assumed four types of idols. We have listed them: Idola tribus, Idola specus, Idola fori, Idola theatri, four types. This tendency, to base everything on knowledge gained through sensual observation and through concepts that in turn arise from sensual observation, is expressed through Bacon's spirit at the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantic period. Everything that goes beyond sensory perception is an idol, the content of which is actually exhausted in words. And we have already characterized that, so to speak, that is one current.

Now take, schematically expressed, the current that expresses itself through something like: “O Sun, a king of this world,” which still goes into the deep foundations of existence. If it only wanted to develop from the fourth into the fifth post-Atlantic period, we can say that it would go like this (see drawing). The development that leads to the idols goes down below this evolution (blue line); it does not recognize that in reality one finds a spiritual immediately, just as one finds a sensual; it excludes the spiritual and regards it only as contained in the word idols. This development is inaugurated with Bacon.

What would be the counter-image to this? The counter-image would be an evolution that would only recognize the existence of the spiritual, of the soul-spiritual, which the physical-material does not recognize. That would be the counter-image to this. We could therefore ask: Does this development also exist? Is it also the case, as Bacon says, that only sensual reality is reality, and that everything else is mere word-idols, an expression for the fact that there is only a spiritual reality and no material-physical reality that enters into the senses? This too actually exists. George Berkeley lived a little later than Bacon, and he represents this line of development (red line). Let us take a few moments to clarify the essence of Berkeley's world view.

Berkeley's view, which essentially resulted from his theological world view – he was a bishop at the end – is that everything outside of man that is perceived by the senses is only there as long as it is perceived by the senses. So Berkeley's view is this – isn't it, perhaps the contrast is the best way to characterize it – you assume, now from a, I would say, view that is naive towards Berkeleyanism, you assume the following: When you enter, you see, let us say, Mr. Brown sitting here, but you assume that he was already sitting here before, and you see him afterwards. — As I said, there is not the slightest proof that what you see sitting in this chair was also there before you saw it. And when you go out again, you believe that the Lord remains seated here and sits there while you turn your back on him and go out. Berkeley is of the opinion that there is no proof that, let us say, what you have seen here is still sitting there. It sits there as long as you look, because that is alive, the forming in the eye, and how should the forming in the eye be there if you do not look? One can prove Bacon's view of the world to be logically complete. One can also prove Berkeley's view of the world to be logically complete, because there is no contradiction in Berkeleyanism that could arise logically. It is perfectly possible to prove it logically, even if it does not correspond to naive consciousness. Berkeley does not believe that when you go in you create the farmer and when you go out you magically make him disappear again, he certainly does not believe that, but that what you see comes only with your looking and goes away again with your looking. Esse est percipi: to be is to be perceived. And there is no being other than being perceived in the surrounding world. Therefore, as you can imagine, for Berkeley everything that is the sensory world is only in the process of becoming. You look, there it is; you look away, there it is gone, no longer there. So all this is only there in your perceptions. As I said: esse est percipi, there is nothing but perception, except the process of perception. But behind this process of perception, which is nothing but the process of perception, there is the divine spiritual being. Apart from your perception, Mr. Bauer also has to do with the God who sets him up as he wants him. And this God, when you enter, creates the image of Mr. Bauer in you from what is only in you. Then, when you leave, he lets it disappear again. So this world of the senses does not exist, only the spiritual and soul-like. All of you, as you stand here before me, are only the creature of my eyes. Besides what is the creature of my eyes, there is also the divine-spiritual, soul-spiritual world, but it receives and sustains you quite differently than you exist as the creature of my eyes.

I have only characterized this view. It is really strictly provable philosophically. But it is the one that gives, one might say, the other half of the world to Baconism. And all world views of the fifth post-Atlantic period oscillate between these two directions, between the red and the blue. Either this world view becomes entangled in the mere recognition of the sensual-real and thereby declares itself powerless to see a real spiritual in the sensual-real, or it exhausts itself in the mere recognition of the spiritual-soul, seeing only God and divine thoughts everywhere and declaring itself powerless to descend from the life in God and divine thoughts to the sensual reality. These two aberrations are very much present in the fifth post-Atlantean period. And anyone who observes spiritual life as it develops outside of esotericism will constantly find it either on one or the other, on the red or the blue line. The outer esotericism does not lie on what I have drawn here as the white line.

It can be said that in the fifth post-Atlantean period, man enters into a certain tension between these two views of the world. And Goethe felt this tension intensely. I have presented here, I would say, the theoretical, the more philosophical impulses, but it did not stay that way. All life also errs between the merely spiritual-soul and the merely sensual-material. Goethe felt this tension in the most eminent way. That he felt everything that lives in the outer world, I would like to say under the influence of the current of the blue line, you will not find wonderful, because that is how our essential development goes in the fifth post-Atlantic period, as far as possible towards the material and towards the mere recognition of the material.

But Goethe also felt the other line. He felt it deeply, only in Goethe's time it really was not yet so, I would say, precarious, to call materialism materialistic as it is today. At that time it was not as precarious to point out the aberrations of the blue line as it is today. Today spiritual science must point out the aberrations of the blue line, and it will therefore have to endure all the terrible impacts that must come, because one always only opposes with prejudice, yes, with hatred, what wants to go out into the world as knowledge. And more and more, materialism will be canonized, albeit in a worldly way. But one can still say that materialism will be canonized. How close is materialistic medicine today to declaring itself sacrosanct, how many other endeavors today are declaring themselves sacrosanct in the sense of materialism, in the sense of the aberration indicated by the blue line, the deviation from the spiritual and soul, which at the same time, however, contains as its manifestation the sensual and material, which then belongs to it, which is one with it, and which must be asserted by that which we call spiritual science. Those persecutions, which one might call inquisitorial persecutions, which have already occurred in other fields, will only come in the field of materialism, are actually only just beginning, are now beginning, are only just beginning to assert themselves, even if the forms will be different. The rebellion against the materialistic coloring of knowledge will no less fall prey to the inquisition, the inquisition of the future, which will appear in somewhat different forms than the inquisition of the past, when earlier endeavors fell prey to the corresponding inquisitions. One should not believe that everything that strays according to the blue line will not become just as intolerant as endeavors in other fields became intolerant.

The red line was not so clearly visible in the past. It only separated itself in the fifth post-Atlantic period, and even somewhat later than the blue line, but it was already included in earlier endeavors. It only really emerged in a particular form and has its most important, its greatest philosophical representative in Berkeley. But it has enough other representatives. It emerged in the fifth post-Atlantic period, but certain things remained out of the forms it already had, and that is why it was that in Goethe's time it was already difficult to talk properly about the red line, while Goethe could still talk about the blue line without difficulty. It was difficult to talk about the red line. For what is it that actually strives on the path of this red line? All those world-views strive towards it that avoid extending their view over the whole breadth of the world, and that would revel in a general spiritual-soul life, in a spiritual-soul life that wants to be powerless in the face of the manifestation of the senses. It is a world-view that wants to speak about the supersensible, but that really does not want to recognize anything. Here we have a broad field to which almost all religious denominations and all sects have gradually turned, for it is characteristic of these world views that they actually refrain from trying to understand the world and just talk about something supersensory in general and want to indulge in words. They do not want to acquire the positive, concrete power of knowledge, to really delve into the world of reality with what they attain, with what they talk about.

You will perhaps understand me better if I try to express myself in the following way. Think about how life can unfold for an average person today. He works, let us say, six days a week in a factory or in an office or wherever. He is part of a purely material mechanism that is absorbed in mere sensory observation; today, nothing spiritual is mixed into it, and less and less spiritual is mixed into it. On the contrary, anyone who wants to mix something spiritual into it is considered a real character. But in this sphere all the forces which present-day science seeks to recognize are at work. All the human interconnections which knowledge seeks to fathom are at work here. In short, all the thoughts and concepts which express themselves through the reality unfolding before our eyes are developed here. And then we assume, for his own good, that this person, who has spent the week in the office or in the factory dealing with the purely material or teaching the purely material - after all, nothing but the material is taught in ordinary schools - materially cognizable. Let us assume, out of a sense of honesty, that the person goes to church on Sunday for his own good. There he hears talk about the things that are talked about in church today, based on the evolution that has taken place over the centuries. Try, if you can, I mean, if you have been to church often enough and listened to sermons with an open mind, if you have seen with open eyes what is going on, ask yourself whether there is something in what is being said that is suitable for educating the world that is spreading around us. It is admitted that the God of whom they speak is the author of the world's ruin, but there is no mention, not a single one, of the way in which He intervenes in the world through His forces, through His impulses. There is a special Weltanschhauung for weekdays: blue line; a special Weltanschhauung for Sundays: red line. Nowhere, absolutely nowhere do we see a connection between the two, if we really look at things with insight. Just ask yourself: what does what is taught from the pulpit have to do with chemistry, physics, biology? No relationship is sought, it is even condemned.

Take, on the other hand, the humanities, and you will immediately see what is important. The humanities do not speak of the sensual-material world in the same way as ordinary physics or ordinary chemistry, but they speak of the physical-sensual world in such a way that what they say about the physical-sensual world can flow into every detail of what they say about the spiritual world. It does not have a weekday view and a Sunday view, but a view that extends over the spiritual world and flows down into the details of the physical-sensual world. It does not declare itself powerless, like Berkeleyan idealism, to grasp the world of the senses from the spiritual; it does not declare itself powerless, like Baconian materialism, to find the spirit in the world of the senses, but only to find idols. Where does that come from? Well, we have already grasped that. It is natural to the fifth post-Atlantic period that evolution, schematized by the blue line, came into being. We could, so to speak, call Bacon the inaugurator. Man had to submerge into matter at some point. I have often discussed and discussed the fact that spiritual science is by no means opposed to materialism, but understands why material development is recognized in the fifth post-Atlantic period. But it cannot be recognized without allowing oneself to be inspired by a spirit like Ahriman. And however long this materialism of the fifth post-Atlantic period continues to develop in its Ahrimanic sense, it will have to believe in turn – you can be assured of this, and you will not be because I am telling you, but because you will understand it from the whole spirit of spiritual science, he will have to hold on to this materialistic Ahrimanic sense, to which Ahriman-Mephistopheles, in his deepest hours of wickedness, had resolved to have nothing to do with the regular progress of the human race on earth. Therefore, this science, which has grown out of this materialism, will never come to a thorough understanding of the mystery of the human becoming, of the riddle of embryology and so on - never! It would be able to come to an understanding of the origin of such entities that can form on the way of the homunculus. But this science will never come to that. Now this is only one current of evolution. But much, much depends on this Ahrimanism. Knowledge is only one part of it. But this Ahrimanism runs through the whole of culture.

Goethe also felt the other current, schematized by the red line, deeply, but it was not possible for him, I would say, to present the figures for this red line as clearly, as distinctly as he presented them for the blue line. For the blue line, he created Mephistopheles and his stout and lanky demons and the lemurs. There they stand before us. He dared to do that. For those who speak of the lemurs and the stout and lanky demons will only be slandered from the present age onwards, and will be slandered more and more if they speak in the sense of spiritual science. In Goethe's time, this was still less worrying to some extent. But what was worrying was the other thing, which Goethe also saw through and saw through quite well. It was that he knew that when this red line enters our present time, when there really is a view that declares itself powerless and will declare itself more and more powerless, to come from the recognition of the spiritual and soul to the penetration of the real world, it is due to the fact that certain Luciferic spirits prevent currents that were justified in the past from progressing. Luciferic nature hinders certain trends, religious and sectarian trends, from progressing. And so they cannot penetrate the world, remain stuck in mere recognition of the spiritual-mental. Berkeleyism is just a particular expression of this. This is based on a Luciferic restraint. How does it express itself for Goethe, for example? Mephistopheles remembers himself and his brothers and sisters, those who once, in the depths of their depravity — which means something different in the language of Mephistopheles — swore destruction to the human race, that is, not wanting to know about the way humanity populates the earth. Mephistopheles remembers that it was actually part of his essence that, in the Ahrimanic period, figuratively speaking, he was in the momentous meeting of his spirits, who then decided that no human being should ever be born naturally on earth, but that the powers that exist on earth as sexual beings should be used for something completely different. These Ahrimanic entities decided in ancient times not to allow the love of the sexes to arise. But now Goethe says, not identifying himself, of course, but thinking as Mephistopheles: There are others who are not inspired by Mephistopheles, but are also inspired, well, they don't say anything about the human race on earth not reproducing in the usual human way, but they begin to pray, and find that those who do nothing in the sense of the ordinary reproduction of the human race, who refrain from it, who want nothing to do with it, those are the ascetics, the saints, who make the familiar long faces at the love of the sexes, of which we have spoken several times before. — Mephistopheles sees, looks, beholds such on the other side in the host of angels. There he sees the inspirers of these others, who, in essence, worship what Mephistopheles and his brothers and sisters have decided:

... how, in our most wicked hours,
we devised destruction for the human race.
The most shameful thing we have invented
is just right for their devotion.

That is what devotion is focused on. The Luciferian inspirers of the backward church communities, monastic communities, and sectarian movements are standing among the other crowds inside it. It is not for nothing that Mephistopheles says to the one tall fellow whom he particularly likes:

The priestly mien does not suit you at all.

Goethe has here intuitively grasped much of what he had on his mind regarding the world view that goes hand in hand with the priestly mien, regarding the Sunday world view, which he conceived as Luciferic as opposed to the Ahrimanic. Mephistopheles feels a kinship with those who have taken up into their devotions what Mephistopheles has taken up into his science and into his will.

We can talk about how we think about all these things in purely spiritual terms. But now we want to talk about these things in the Goethean sense. And what I have just said is already, if I may say so, a primeval Goethean intuition. Thus, the Ahrimanic world of lemures, dickteufel and dürrteufel is juxtaposed with something that is initially touched by Lucifer. Goethe expresses this very clearly. The Luciferic is contrasted with the Mephistophelian, as I said, in as veiled a way as possible for a personality to express it, well, a personality to whom many things are allowed: the devil. He is allowed to speak of the 'cleric's expression', of the 'dearest' boys and so on. So in the facts, these two stand in contrast to each other. On the one hand, Mephistopheles, who has, as it were, pledged Faust's soul. How is it pledged? By having driven Faust through everything earthly that goes down below the sphere that has entered into earthly becoming, and goes down below the sphere of human becoming through sexual love. He has a claim on Faust's soul because he has introduced him to everything Ahrimanic. Mephistopheles is truly not to blame for what has entered Gretchen's love through Faust, and he has sufficiently transformed it into its opposite. And afterwards things go quite Ahrimanically. Only Ahrimanic arts are used to evoke certain external phenomena of the Greek world. What can be achieved by Ahrimanic arts is first achieved in the context of the state – let us say it very softly. Then it is sought in the development of the human being, in the context of evolution, but in the context of subhuman and subanimal evolution, in the context of the mechanized homunculus, historically mechanized homunculus. Helen is brought up in a way that is not in the earthly existence of humanity. Then some earthly actions are produced, well, after all, these are not earthly figures either, who help as elves and goblins. All this is already very much mortgaged under the influence of Ahrimanic arts, and mortgaged through the only thing he can have of man's actual earthly blessing. Thus, by leading him through the shallow insignificance - for earthly existence it is only shallow insignificance, but it is therefore not something to which immense reason and science do not belong, even if it is shallow insignificance - the soul is pledged to him. Then pledged by the other, that he has of the actual earthly blessing - well, what then? Man has received his ego on earth, so first his blood. Bones, tendons, ligaments, what the patched half-nature does, Mephistopheles can have, but the actual earthly blessing, the blood, the representative, the physical-material representative of the earthly man, he would like to have that, but he cannot have that, he is left standing on the moon. From him he can only obtain the title written in blood, only that which can be brought into the abstract contract, so to speak, that which is not connected with the impulses that are in reality, but which remains in the abstract, in conformity with the contract. He can only extract that from the blood, not the impulse itself, only that can Mephistopheles extract.

The soul is pledged to him. Now, in his language, it looks as if the other host has simply smuggled it away, cunningly taken it away. But it's not that easy. Up to the point of the death we described yesterday, Mephisto still has Faust pretty much in his claws. But if you recognize death as we showed it yesterday, not just when Faust falls down, but as death gradually sets in, then what Faust experiences, and in particular experiences as the blissful feeling that I described at the end yesterday, after the soul has detached itself from the body, is something that has already been experienced in the spiritual world. There Faust's soul, or, as Goethe first wrote, Faust's entelechy (we will speak of this entelechy tomorrow), glides over into the luciferic sphere and would dissolve in the luciferic sphere. Faust would have just as little benefit from this as if he were to fall prey to Mephistopheles. Just think of what is threatening him there!

Turn to me, loving flames!
The truth will heal
those who condemn themselves;
so that they may joyfully release themselves
from evil
to be blissfully united with the All.

But this beatitude would lead to dissolution in the All, to transition into the eighth sphere! This is precisely what Faust would have: dissolution into the All, which would be identical with annihilation. And now turn to the last scene, of which I have said that it is necessarily connected with the preceding scene, that it belongs to it, that it must be there. There we see the action continuing in a completely different area. There the angels come again and bring Faust's entelechy, Faust's immortality. But in bringing this entelechy, this immortality, they say how they can bring this entelechy here. The younger angels, so it says in the last scene:

Those roses, from the hands
of loving, holy penitents,
helped us to win the victory
and to complete the great work,
capturing this treasure of the soul.

Thus the angels do not raise the entelechy, the soul of Faust, through their own nature, but by receiving the roses from the loving and holy penitents, they raise it out of the human sphere, or rather out of the sphere of people who have gone through human life on earth, who have truly developed out of earthly life. Goethe derives the whole evolution from Mephisto, from the angels, to the human evolution, in that the angels do not only save the entelechy through their own power, but they save it by having received the roses from the hands of loving, holy penitent women. That is the infinitely profound thought. Goethe brings into it his conviction of the significance of continuous human development, of the significance of earthly evolution. And so he must find something in the human being that overcomes the mere Ahrimanic-Mephistophelian. Mephistopheles stands there, commanding the lemurs, half-natures patched together out of bones, tendons and ligaments, commanding the devilish thicks and scrawnies. I have come to terms with what this means: the subhuman nature that could never produce the human being lies in all this only, nature in a basis from which man cannot grow out of, lies in there. Everything lies in there that the world view can grasp, which runs on the blue line, but what surrounds us must not be grasped in this way. From his time on the moon, Mephistopheles has only the powers at his disposal that command lemurs, thick and scrawny devils, but what they draw from nature, from the earth, is only the Mephistophelean, and something else can be drawn from it that Mephistopheles cannot know because he has not gone through the evolution of the earth in his own way. This is drawn out by seeking out the relationship with earthly powers and elements from the now real sanctification of physical nature, the ennoblement of physical nature.

Eternal bliss,
glowing bond of love,
boiling pain of the chest,
foaming divine joy.
Arrows, pierce me,
Lances, conquer me,
Maces, crush me,
Lightning, batter me;

- and so on. There you have the effervescence of nature, which belongs to the human being, which is also connected with the Luciferic, with the devilish, but goes higher. There you have this nature. And the angels have the task on earth or for the earth to take with them the care of the human race. The angels who do not stay behind, but progress to the point of caring for the human race as it should be on earth, Goethe regards as the true redeemers. Do you remember what commission the Lord gives to the actual angels:

But you, the true sons of the gods,
Rejoice in the living, rich beauty!
That which is becoming, that which is eternally working and living,
Embrace you with the sweet barriers of love.

- there they are to provide help, there they are to intervene, and they do so. Those angels truly advance in the angelic host who occupy themselves with the loving-holy penitents and take the roses from them. Just as man absorbs what is allotted to him in earthly evolution, so these angels, who do not remain on the level of lunar evolution but go along with earthly evolution, receive the forces that come from natures such as those portrayed in the last act in the loving, holy penitent women. That is what will help them to progress. Goethe is convinced that the angels develop beyond the Luciferic. As I said, I wanted to hint at Goethe's thought, at how Goethe was connected with all the great evolutionary thoughts of his kind.

We will continue our discussion tomorrow. I hope that from what we have discussed today you have seen how Goethe delves into the depths of becoming and the secrets of the world in order to create his “Faust” and how he wanted to give his verdict on the evolving currents of world view. Truly, there is much in this “Faust”, very, very much in this Faust! And it must be said: humanity could gain infinitely if it tried to find its way through all that is contained in Goethe's “Faust”, to use Goethe's own expression. But we will talk more about all this tomorrow, and about some of the connections between these Faust ideas and the ideas of spiritual science.

after a eurythmic presentation of the scenes “Midnight” and “Entombment”

Much could be said if one wanted to exhaust everything that lies in these final scenes of Goethe's “Faust”, if one wanted to point out all the perspectives that naturally arise for spiritual science from the thoughts that flow from these final scenes. Today I want to bring out a few things from the abundance of what could be said. But I certainly do not want to create the impression that these things could be completely exhausted.

We must take as our starting point two facts of the evolution of the earth if we want to understand these final scenes, two of the most important facts of the evolution of the earth. We have already referred to them. The first fact lies in the Lemurian period, the second in the Atlantean period. Today we will only characterize them insofar as we need to. The fact of the Lemurian period, characterized from a certain point of view, is that through all the events that can be read about in “Occult Science in Outline” or in our cycles, human beings have, to a certain extent, organized themselves more deeply into matter than was predetermined. This has come about through the Luciferic impulse. This impulse has, as it were, fulfilled one of the intentions to which Mephistopheles refers when he says that he undertook it together with the others in deeply wicked hours when destruction was devised for the human race. Through the fact that humanity organized itself more deeply into matter than was actually predetermined for it, human consciousness connected with all that human existence means in the evolution of the earth in a different way than it should have been. We have often pointed out that, as a result of this Luciferic impulse having been given, man connects a completely different consciousness with generation, with sexual reproduction. In those days, so to speak, sexual reproduction was brought into consciousness, and in this way it was made, in a certain sense, one might say, from a supersensible fact, into a sensual fact. That is the first.

The fact that then exists in the Atlantean period is that, since man was now already more deeply organized in sensuality than was predetermined for him, he developed his whole organism in such a way that the Verahrimanization, one could say, could take place as we have often described it, that man connected his spiritual powers with the sensual-physical natural powers and natural facts. You know that in the Bible the first fact is expressed through the image that is given of the Luciferic seduction, which is mainly characterized in the words that Lucifer speaks with regard to the human race: Your eyes will be opened, and you will distinguish good and evil. Your eyes will be opened – in this taking in of the sensual into consciousness with the opening of the eyes lies precisely the fall of mankind into matter. So now mankind had fallen deeper into matter than was predetermined for it. It was predetermined for mankind to see the material world from outside the material world. Through Luciferic seduction, humanity sank into the material world, and through the Ahrimanic of the Atlantean period, a relationship between man and the material world arose within the material world, which should only have taken place in the spiritual counter-image above. What should have taken place above, as it were floating above the material, took place in the material.

The first is expressed by the words spoken over the human being: Your eyes will be opened, and you will distinguish – outwardly – good and evil in sensual perception. – The second is expressed in the Bible, as you know, by saying: And the sons of the gods found that the daughters of men were beautiful, and they united with them in matter. — That is the biblical word, which, I would say, with reference to the human being and that which dwells in the human being, expresses a broad fact. For in this broad fact, all Ahrimanic activity in the human race is included at the same time. Through the same power with which heavenly love has sunk and been drawn into matter and become earthly love, through the power that underlies the fact of the transformation of heavenly love into earthly love, through these impulses, this fact was at the same time brought about, that in an earthly way the intellect of man connects with matter and creates the materialistic form of science. If the Ahrimanic impulses had not taken hold in man, which are expressed through their most human fact: And the sons of the gods found that the daughters of men were beautiful, and they joined with them in the flesh, without the impulses having entered the human race, had the impulses not been drawn upon to use the human intellect to create all kinds of instruments that are only combinations of material forces, and that consist of merely creating everything possible in a machine-like way for any purpose, even if that purpose is the destruction of the human race. If this Ahrimanic temptation had not occurred, it would not have been possible for instruments of murder and the like to have been devised on earth, because if people had retained the relationship between intellect and creation up there, not down in matter, they would not have poured intellect into matter to create the kinds of things that are created in our purely demonic machines, which play an ever greater role in the materialization of human culture. Just as everything that is confusion and aberration in human affectivity, human passion, human emotional life, is expressed by the fact: “And your eyes will be opened and you will distinguish - outwardly, sensually distinguish - good and evil - so all the facts that, as it were, arise from the pride and out of the Ahrimanic nature of man, such as great advances of humanity are marvelled at, the purely mechanical culture, is out of the same principle as that which is hinted at in the Bible: And the sons of the gods found that the daughters of men were beautiful, and they joined with them in the flesh. The records express these things in their own way. In a certain field they shine where these impulses lie, but these impulses are effective in a wide periphery. In the present age, when humanity is to overcome that which is Luciferic and Ahrimanic – and this must be fully recognized – in our time, a clear insight must increasingly prevail regarding what has come about through the opening of the eyes, through the union of the Sons of God with the daughters of men, that is, through the descent of heavenly love to earthly love. A clear understanding must spread.

And Goethe's intuitive perception came close to grasping the necessity for this clear understanding. Precisely when he was writing the last scenes of Faust, his intuitive perception, which was based on instinct, came close. This is of infinite significance. What, then, is it all about? You know, it achieves nothing to say: Oh, I avoid the Luciferic, I avoid the Ahrimanic. That is foolish talk, for one cannot do that; one can only establish the balance between the two. Thus, the Luciferic must gradually be paralyzed by the Ahrimanic as human evolution progresses, and, conversely, the Ahrimanic must be paralyzed by the Luciferic. This is what Goethe sensed and what he incorporated into the last scenes of his “Faust”.

Let us recall once more the deeply moving scene with Sorge. Do you recall how it was explained in an earlier cycle that the rightful realm of Ahriman-Mephistopheles is the realm of death? Thus, in a certain sense, destruction and dying already belong to the realm of Ahriman; he must only not apply his impulses in a misplaced way. When he applies them to places where they do not belong, then the

bad arises. Now, Goethe has lack, need, guilt depart at the moment when the physical body begins to separate from the spiritual soul. In this way he indicates that he is aware of the connections that exist between man and lack, need and guilt, especially for the physical life on earth spent in the body. But when the soul is already loosened, when it is already said of the three that death is approaching, then there still remains worry, but it is still related to the others. It remains, so to speak, in the time in which death is already at work. It is sent from the legitimate realm of Ahriman, worry. Ahriman could do nothing worse for Faust than prevent worry from remaining with Faust through the beginning of Faust's death, for in this lies the intervention of very mysterious forces. A deep mystery is touched here. What does worry do? Sorrow, which is also brought by Mephistopheles-Ahriman, like all gray-haired women, for the magic of Mephistopheles still lasts until then, what does sorrow do? It undoes in Faust what Lucifer has achieved; it closes his eyes again. Do you realize the depth of the world view here! That which came to man through Lucifer's impulse is now paralyzed by an impulse of Ahriman through the detour of worry. Man has become sighted in the physical realm through Lucifer. Now he is being blinded again by the form brought in from the realm of Ahriman, that is, made to see inwardly.

But within there is a bright light.

There is an enormous depth to this matter. And so, in this dying Faust, Goethe is really not trying to undo anything in a human being, but to shape the Luciferic in such a way that it enters life in balance with the Ahrimanic. And now, in a sense, care speaks a profound word to interpret what it does. Lucifer once said: You humans will see by having your eyes opened. What does care say? Care counters the Luciferic with the Ahrimanic. People have indeed become able to see outwardly, physically, but they are blind in spiritual terms, and this continues throughout their lives. How can this blindness be overcome? By consciously immersing oneself in it, by grasping it, by recognizing it, and thus spiritual seeing, spiritual looking, occurs. Now Sorrow utters a word that one could already say, with a certain justification, sounds equally mysterious to the clever and the foolish:

People are blind throughout their lives,
Now, Faust, you will become blind at the end!

Thus, Sorrow seems to say:

People are blind throughout their lives,
Now, Faust, you will become blind at the end!

One cannot make much sense out of these two sentences. One wonders: What is it actually supposed to mean? — So, physically, people see all their lives, but worry calls this blind.

Well, Faust, you will become blind in the end!

He is now really going blind. She applies the words in a completely different way, but she actually means that he becomes inwardly sighted. It is important to learn how to read these sentences in the right way. And that consists of:

People are blind throughout their lives,
Now, Faust, you will become blind at the end!

The experience lies in the becoming. For people, it is a given fact: they are blind. But Faust should not be blind, but should experience the process of entering into blindness. Become blind, experience this connection between being-seeing and being-blind. Take this word and link it to another:

But you, the true sons of the gods,
Rejoice in the livingly rich beauties!
The becoming

- attention is drawn to this! —

That which is becoming, that which is eternally active and alive,
embraces you with the sweet barriers of love.

The Becoming, which is eternally active and alive, is conceived as the spiritual, as the reflection of the spiritual in the “Prologue in Heaven”; this Becoming is now poured out upon Faust through the concern:

Men are blind in their whole life,
Now, Fauste, become blind in the end!

It is something different to experience the connection between seeing and blindness in the process of becoming than not to experience it, but to be only in the blindness of seeing,

If one is well acquainted with Goethe, one can well understand his peculiar feelings towards being and becoming, and then one has a deep, deep understanding of Goethe in this interpretation of this saying. So we see how Goethe penetrates to the deepest human secrets. This going blind through worry is really the counterpart to man becoming blind through Lucifer in paradise.

And now let us move on. Let us look at Mephistopheles as he stands there, facing the sons of the gods, who have received, so that they can truly have the treasure of the soul, the roses from the hands of loving, holy penitents. What has happened here? These penitents were once on earth, they went through earthly love, through that which had become of Ahrimanic seduction in the Atlantean period. But what have these penitents achieved through their human experiences? Earthly love has become heavenly again! We see at the end that Gretchen herself has carried the earthly love she experienced here up into the spiritual regions. And what took place here on earth has been transformed into the spiritual and heavenly. Gretchen is up there among the penitents, she is among the penitents scattering roses. Love that has become earthly comes to us again in a heavenly form. She has been led back to the heavenly realm through the process of humanity, through what human beings can experience. And

if the Bible expresses it at the point where it means heavenly seduction, that heavenly love has become earthly, then Goethe points to the process of humanity, where earthly love becomes heavenly again, and Mephistopheles stands below as a son of the gods too, but now unites with the daughters of men, who in turn have become spiritual, through the roses they have strewn. It is the reverse process of the one the Bible suggests to us: And the sons of the gods united with the daughters of men. And again, Mephistopheles, who had strayed with the daughters of men, united with the daughters of men, who had been taken up by the gods. So it is the reverse process. Both the process in Paradise of the Luciferic temptation and the later process, which was indicated by the words: “The sons of the gods united with the daughters of men in the flesh” —, are applied in the opposite direction. The son of the gods, Ahriman-Mephistopheles, unites with the daughters of men, who in turn have been taken up into the nature of the gods, but now in heavenly love, not in earthly love, in spirit, in soul, not in the flesh. The reverse process. Once again, a wonderful mystery through which the events of “Faust” are directly linked to the highest traditions of humanity.

And only now, taking things this way, do we understand what Goethe actually means, for only now are we able to grasp the process that is taking place. It is most interesting to follow how Goethe was led, I might say, by the necessity of the matter, to shape the conclusion of his “Faust” exactly as he did. He really allowed himself to be led by the matter, not by some mere inner arbitrariness, he allowed himself to be led by the matter. Just consider, he once wrote down, when the matter was not yet finished, when it was so ripe that he could write it, in a scheme of how he wanted to shape this scene. There he writes down:

“Four gray women.” — Well, he carried that out.
“Faust and sorrow“ — carried out.
“Mephistopheles and lemurs” — carried out.
“Faust satisfaction“ — carried out.
“Gone. Corpse. Lemurs burying. Removed. Satans and hellish rachen” — good.
“Decay awaiting“ - he formed that. “Because the soul escapes later than usual” - that is again executed. “Satanic postures to catch it” - well, that is what we have tried to depict here today! “Angels, heavenly glory, float by. Mephistopheles. Resist. Angels scatter roses. They wither at the breath of the satans. Transformed into flames of love. Satans flee. Mephistopheles's love torment. Angels float away. Mephistopheles to the appeal."

Goethe originally wanted to tie in with this appeal, where Mephistopheles, as it were, appeals to heaven for the soul of Faust. So he wrote this down: Mephistopheles off to appeal. -— Then he writes: “Heaven, Christ, Mother” — that is, the Mater dolorosa — “Evangelists and all saints. Judgment on Faust”. So not long before Goethe completed his “Faust,” he wanted to end it with Mephistopheles appealing to heaven on behalf of Faust's soul, and he thought of having a kind of judgment held, where one should have seen a kind of heavenly scene, in which Christ, the Mother of God, the Evangelists and all the saints were gathered. Goethe had thought of presenting this scene in a way similar to the way we find the upper part in the well-known Raphael painting, where the sacrament is in the middle. We know this picture. A judgment should have been held over Faust. Goethe did not carry this out because at the time he wrote it down, he wanted to follow his inner arbitrariness even more. He was driven by the desire to do it differently. The first could have been quite beautiful, but, one might say, it could have been written in earlier times. It no longer fits into Goethe's time. Only those who understand nothing about the developmental history of humanity believe that everything can be written at all times and that the same things can be written about in the same way in every age. Those who are alive in the process of human development

So that is not what Goethe did. Instead, he did what we now know and what was presented here some time ago, the scene where it goes up through the holy anchorites, where we are then led into the realm where the angels come, into the realm of the blessed children, where the penitent women appear, where Gretchen herself appears. That is to say, Goethe humanized the last scene, in keeping with the challenge of the times that was set for him, and included the human element in its significance for spiritual reality. Goethe himself once said that, to a certain extent, the most important thing for solving his Faust problem lies in the words contained in the final scene:

Whoever strives and labors,
We can redeem him;
And if his soul has been touched
By love from above,
The blessed host will meet him
With a warm and loving welcome.

One should not take such a word of Goethe lightly. The commentators on Faust took it very lightly. By pointing this out, Goethe wanted to show how deeply he was able to grasp the secret of the gracious working of the divine spiritual principle in relation to man. And he proceeded with deep significance. But he took it in a lively way. Through the fact that Gretchen had certain experiences at Faust's side during her time on earth and was then transported into the spiritual worlds, a bond is created between Faust and Gretchen, and Goethe wants to show that something like this is a reality to him, that when death passes over these things, they remain a reality. Man is placed in the connections that are formed during his physical existence, only when death has passed over them, they take on a spiritual form.

And if love has shared in him
from above,

– that is, he has entered into an elective affinity with the spiritual that has become of the sensual – then what has become spiritual meets him with a warm welcome, then he is not only a free human being, then he is a human being enveloped in the effects of grace. Goethe points out how deeply significant everything becomes for the human being that he enters into by way of elective affinity, and how real it is for the human being who is interwoven in some way, having been taken up from the physical into the spiritual. And how real are the things that people do in the moral and spiritual realms, how these are not just, as materialism believes, something temporary, but something that continues to have an effect, something that has significance for developing humanity. This is what Goethe shows in this final scene. That is what makes this final scene so magnificent.

What can materialism say other than: Well, the Pater ecstaticus, he imagines things; but when the Pater ecstaticus is dead, then it is all over. Likewise the Pater profundus, likewise the Pater Seraphicus, and so on. — For Goethe, what these anchorites experience is just as real as the rising and setting of the sun is real to him. And just as the rising and setting of the sun has an effect on the physical world, so in Faust's soul a real process is effected in Goethe through what flows through the world from the raptures and prayers and mystical hoverings of the anchorites. Goethe presents the reality of the spiritual world, insofar as this spiritual world is rooted in human feeling and in human inner experience. Not just the supermundane conceptions that are to some extent detached from the human being, but the supermundane conceptions that are deeply connected with the human being, are presented by Goethe. And that is why his Faust has become the real poem about the origin, about the first time of the fifth post-Atlantic period.

But one thing must strike those who follow the various notes that Goethe made before writing the individual scenes. I have already spoken of some notes in another context. For example, at the end of the 18th century, when Goethe was once again approaching the task of editing his “Faust”, he wrote down a few sentences of this sketch of how he wanted to work, how he wanted to transition from what had already been edited to what followed. He wrote down:

“Ideal striving for influence and empathy in all of nature.
Appearance of the spirit as a world and deed genius.”

- That's all there.

"Conflict between form and formlessness.
Preference for formless content
over empty form.
Content brings form with it.
Form is never without content.
These contradictions, instead of unifying them, make them more disparate.
Bright, cold scientific striving. Wagner.
Dull, warm scientific striving. Pupil.
Enjoyment of life of the person seen from the outside, Part I.
In dullness, passion.
Enjoyment of action outwards, Part II, and enjoyment with consciousness.
Beauty.
Enjoyment of creation from within.

There he already indicates the direction he wants to take towards the end. And then he writes down what was not carried out: “Epilogue in Chaos on the Way to Hell”.

I have already said how it was misunderstood that this epilogue should have been held in chaos on the way to hell. People racked their brains over how Faust should have ended with an epilogue in chaos, on the way to hell. So, in a relatively advanced stage, Goethe would not have wanted Faust to be redeemed, but would have wanted him to go to hell. People have not thought about the fact that this epilogue should be spoken by Mephistopheles and not by Faust. Faust goes off to hell after having lost the bet and speaks his epilogue. But Goethe could not carry this out, it is really not there. Why is it not there? Because at that time it could not yet be written, arising out of the profound mystery and at the same time out of the mystery of his time. For what would be contained in this epilogue in the chaos on the way to hell? Let us imagine what would be contained there. What has happened? We have considered the various interactions that have occurred between the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic, which are depicted at the end of Goethe's 'Faust'. As a result, Faust's soul has not really been captured by Ahriman-Mephistopheles, but enters the spiritual world in the appropriate way, to join the forces that come from the blessed host in the way we have depicted. It is due to the fact that the Luciferic element has gained a little ascendancy, that a kind of spiritualization has occurred for Faust, that the materialization, which should have occurred through Ahriman, whereby Faust's soul would have remained united with matter, as it were, through earthly heaviness, and Faust would have sunk into an abyss — the ruler over matter is Ahriman-Mephistopheles! That this did not happen. It did not happen. In a sense, the scales tipped more towards the Luciferic side. This made it possible for Faust's soul to enter the region where it then enters, where, with the overcoming of the Ahrimanic in the appropriate way, the human effects of penitents and Gretchen themselves are in the spiritual sphere.

Now Mephistopheles is standing there. He wanted to capture this soul, but could not. He did not succeed in connecting it with the heaviness of the earth, otherwise it would either have remained with the corpse and been caught by the circle of lemurs, or it would have been captured by the thick devils or the thin devils. None of this has succeeded. Such a state of equilibrium between the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic has arisen that Faust has risen to heavenward. But Mephistopheles has now come to a standstill. The soul has escaped him. But he could now say to himself: Yes, here I stand; this soul has escaped me, but it will again move into my realm, it will return to earth. Then I will recognize it, then I will be able to come close to it again, because then it will have to undergo new ahrimanic trials. — Having explained this, there would be the 'epilogue in chaos on the way to hell'. For that is the peculiar thing about Mephistopheles-Ahriman, that he always believes he will win in every incarnation. And in every incarnation, when the corresponding state of equilibrium with Lucifer occurs, he can again lose his victory. That is the peculiar thing. But this to and fro of man between Ahriman and Lucifer must take place, otherwise the human personality could not develop. If man did not have the spirit that works and creates through resistance, the human personality would not be able to develop. It is only through resistance that the human personality develops. Even in our body, our personality develops through resistance. Think, if we did not have two eyes and could direct them at things so that their axes intersect, if we did not have two hands that touch each other, and one of which washes the other, our personality consciousness would not be able to develop physically. The lord of obstacles, the lord of hindrances, is also Ahriman-Mephistopheles. Therefore Ahriman had to gain great influence in the fifth post-Atlantean period, because personality is to be developed precisely in this fifth post-Atlantean period. In earlier periods, the human being had far less personality; in the Egyptian-Chaldean period, almost none at all, since the human being was still almost completely enclosed in a sense of community. I have often discussed this. Personality only really begins to emerge in the Greco-Latin period, and even then slowly, there is still a lot of sense of community. Then in our fifth post-Atlantic period is the time when the personality must become fully aware of itself, so that it can fully create out of itself what is to be achieved for this fifth post-Atlantic period. The strongest demands on the creative and life impulses of the personality are the hallmark of the fifth post-Atlantic period. In this fifth post-Atlantic period, spiritual science must enter into human development. But this spiritual science demands, in order to be understood, grasped and comprehended, a greater strain on the intellectual, the sentient and also the will forces, a greater strain on all the forces of the personality than was present in earlier times. And it was from a deeply intuitive recognition of the impulses of his time that Goethe placed Ahriman-Mephistopheles at the side of Faust, who is to develop personality consciousness in his trials. He must develop in the face of the resistance of Mephistophelian influences; he must recognize what lives in Ahriman-Mephistopheles from the one-sided development of reason and science, but he must preserve himself in it. For a personality who has passed through all science – “Alas, now I have studied philosophy, jurisprudence and medicine, and unfortunately also theology!” – and who has also taken up magic and magical traditions, it was only possible either to fall into mystical enthusiasm for the Earth Spirit:

In the flood of life, in the storm of action
I surge up and down,
weaving back and forth!
Birth and grave,
an eternal sea...

— to weave with it! But this is a rising, a becoming nebulous in this weaving and living in the storm of action... only vague mystics who want to lose their personality may long for this! The fifth post-Atlantic period demands the precise exertion of the strongest personality forces, and out of this knowledge and will in man should arise in the fifth post-Atlantic period. Therefore, however, in this fifth post-Atlantic period, humanity is required to fully employ its personality. And this will become more and more a requirement of this fifth post-Atlantic period: strengthening, empowering the personality through full use of the personality. It will become necessary, also with regard to moral understanding of life, for people who do not want to lag behind in their development to use their personality more and more. This strengthening of the personality will be a demand of the time. And this strengthening of the personality lies in the sense of normal, good, proper further development. The weakening, obscuring of the personality does not lie in the impulses of the rest of the fifth post-Atlantic period. This dissolving of the personality in nebulousness is a relapse, an atavistic relapse into ancient times. But when left to themselves, the opposing Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces work against the human being and undermine his tasks. Because the human being must then fully employ the spiritual science that should arise out of the strong forces of the personality for the fifth post-Atlantean period, Ahrimanic counterforces work against the personality. We must understand this, and it is from this point of view that we must view our time.

If we look back to earlier times, we shall find, in spite of all that is already personal, much more objective striving. In our time, the Ahrimanic forces are working in such a way that they gradually seek to draw the objective striving entirely into the sphere of the personality of those individuals who allow themselves to be drawn into it. Consider how, little by little, everything is diverted from the factual to the personal. This is not just a matter of chance, but something that lies in the nature of our time. Someone is working in the service of evolution, which continues to have a regular effect. Instead of approaching the matter, the fight against his personality will start more and more, personal defamation, personal distortion, will take the place of the factual. And today we can already see how far this has progressed in our age, how people no longer know how to distinguish between purely personal suspicion and objective criticism. And precisely where spiritual science is being practiced in an improper way, it expresses itself most grotesquely and most strongly.

Just recall our own struggles. Do you remember how objectively something had to be presented against the movement that has been attached to the name of Mrs. Besant in recent times. Did they present a single objective argument in their reply? No! Only the strongest personal suspicions. All personal suspicions! This is only a caricatured anticipation of what is a characteristic of our time and will take up more and more space, and which must be seen through with full awareness. Because personality must be pushed into the breach – because only through personality will it be possible to achieve more and more of what used to be achieved more through public spirit – the fight against personality is also starting. And because strength is demanded of the personality, and the sense of comfort does not want to seek strength from the thing that is striven for, the weak personality, the incompetent personality, is today so directed by the own power of the personality, drilled up into the strong. Without having learned anything, without having seriously occupied himself with anything, without having penetrated deeply into anything, today, purely out of the arbitrariness of the personality, this or that is done. And one does not understand at all how to reckon with these things.

In our field, you can again do some nice studies. How often has it been necessary to repudiate the swelling folly that has developed in our movement over the years, to repudiate the swelling vanity! But vanity does not understand that it must be repudiated. An example: in Frankfurt, when I was there once, I received a telephone call from a man who said he had to speak to me immediately. He then arrived, with extremely long hair that fell down over his shoulders and a corresponding patriarchal beard. He explained that he had been following me for quite some time and that he wanted to reach a kind of compromise between what he has to give to the world and what I represent. Well, you can't help but violate that principle of brotherhood, which considers amateurish stupidity and that which is honestly striven for as equivalent. You have to presume to make that distinction. So, of course, you have to let such people go, you don't have to worry about them any further. You don't have to be rude to them, but you do have to show them what you think of them and that you don't subscribe to the vague principle of equality, that every self-important idiocy must be regarded as equivalent to the other. Well, after some time the person in question appeared here in Switzerland and even announced lectures in various cities against me. He has also caused mischief in other ways, as some of those sitting here know. Thus enmities arise because the personality, which today must push itself into the breach everywhere, must permeate itself with something. But if it cannot do so, it wants to be strong without first making itself strong through the forces that permeate it. One must see through the causes of the conflicts. That is the essential thing. We must really understand the times in which we live, not act arbitrarily. Therefore, the strongest possible assertion of the personality is what our time demands. Fight the Ahrimanic battle against the personality.

The second thing that our time demands, and demands quite energetically, is familiarization with the sense of fact. Humanity is instructed to understand the spiritual world. In this spiritual world, it is not the case that one can follow how one is being corrected. I expressed this in the final chapter of my “Theosophy”, that one is not corrected when one has done something wrong. Read it up. Sense of fact, sense of real facts. But the strongest Luciferic battle is being waged against this sense of fact in our time. In no other time, despite everything and in spite of everything that has happened, have facts been falsified as much as in our time! The Luciferic instincts call upon Ahrimanic forces, which present facts in a lying way. This tendency to present facts dishonestly is on the increase and will become more and more prevalent. It is important to see through this. Becoming accustomed to a sense of fact and to the fact that one will increasingly have to stand up for what needs to be stood up for in the world with one's personality is part of the fifth post-Atlantic period.

Try to understand how, especially in our field, the Ahrimanic and Luciferic struggle can already be observed today, how, right up to the most recent events, we have been confronted with a lack of sense of fact. Things are being written and said today that are no longer true at all.

Goethe sensed all this, deeply sensed it. If you go through his “Faust”, you will see that he connects the luciferic and ahrimanic forces to the nature of Faust in such a way as it must be seen by man if man wants to properly place himself with consciousness in the impulses of the fifth post-Atlantic period. In detail and on a large scale, the forces of Ahriman and Lucifer work against the human being. If Ahriman were not recognized, if Lucifer were not recognized, one would not be able to continue to live in the appropriate way. And all this must be brought about through spiritual science. One would like to say that it cannot be discussed strongly enough today, because one is still little understood today according to the weight of what has to be brought out of spiritual science. Things are taken too lightly, too easily forgotten. What our time demands is the deepening and strengthening of the personality, a sense of fact, a sense for true facts, and working with them on a large scale, one could say today, with the external events of the world. There are two things that work against what is necessary for the progress of humanity: an absurd nationality principle that has become atavistic. That is the first. A perverse nationality principle, as it was brought into the world by the Napoleons in the 19th century in particular, a nationality principle in the name of which many impulses are invoked today against the true sense of human development. A befogging nationality principle that befogs and confuses concepts, that places concepts in false spheres. I will make myself clear in the following way.

In a certain sense, we are right to speak of a green meadow if we understand the matter correctly. But we understand the matter correctly only if we speak of the green meadow in such a way that we know that the individual plants are green and that the greenness of the meadow

consists in the green of the individual plants; the individual plants have the concrete green. If I wanted to have the green of the meadow in concrete terms, without the concrete greenness of the individual plants, I would have to paint the meadow green, but then it would truly not be a green meadow. I can only speak of the green of the meadow if I am aware that in concrete terms I can only mean the green of the individual plants. I must know that the green quality is applied only to the individual plants, and that I must not think confusingly as if the green quality of the meadow could apply to the whole. If I use the word the green quality of the meadow in the abstract, then I must be clear about the fact that I am forming only an abstraction which summarizes the individual concretes, the green plants. It is absolutely necessary that there should be such clarity in the use of concepts, that, for example, people should learn that the words “freedom” and “justice” can only be applied in relation to the individual human being, just as “verdancy” can only be applied to individual plants, and that when I speak of the justice and freedom of nations, I can only mean an abstraction, just like the verdancy of a meadow. But today the most mendacious motto that could possibly exist is being spread across half the world, with talk of something that is to be fought for in the name of the rights and freedom of nations, which is such nonsense, such folly, as the green color of a meadow is a folly, if one thinks one could paint all the plants in the meadow, instead of the meadow being green because of the individual plants. Nevertheless, today's delusion of nations, with the false principle of nationality, speaks of this foolish motto: the rights and freedom of nations. And one is quite sure to be considered a fool, a madman, if one expresses what has already been expressed, especially in connection with 'Faust', who says: 'On free ground with a free people', not with a free nation, which could not be mentioned at all, - which must already be expressed in reference to 'Faust'. Today, one is certain to be considered a fool or a malicious person who rebels against something that is so beautiful and so great and so ideal, that is so well intended, but that is thought imprecisely, thought carelessly , is conceived with malevolence because it brings in something atavistic that does not belong in our time, because it teaches the individual a consciousness that comes from weakness and not from strength of personality.

And the other thing that works against progressive principles in our time, apart from the absurd principle of nationality, is the politicization of intellectual life. It is important to understand these two things, to understand the politicization of the life of thought. I have already drawn attention to the meaning of “policy” in another context, where people are constantly talking about policy, about staging certain thoughts in order to achieve this or that. But how widespread this is in the world! In our fifth post-Atlantic period, the worst is emerging from this politicization of the life of thought. A time that could still believe in a certain way when it formed thoughts, could be inspired at its councils, and could decide on this or that dogma, which was then used to achieve this or that in the world. But our time, which is truly uninspired in its materialistic structure, will, if it does not tie the thought in such a way that it is tied in responsibility to the impersonal truth, grasp the thought only out of personal-arbitrary or out of association-arbitrary or otherwise somehow common-arbitrary aspiration. And so the thought is not put into the world because one sees its correctness, but because one wants to politicize with it. This politicization of the thought life goes on and on. And one does not educate oneself in such a way that one comes to the right, to the true thought, but one educates oneself in such a way that one comes to a thought with which one can politicize, for example with the thought of not vivisecting animals. But one does not grasp the thought in its truth, but by its political power of agitation. One agitates with the thought, one politicizes with the thought in temperance associations, in anti-vivisection associations. One does not grasp a thought in its reality – temperance, vivisection or the like – but one politicizes in relation to it. Thought is politicized everywhere. They are absorbed into the political machinery. The false principle of nationality, the false politicization of thoughts, as it lives especially in our present-day clubbiness, is what is contrary to the currently progressive correct evolutions of humanity. Associations are founded, not to represent the truth, but to achieve this or that. As a result, even the right idea can be fanatized, made one-sided, while the fifth post-Atlantic period has in its fundamental character the task of working through the truth.

Herman Grimm, who had become familiar with Goethe's life, said: “Goethe's ‘Faust’ represents a poetry that is really thought out entirely from the organization of the human personality.” A middle-ranking university professor goes astray in his scientific pursuit, going through all sorts of things. But what he goes through is representative of all human striving in the highest sense and, if you go deep enough, contains everything that can arise in a person in our time in terms of philosophical questions, everything that can arise in terms of matters of the heart, and everything that can arise in terms of political forces. And one could add from the depths of spiritual science: precisely that which is purely human, which is the content of humanity, is contained in this “Faust”. What nation does he belong to then? None, of course. And he is the most vivid protest against the false nationality principle of our day, which is thoroughly captured in a word of Grillparzer, a harsh-sounding but deeply true word of Grillparzer. Grillparzer spoke the word: from humanity through nationality to bestiality. That is the way! Nationality leads astray when it is insisted upon, when aspirations are drawn from it, from humanity, and it soon leads into bestiality. And of course politics is necessary in the world, but not the politicization of thought. And one sees how Goethe's thoughts are depoliticized! Try to understand the second part of Goethe's Faust from this point of view; it is written from tremendous depths. It is a great document not only of our time, but of all times of humanity, for it touches on the questions that we have seen, which stand directly alongside the great biblical questions. The scene of Sorrow stands beside the scene of Paradise; the scene where Mephistopheles stands before the spirits of heaven stands beside the image that the Bible gives of how the sons of the gods took pleasure in the daughters of men and joined with them in the flesh.

One would like to have much, much better words to point out what should be deeply inscribed in the human mind and heart and what should not be forgotten, which unfortunately is all too quickly forgotten after it has been heard. For the healing of the great evils of the time can only come from an understanding of the things that have been touched upon.

If today, in connection with Goethe's “Faust”, I have tried to give some idea of the impulses of the fifth post-Atlantean period, and how they are spiritual, I would above all like to see an understanding come of how the sins against these impulses of the fifth post-Atlantean period are showing up all over the world, how lack of understanding is occurring everywhere in the world precisely with regard to what is to be understood. Oh, I would like to have the words with which I would like to talk about these things! But perhaps in the times to come other people will find better words to discuss the things that are so little understood today, because so many people would like to let their personality be submerged in some convenient support for this or that, seeking to become this or that through this or that movement here or there, and then no longer able to extricate themselves from the false principle of community or false principle of nationality, no longer able to extricate themselves from the politicization of thought. And yet, everything that goes down this false track will fall prey to Lucifer and Ahriman. Only that which will know that nothing can be achieved on this track will flourish! However comfortable we may be in all the various agitations and club activities of our time, the path that must be found will only be found in the service of that human activity that seeks wisdom in truth, and that is convinced that only by incorporating truth into humanity can the human goal can be achieved by incorporating truth into humanity, and which knows that all politicization of thought must cease, all agitating with thoughts as if they were dogmas, that they must be grasped with the full sense of responsibility for truth, not for their agitational value, not for the favor that we show them. It is not because they please us that thoughts may enter our sphere, but because we really have the full sense of responsibility for truth and truth-value.

I would like to have said much more than can be contained in the words spoken in the appendix to Goethe's “Faust”. I want it to continue to work in hearts and souls, because I know how much of what is needed for our era and for humanity, which is wandering on such wrong paths in our era, is contained in it. If we cannot admit to ourselves the wrong paths we wish to continue along, then we cannot make real progress towards the right goal that humanity must pursue.

Address given during the first Anthroposophical College Course at the Goetheanum, in response to the call to academic youth.

Dear fellow students! You will understand that I cannot speak about the content of the call itself, since it is too closely associated with my person. And so it will be best if I, in the words that I am allowed to speak to you today, refer more to what actually announces itself as a desire from the current student body for new scientific and general cultural goals, as well as for social life.

When I consider this appeal, it reminds me of another appeal that was also supposed to start from Stuttgart some time ago: the appeal that was then intended to form a cultural council.

In 1919, when our work began in Stuttgart, it was initially based on the “Appeal to the German People and the Cultural World”, which I was allowed to write and which made its way around the world in March of the previous year. And this work was based on what I tried to set out as social guidelines in my book “The Key Points of the Social Question”. At that time a number of prominent people who stood by the convictions and social aims of the Kernpunkte decided to found a Cultural Council as one of their most important undertakings. They intended to show the world how to approach the renewal of spiritual life and the permeation of spiritual life with new impulses.

You know, in the “Key Points of the Social Question” attention is drawn to the fact that the most important aspiration of our time must be to raise a subconscious goal of present humanity to conscious action. That is precisely: the shaping of the social organism into a threefold one.

Anyone who has the slightest insight into the seething and pulsating life of humanity today can already feel that there is nothing utopian in these “key points”. Rather, it is the result of thirty to thirty-five years of observation that years of observation, what actually the majority of people fundamentally want, or let us say, actually should want according to their instincts, according to their feelings, but what they do not yet admit to themselves because they have a certain fear of raising it to their consciousness.

We can see the need for new paths to be taken in all three areas of life: in the spiritual, in the legal, state and political, and in the economic. And in my “Key Points” I tried to show how the main obstacles to walking on such new paths arise from the fact that over the last three to four centuries we have become accustomed to the suggestion that the unitary state must do everything. One could say that the unified state has gradually occupied the university system as well. The university system was annexed and occupied. Just consider that this university system has developed out of intellectual life itself. Consider that, in a time not so long behind us, the validity of the university system was based entirely on the individual fertility of the individual universities. Consider how people spoke of the law faculty in Bologna, how they spoke of the medical school in Salerno, how they spoke of other important schools; how they derived the reputation of the university system in the world from the special individual achievements of what was available in the individual universities. And it is basically only a more recent occupation or annexation, carried out by the states that were increasingly seizing power, that our higher education system finally ended up serving the external needs of the individual states. Today, in particular, anyone who feels connected to the pursuit of knowledge and the spirit and to the cultural aspirations of humanity should have some kind of historical memory of times when it was up to the universities to decide what they wanted to give the state and what they wanted to make of the state. And, I would like to say, a certain inner impulse, which comes from reflecting on things, should lead one to realize that, as was emphasized again and again at the end of the 18th century, at the beginning of the 19th century of the Age of Enlightenment, in the times of the Middle Ages, science was the servant of the theological and ecclesiastical establishment. How often has it been repeated, what Kant – you know that I am no Kantian – said with the words: the time is over when all the sciences followed in the train of theology. The sciences have become independent. They are called upon to carry the banner of all other culture. But basically only after such words had become popular from a justified feeling towards the spiritual life in the branches of science, only after that the state has created the current that has now made the university system the servant of the state, of politics, of jurisprudence. And, my esteemed fellow students, whether it is better for theology, that is, at least for something spiritual, to trail behind, or for the external state to trail behind, is still an open question. The coming times will have to pass judgment on that. For it was not nice, either, that, so to speak, a century after Kant spoke, science no longer wanted to follow theology, the rector of the Berlin Academy of Sciences, the famous physiologist Du Bois-Reymond, said that the gentlemen members of the Berlin Academy of Sciences felt very honored to be allowed to call themselves: the scientific protection force of the Hohenzollerns. This is ultimately the result of what I would like to call the occupation of the higher education system by the state. And it goes without saying that the state does not care for science, but for its “civil servants”. Recently, my dear fellow students, the rector of the University of Halle was able to publish an essay that throws a very strange spotlight on the old attitudes that he has come from after becoming rector. The rector of the University of Halle seems to be reasonably well informed about important events behind the scenes, because he points out with concern and in great detail in a newspaper article that there is an intention to close a large number of German universities and to establish civil service schools in their place, where civil servants will be trained in the right way. Yes, my dear fellow students, one must look at these things if one wants to understand that a relatively sharp language was used at the time in that appeal to a cultural council that originated in Stuttgart. Because what has had an effect on the university system has not only affected the appointment of professors and the inconvenience of the examination system, but has also affected the sciences, knowledge, and the spirit itself. And that is why a remedy was sought at the time, by calling upon everyone who was believed to have a heart and a mind for furthering the cause of education and spiritual matters in general. And it was the hope of those people who set to work on this appeal with a warm heart for such a cause that the first step was to turn to the representatives of spiritual life itself. Many well-meaning people thought that the university teachers themselves would see reason and go along with the emancipation of the university system from the state.

Well, my esteemed fellow students, a truly active support was not found. But all the more often one could hear how the gentlemen expressed themselves in a peculiar way. They said: Yes, if this threefold social order were realized, with its free spiritual life, then it would come about that instead of the minister of education and his civil servants, the teachers at the universities themselves would exercise a kind of administration of the entire educational system. No, said the gentlemen, I would rather be under the minister of education and his deputies than be subject to the decrees and measures that my colleagues make. And one could hear very strange statements about one's colleagues. And since one had the opportunity, in this journey through the opinions of university teachers, to hear what A said about B and B about A, not many of those remained who could be relied upon in this self-administration, this desire of the spiritual organism to be left to its own devices. One had quite sad experiences. You may already be aware that this whole cultural appeal, with all its good intentions, was in vain, that basically no one from the circle of spiritual workers wanted to stand up for a free spiritual life.

But one can also sense from external appearances what has happened in recent decades. Some people do not yet appreciate things in the right way. I would just like to emphasize that, for example, what one used to become by being part of the School of Spiritual Science was expressed in something that, so to speak, grew out of the scientific and the striving for knowledge itself. What had something to do with the quest for knowledge is the degree system at the various faculties. One only notices how the state examination system has crept into this degree system, which emerged from the self-administration of the universities. Finally, compared to the state examinations, what grew out of the universities, out of the sciences themselves, has become only a decoration.

Of course, such things are only symptoms at first. But as symptoms they show very clearly that a process of absorption of intellectual life by the political, by the external state life, has taken place to a high degree. And you can be quite sure that the state system, which I have pointed out today, and which only wants to be a state system, will kill the universities altogether because it does not need them as universities, as centers of learning. Because it has needed what it has needed from the universities so far only as a school for state officials, it will transform everything into schools for state officials. That is the tendency of the time. When something like this is mentioned, people always want to dismiss it as utopian, as the words of a false prophet. But one must also be able to see a little in the direction in which the times are moving. And finally, it has already progressed so far that we see a school of civil servants emerging from the law faculty, and an aspiration emerging from the medical faculty that aims to turn the healer of people into a mere cog in the state machine. And at the philosophy faculty? What is of much value today is what prepares people to be teaching officials, not educators, in the sense of the state! In Germany, the model country, in democratized Germany, teachers are no longer even called teachers or professors, but – horror of horrors! – Studienassessor or Studienoberassessor and the like. But these outward appearances have to do with the whole inner spirit of the sciences. And it was truly a sad thing that one had to realize that on the part of the teachers there is absolutely no heart and no sense for an independent intellectual life.

I must bear this in mind when I now take up the call that comes from the student body. If old age cannot do it – there is no other way to put it – then young people must feel it as their sacred duty to stand up for the freedom of intellectual life. Because we can be sure of one thing: if no one stands up for the freedom of intellectual life, if no one stands up for the original sources of a renewal of knowledge, then the times in which the next generation of our civilized humanity grows up will be dire. It is not without significance that a man as brilliant as Oswald Spengler can already prove scientifically, that is, with the means of the old science, that Western civilization is heading towards barbarism. We have learned to prove many things scientifically. Today, it is really being proved with great force that all our knowledge leads to barbarism.

This is something that, as one can believe, must weigh like a nightmare on the youth, who, after all, must not grow up today in blind faith in authority, who must not allow themselves a blind faith in authority, but who must look with seeing eyes at what is going on at the institutions they enter in order to grow into life. And one may therefore believe that it can make a certain beneficial impression, apart from everything - and I will and can disregard all that relates to me personally in the appeal - it makes a beneficial impression that now, in contrast to the old leaders, the led are speaking out and saying what they want, and that they are saying it in concrete terms. Because, my dear fellow students, the liberation of intellectual life, the independence of the intellectual organism, cannot be achieved through tirades or rhetoric. That which has been absorbed by the state must be pulled out again. But this can only happen if there is a real intellectual force. And just as in the age of materialism science was powerless in the face of the state's desires for absorption, so would a material science remain powerless in the face of the state's desires for absorption, transforming science into barbarism. To lift the spirit of science and knowledge out of politics, out of all that it is involved in today to its detriment, can only have a positive effect. Just as material science has fallen prey to unscientific powers, so too will spiritual science, through its own essence, through its own power, be able to pull this science out of the unspiritual powers again. And only it will be able to establish the free spiritual life, the spiritual part of the social organism that is independent.

Of course, you who are signing this appeal must realize that it will be perceived as a storm, especially when it comes from such a source. But, my esteemed fellow students, we cannot make progress without a storm today; without the will and courage to truly transform what needs to be transformed, we will not move forward, but instead continue to decline, into barbarism. It must be clear from the outset that this appeal cannot be favorably received by certain quarters. But I believe that all those who wholeheartedly and courageously subscribe to it are also aware that nothing at all could be achieved with an appeal that would be favorably received by certain quarters, to which I am alluding here. We must be prepared for a fight with those who want to do the opposite today.

Of course, it will be important not to simply issue a call in words and send it out into the world. My dear fellow students, I have seen many calls in the course of my life. And I know that appeals mean nothing if there are no people standing behind them, for whose will such an appeal is basically only an expression, even an external means of expression. People whose strength does not wane when they see how everything is opposed to what one wants in the early days, energetic people must stand behind such a cause, otherwise words of such severity are not justified. But they must be justified in our time, basically after all the experiences that have been made. But all that must be made clear as criticism to those who are concerned in this way through such criticism of the existing, all that must be juxtaposed to the positive work. And we will probably have to see, if what is intended is to succeed, that circles are formed and more and more circles are formed, ever larger and larger areas, completely internationally, that really work in the sense of spiritual science, that they fertilize the individual scientific disciplines with spiritual science.

It has gradually come to something strange when it has been a matter of connecting young, aspiring minds to the operation of spiritual life. I would think of many things if I wanted to talk about this chapter. I will just tell you an example of a nice scene that once took place at a philosophical faculty, where a young, hopeful doctor wanted to habilitate for – yes, for philosophy. He went to the professor, who held him in high esteem, and told him that he wanted to habilitate, and what would now be pleasant for him was that this would be chosen as the topic for his inaugural lecture. Then the professor, who, as I said, was well disposed towards the young doctor and who wanted this young doctor to become a private lecturer at his side, said: Yes, but that's not possible at all! I can't recommend you to my colleagues for a lectureship; they'd all turn on me. You've only written about philosophical events and personalities of the 19th century in philosophy; we can't allow someone like that to become a lecturer. You must have written about much, much older things. – Yes, said the young doctor, what should I do now, Mr. Hofrat? I thought what I wrote about Schopenhauer, about the development of aesthetics in the 19th century, would be good? Perhaps the Viennese present already realize who it is? Yes, said the Privy Councillor, it doesn't depend on what you write about, but only on it being old and unknown. Let us look up an old Italian esthete in the encyclopedia. They opened the encyclopedia and came to G, where the name Gravina was listed. Neither of them knew anything about him, but the professor in question thought it was the right thing to do. And the young doctor wrote his habilitation thesis on this interesting topic, a completely unknown, insignificant Italian esthete. And now the professor could admit him as a private lecturer. But the whole process took much longer than that; he had to work on it for at least a year and a half, I think, because it was not that easy to put the merits of this unknown Italian esthete in the right perspective.

That is just an extreme case. But you can imagine the huge number of such cases.

Let us just take a look at how it came about that, little by little, all freedom in the choice of dissertation topics basically ceased. In a subject such as modern philology, Wilhelm Scherer, for example, actually managed to schematize and organize the entire dissertation process. A student who came and asked for a dissertation topic was simply allowed to do that dissertation, whether it suited him or not, whether he had done something special on the subject or not, it did not matter. He was allowed to do the dissertation that could serve some professor who then wanted to write a detailed book on the subject by collecting the individual dissertations and the like. But this external activity corresponds more closely than one might think to the inner workings of the spiritual life. And I do not think I am mistaken if I say that it would be of the greatest benefit to you, my esteemed fellow students, if you could really counter the spirit that is blowing from there with a fresh, elementary source of scientific work. If you formed circles and, with all the tools and sources at your disposal, tried real, original, elementary scientific work. From group to group in individual cities, those who want to work in this spirit may come together – I would say that if you want my advice. If you want to work for the lively flourishing of scientific life, of the life of knowledge, then the chemist, the physicist, the philosopher, the lawyer, the historian, the philologist will be able to contribute to some common topic in a common effort. And if it is desired, then we who work in Dornach for these university courses will endeavor to create a kind of free committee of those lecturers who have lectured on the various branches of science that have been fertilized by anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, and that this committee can make suggestions about what should be dealt with first. The topics should not be chosen out of the spirit that has come from people who govern in these fields to this day, but rather, it should be suggested more out of the need for the general spiritual life of humanity. And again, the free choice should be counted on. Those who have had some experience may say what is necessary. Those who see what is needed from this free committee may decide what they are particularly suited for. And so those who have now pioneered a kind of free college system here in Dornach by giving lectures could work together with those who, as enthusiastic students, are interested in the question of what will become of the spiritual life of Western civilization through this spiritual science.

This is roughly the way in which one could initially attempt to put the words of the appeal into practice in a positive way in scientific work. Of course, it is not yet time to give more detailed advice. But you can be sure that those working here in Dornach or in Stuttgart will always be ready to use all their strength to support, to support, to advise, to help wherever an enthusiastic student body wants to contribute its mite, there or there, in this or that group to what today must be a great, comprehensive, intensive task, an enormous ideal: to lead from a renewed spiritual research going back to the original sources, to a spiritual life - and thus to the general cultural and civilizing life of humanity - to an ascent, to a dawn, not to a decline, not to a sunset, as some believe.

And by promising that everything in me will be done to ensure that intensive scientific collaboration based on inner harmony takes place, by promising you this, I would like to answer the question that was put to me: what I advise as a positive thing to do first. If we really work together in this spirit, then the student body will be able to produce the results that have unfortunately not been produced by those who supposedly lead the student body, whose task it would be, however, to provide the student body with leaders. If they do not prove themselves as such, well, then a good school in breaking away from all belief in authority will be what you will have to go through if you stand on the ground of free scientific work. I believe I can foresee that you will be able to work well together with spiritual science and with all that is wanted from Dornach and from Stuttgart, if you place yourself on such ground. And it is from this attitude that I would like to have addressed you today, my esteemed fellow students.

My dear fellow students! It is clear from many statements of this kind that we are counting on you with all our hearts for what we are thinking of here as anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. We are counting on you with all our hearts because, if we are to work against the impending downfall of Western civilization, it can only come from science, given the state of affairs today. Consider that what has brought us into today's situation, after all, basically also comes from science. I will point out much less what is actually, so to speak, on the palm of your hand: that the destructive anti-cultural institutions of the latest time are basically scientific results. It is easy to imagine that, so we don't have to discuss it here. But we want to consider something else. You see, the proletariat, if I may use the grotesque expression, has a kind of Janus face today. It is quite true that the proletariat must be brought in if the situation is to be reorganized today. That, again, is something that is as self-evident as can be. And perhaps I may remind you that in Stuttgart, among the nearer and more distant surroundings, the cold was at its worst when I once used a certain word in a public lecture, but which, I believe, was spoken out of a real insight into present conditions. I said that the bourgeoisie suffers first of all from a decadent brain and that it is absolutely dependent on replacing brain work with the work of the ether brain, with something spiritualized. That is as obvious as anything can be. By contrast, the proletarian, in the context of the present vertical migration of peoples, does not yet have a decadent brain. He can still work with his physical brain if only he can be persuaded to do so. This, of course, has caused a great deal of resentment among the bourgeoisie in the immediate and more distant vicinity. But today it is not a matter of whether people are more or less resentful, but of bringing the truth to light.

Now, however, the proletariat is revealing this. On the one hand, the proletarians will always be inclined to say to themselves: Yes, we don't want to know anything about what you are bringing us. It's too difficult for us; it's not of interest to us for the time being. But on the other hand, these proletarians are completely fed up with the waste products of the science of the 19th and early 20th centuries. They only work with what has fallen away from it. We must make up our minds to look at it that way. We must say to ourselves: Of course it will be quite difficult to enter the proletariat with what we are working out of science in a very serious way. But if we do not let up, if we do not let ourselves be deterred, but rather base ourselves on this social action: we must win the proletariat from science! then we will also certainly get through to the proletariat with something sound, just as one has come to the proletariat with Marxism and Bolshevism. It is only a matter of not losing our breath too soon, that we actually carry out what we have once recognized as correct. That was always and always my principle in anthroposophical work. Therefore, I never compromised, but simply made enemies with full insight into the matter, because there was no other way than to simply reject everything that came up amateurishly. And if it were worth the effort, it would be very easy to prove that the majority of our current enemies are people who were once rejected because of over-amateurism. You would see, if you went into the details, that this is the case. All you need is a substitute for memory. After all, memory is no longer as strong! If you have access to spiritual training, you know that. Then you know how to assess the enemies. They often emerge from the shallows only after years.

Therefore, you must not shrink from a powerful adherence to what was once recognized as correct, then it will also go with the proletariat. For the proletariat suffers only from an exaggerated sense of authority. But as soon as you have it for yourself, you would win it. It is still difficult today to make people understand that their leaders are their greatest enemies from the bottom to the top; that they are pests. But this must be taught to people little by little; then it will work. Then one will probably give the proletariat an interest in this healthy scientific work that we are scientifically developing. Then one will have an extraordinarily good audience in the proletariat. And for a long time to come, the proletariat itself must, of course, be an 'audience' in its mass.

But now I would like to point out something else. You see, for many years I have been active in the anthroposophical movement and have always tried to work in a certain direction, which consisted of bringing together the anthroposophical and the specifically scientific. I could give you specific examples of the difficulties that have always arisen in this regard. For example, many years ago a scholar approached us who was an extraordinarily learned man in terms of Orientalism and Assyriology. On the other hand, he was enthusiastic about anthroposophy. It would have been natural for someone who really had Orientalism and so on in his fingers as a scholar and was enthusiastic about anthroposophy to work on these two things at the same time. But he could not be brought to do that; the man could not be brought to build a bridge from one area to another. He could make progress in both, but he could not build a bridge. Nevertheless, it must also be the case that this bridge must be tried absolutely. And you can find it; you can find the entrance to every single science through anthroposophy.

On the other hand, I found a well-known professor of botany who was also an enthusiastic 'theosophist'. The man in question wrote botanical works and he wrote about theosophy. He did not belong to the Anthroposophical Society, but to the Theosophical Society. He wrote about theosophy in the same way that Annie Besant wrote about it. He was completely a botanist when he closed the book on Theosophy and completely a 'Theosophist' when he taught or wrote books on Theosophy, without one being able to recognize that he was a botanist. He even found it abhorrent when I spoke to him about botany and wanted to prepare a kind of bridge.

You see, this is the result of the culture of the last few centuries, this double bookkeeping – that is what I must always call it. One wants that which relates to life in the specialist journal, and that which one then needs for the mind, for the “interior”, as one calls it, in the Sunday supplement of one's political newspaper. Politics is in between; according to the “tripartite structure” that has existed up to now, you want to get that from the political paper. These things are the ones that you actually have to see through above all. And then you will perhaps be the ones most qualified to help find this bridge everywhere. In a sense — it won't always appear so radically — things are like that.

You see, poor Hölderlin already expressed the beautiful word at the turn of the 18th to the 19th century when he said to himself, when he looks around his Germany, he finds officials, factory owners, carpenters and tailors everywhere, but — no people. He finds scholars, artists and teachers and so on, but — no people. He finds young and older and old, sedate people, but – no people.

One would like to say today: We actually have the least of all in our learned professions, that there are people there! We have sciences, and the scientists actually swim around as something factual. Basically, we actually live to a high degree quite apart from science, in that we feel like human beings. Just think, if we today – I mean, if we summarize all of our scholarly knowledge – if we do a piece of work today to habilitate, what do we do then? We cannot just sit down and write what flows from our soul into such a scholarly work. That doesn't work. Then we would very soon be reproached: Yes, he writes from the wrist. You mustn't do that. You mustn't write from the wrist, but you have to study the books for your doctoral dissertation, which you otherwise don't pay attention to, maybe don't even read, only open at the pages where something is written that you have to quote. In short, you have to have as external a relationship as possible to what you are working on, and you absolutely must not have an internal relationship to it! When people meet again, I can tell you about a strange meeting in Weimar that took place during my working hours at the local Goethe-Schiller Archive, where I was able to attend the meetings of the Goethe Society. As soon as someone said something that was related to Goethe, or as soon as someone touched on something scientific, they would say: There's another group talking shop, that's not on! The purpose of the gathering was something that had to be avoided at all costs, so as not to be seen in a bad light of talking shop. But all of this is essentially to blame for the fact that we have ended up in this situation. In Weimar, one could really see all the specialists – many of them offered a kind of combination of all subjects – in these seven years, and there was basically no strong differentiation by nationality. For example, when Mr. Thomas from a very Western university in America writes, there is no real difference between the work and thinking of any Schmidt or Scherer student, even in his work and thinking - he worked on Goethe's “Faust.” It was basically international, because Thomas only differed from the others in that he sat on the floor and crossed his legs when he sat on the floor in front of the bookcase. That was how he distinguished himself as an American. But otherwise he worked like the others. The only exception was a Russian councilor. The man didn't know what questions he was researching. But when he came to an inn in the evening, where people would gather, they would always say to the others: “Don't look around, because the councilor is walking around!” Because he kept starting to talk about what he knew of Goethe's Faust, people avoided sitting with him. These things are actually more important than one would usually think; for they could be amply multiplied and would still explain something about how the scientific life has developed bit by bit. And we want to get out of this! We certainly do not want to become pedants or new-fangled simplifiers, but we must realize that man stands higher than all science, that he need not let himself be tyrannized by it. And the emancipation of the spirit is actually working towards combating science as such in its abstraction, and putting man first. So that we not only have science as Bölsche writes about the “immortality” of science. Wilhelm Bölsche has also set up a kind of spiritual science, but he seeks it in libraries, which are, however, full of paper and blackened print of the actual spirits.

But this is what we must work towards: this humanization of scientific life, this: putting people in the foreground in so-called objective science. Objective science must actually have its existence in life in man. And having this does not make one dry and arid. On the contrary, by combating abstract thinking, one becomes a useful co-worker in that which we so urgently need: the combating of barbarism in the life of Western civilization.

This is what is most urgently needed by those who enter the learned professions, or professions supported by the sciences. Therefore, I believe that it will be extraordinarily beneficial if you get together at the individual universities and freely address such topics scientifically, develop such topics, as it is to be attempted from the bodies that we already have, especially from the Waldorf school. I am not thinking that a school-like operation should be set up, not at all, my dear fellow students, but I am thinking of something else. We will try, so to speak, to shape the threads in such a way that they are woven out of the necessities of the time, that they are basically found in view of what actually lies in the ethos of the overall context of our culture. And then certain individuals among our Waldorf school teachers, the body of teachers, which in turn should maintain a kind of unity with those who have presented here, should simply be given the task of identifying the topics that need to be resolved today. And it should only be said to the student body what tasks are necessary according to the insights that these circles can have. The rest is therefore not letting oneself be led by the tasks, but it is a fathoming of what is particularly necessary today. And there will be the opportunity to work really correctly from scientific foundations. I would like to emphasize that it must be avoided that small scientific circles, more or less really or supposedly working, isolate themselves and believe that they can do enough with that today. This could, of course, be very useful and will be very useful, and it must also be done, but we also need a broad student movement that is truly aware today: things cannot go on as they would among young people if these young people were only to follow in the footsteps of those who still hold office today out of old traditions and old times. If one says that the Social Democrats must get rid of their leaders, then it is above all necessary that the youth of today get rid of the old leaders in a certain way. That will be more difficult than it should be.

Because, you see, I cannot, of course, avoid the issue that is actually at stake. And I must ask you to be quite clear about the fact that I am talking about these things with complete honesty and sincerity. You can be quite sure: we would make easy progress in the anthroposophically oriented spiritual movement if we had the freedom to work only for the spirit and as a stimulus to the spirit. Assigning posts, awarding degrees, letting students fail their state exams – that is what the others do. And that is an important factor. We certainly do not underestimate it in our field. For we know full well what courage and boldness are needed today, especially for the prospective scholar and prospective scientific worker, to be and remain with us. Because, in fact, we can offer him very little today. If we can gradually build up our individual movements, then things will improve. When the Waldorf School was founded, I said: the founding is nice, but it has no meaning if at least ten more schools are not founded in the next quarter, because then it is only established. And I have definitely envisaged – as I always follow up practical ideas, not just ideas that can be handed down – that if we can found schools everywhere, then we will be able to appoint to our schools those who, under certain circumstances, do it the way Dr. Stein told us himself. But it is not a system. He enrolled, saw what a few lectures were like, but otherwise he read cycles and other things, read what was quoted there, and completed his academic studies. Of course, this cannot be generalized, because probably only three quarters of the professors would agree that if there were only students like Dr. Stein, they could actually only attend the first three lectures and then go for a walk. This cannot be easily realized for the general public today. So I do not want to propagate that. But I just want to draw your attention to the fact that at any rate the spirit that sits on the chairs in the lecture halls today, if it is transferred to the school benches, does not bring us any future. Out of this necessity you must already find the courage to at least in some way ally yourselves with what is wanted here. But on the other hand, I thought practically, as the Waldorf School was founded: if we are able to truly emancipate spiritual life, we will have more and more Waldorf Schools, and then we will also be able to offer our young friends from the student body a future. It is not at all unidealistic for me to say that. But then it will be easier. But we have to support each other from both sides. We will only be able to work on founding independent schools and universities if we see an understanding student body coming towards us. To do this, we need not only small groups, but a student movement that wants to work on a large scale and advocate on a large scale for what is being considered here.

I must point out that what I have said in these days as the reason for the World School Association is meant very seriously. I think of it as international, so that it is to be created, so to speak, out of the thinking and feeling of today. If we can first make the world understand that there are really only two movements today that have to struggle with each other, on the one hand Bolshevism, which is leading the world into the swamp, and on the other hand the threefold social organism, then people will also be faced with a choice as soon as they see that the old impulses will no longer work! Either it must happen, that those who want to advance civilization in a reasonable way must gradually live into the impulse of threefolding, or, if people are too lazy to do so, Bolshevism will flood Europe and barbarize European culture. If people understand this, they will be easier to win than they are today.

There are three things that must be taken into account. When one speaks to the international world today about a project such as the one in Dornach, and that money is needed for it, people take the view that it must all be idealism! You can't be so mean as to give money for it! Money is much too dirty to be used for such an idealistic cause. In short, people are not easily won over to something like this unless they are prepared for it for a long time. And since we cannot complete our building in Central European countries because of the foreign currency, we are dependent on other parts of today's civilized world. But they don't give us any money just like that. Basically, they are very tight-fisted. On the other hand, people are still relatively easy to win over if you tell them you want to set up sanatoriums. You can get as much money as you want. We can't do that now, set up sanatoriums, but we can get involved in the middle way. The middle way is what I mean by the world school association. The World School Association can finance all cultural institutions if it is understood in the right way. And there is still some understanding for the establishment of the school-based approach, but less for something that is directly the building. We have to work for what is in the middle, so to speak. Therefore, it is important that this foundation of the World School Association, which we will have as something universal, be prepared in a certain way, that the mood be set for this World School Association. And so I would like to suggest that it would be best if you were to include in your decisions, in your strongest initiative, that you approach everyone you can, and convince them that this World School Association must spread across all countries, that it is up to them to emancipate intellectual life. That it must finance as many free schools across the world as possible. The emancipation of spiritual life must be pursued on the grandest scale. We must come to emancipate ourselves from that which, in essence, enslaves us spiritually. But we can only do that if we create the right mood. The tyranny is greater than one might think. From a place in Europe, I will attempt to inaugurate this founding of the World School Association myself. But what must come first is to create the right mood for it. Because today you can't achieve anything by forming groups of twelve or fifteen people to work things out. Rather, it is important that we spread this idea as widely as possible: a world school association must come into being. Now, I can well imagine, and I am quite satisfied with the fact, that of course the students can't exactly open their wallets very wide. That is not necessary. The others belong to this. But what the student can open, that is – you know, I mean this cum grano salis – what the student can open, that is his mouth. That is what I mean: that you can make it possible for the World School Association to open its mouth wherever you go. So that when we establish this World School Association in the near future, we will not fall on deaf ears, but on prepared people. That is what must be.

As you can see, we have enough to do. What we need is nothing more than real courage and a clear view of the world. Why should we not be able to overcome with youthful strength the things that must be overcome because they still tower over our time with all the hallmarks of the old age and seek to oppress us? We must not let ourselves be oppressed. We must realize today that we are dancing on a knife's edge, or, as we might say, on a volcano. It is not the case, my dear fellow students, that things will continue as they are now. We are heading for very, very sad times. But we can remedy these sad times by growing into them with courage and energy. And I believe that spiritual science, anthroposophy, can be of help to you in this. It can be of help to everyone.

I ask you in conclusion only: do not pursue things particularistically, sectionally, but in the broadest style. Do not exclude anyone, but include everyone who wants to work with you. The only thing that should count is the will to work honestly with us in the direction we have set, the direction of growing into the scientific professions. It seems to me, my dear fellow students, that we must not sin in this direction any longer. We must be broad-minded. We must regard everyone who honestly wants to work with us as a very welcome co-worker. We must not allow any distinction to arise between people and people, but we must let everyone who simply has the will to work with us, work with us. This should also be the case, as it has always been in the anthroposophical movement. We have never demanded that anyone give up anything they otherwise represent in the world. No one has ever had to give up anything; they only had to accept what the Anthroposophical movement could give them. And perhaps I may recall something personal. You know how I am always reproached for having once been part of the Theosophical movement. It was not a matter of me going along with it! The Theosophical Society actually approached me; it joined me for a time, until it threw out what I stood for. But I said to the Theosophists at our first meeting in London that it was not a matter of us accepting anything from the center, but rather of us bringing to the common altar what we had to bring at that particular time.

In this sense, we can work together to the greatest extent possible. And if you work in the style of such work, especially in student circles, then we will make progress.

At the suggestion of German students, a meeting was held on the afternoon of 9 April 1921 to discuss the question of how anthroposophical work could be built up at universities. Dr. Steiner spoke at the end.

Dr. Stein has, however, pointed out the three most important things to be considered here: whether to organize or not, as desired. But above all, I would like to emphasize one thing: if you are involved in a movement like ours, it is necessary to learn from the past and to lead further stages of the movement in such a way that certain earlier mistakes are avoided.

What it will depend on in the first place is this: that anthroposophy, to the extent that it can already be accepted by the student body in terms of understanding and to the extent that it is at all possible through the available forces or opportunities, that anthroposophy in its various branches be spread among the student body as positive spiritual content. Our experience has basically shown that something real can only be achieved if one can really build on the basis of the positive.

Yesterday I had the opportunity to point out that years ago an attempt was made to establish a kind of world federation for spiritual science, and that nothing came of this world federation, which actually only wanted to proceed according to the rules of formal external organization. It ended, so to speak, in what the Germans call a “Hornberg shooting”. But because a sense of cohesion and collaboration were needed at the time, the existing adherents of anthroposophy had to be brought together in the “Anthroposophical Society”. These were now more or less all people who had simply been involved with anthroposophy. It is only with such an organization, where there is already something in it, that one can then do something.

Of course it will be especially necessary for the student body not only to work in the sense of spreading the given anthroposophical problems in the narrower sense, but also to work out general problems and the like in the sense that Dr. Stein just meant. Of course, it will not be so necessary at first to work towards dissertations with such things. It has often, really quite often, happened that I have been asked by younger students in recent times along the following lines: Yes, we actually want to combine anthroposophy with our specific science. How can one act so that one works in the right way towards one's goal after graduation, after the state examination? What should you do? How should you organize your work? — I always gave the following advice: Try to get through the official studies as quickly as possible, to get through them as quickly as possible, and I am always very happy to help with any advice. Choose any scientific topic that seems to emerge from the course of your studies, as a dissertation or state examination paper or the like. Whichever topic you choose, each one is of course diametrically opposed to the other approaches in anthroposophical terms; there can be no doubt about that. Each is diametrically opposed. But now I advise you to write your dissertation in such a way that you first write down what the professor can censor, what he will understand; and take a second notebook, and write down everything that arises for you in the course of your studies and that you believe should actually be worked in from anthroposophy. You then keep that for yourself. Then you write your two pages — that is how long a dissertation must be — and you submit them. And try to complete them. Then you can really help anthroposophy energetically with what you have acquired in addition to this one in the second notebook. For one only really realizes what significant problems arise, specialist and specialized problems, when one is put in the position of having to work scientifically on a certain topic and the like. But there is a danger of unclear collaboration with the professors. And submitting dissertations to the professors that are written “in the anthroposophical sense” – these are usually not suitable for professors – I do not consider this to be favorable because it actually slows us down at the pace that the anthroposophical movement should be taking.

We need as many academically trained colleagues as possible. If there is anything that is seriously lacking in the anthroposophical movement today, it is a sufficiently large number of academically trained colleagues. I do not mean the externality of needing, let's say, stamped people. It is not meant that way. But first of all, we need people who have learned to work scientifically from within. This inner scientific work is best learned in one's own work. Secondly, however, we need co-workers who come from the student body as soon as possible, and who are no longer held back by considerations for their later professional studies. — You see, it is not at all surprising that it is as difficult as it is in Switzerland, for example. As a student, of course, it is easy to join such an association in the first few semesters if you are free-minded enough to do so. Then come the last semesters. You are busy with other things, and it becomes more difficult. And so, one by one, the threads you have pulled are torn away. This has just been emphasized.

So I would like to say, especially for scientific collaboration: During such a transition period, the topics must be dealt with in two ways: one that the professor understands and the other that is saved for later. Of course, I am not saying that very special opportunities that arise should not be seized, and that these opportunities, which are there, should not be vigilantly observed by the student body in the most eminent sense and really exploited in the sense and service of the movement. On the one hand, I hope, and on the other hand, I fear almost silently, that our dear friend, Professor Römer in Leipzig, will now be inundated with a huge number of anthroposophical dissertations! But I think that would also be one of the things he would probably prefer. And such a document of student trust would show that he is not one of the professors just mentioned. That would come from the foundation.

Now, however, we need an expansion of what has already been discussed here in Dornach, namely a kind of collaboration after all. You will work out among yourselves later how this can best be done technically. It would be good if, with the help of the Waldorf teachers, who would be joined by other personalities from our ranks – Professor Römer, Dr. Unger and others – a certain exchange could take place, especially regarding the choice of topics for dissertations or scientific papers, without in any way compromising the free initiative of the individual. It can only be in the form of advice. It is precisely for this scientific work that a closer union should be sought – you do not need an organization, but an exchange of ideas.

The economic aspect is, of course, a very, very important one. It is a fact that the university system in particular, but actually more or less the entire higher education system, will suffer greatly from our economic difficulties. Now it is a matter of really seeing clearly that it is only possible to help if it is possible to advance such institutions, as for example for Germany it is the “Kommende Tag”, as it is here the “Futurum”. So that a reorganization of the economic situation of the student body can also emanate from these organizations. I can assure you that all the things we are tackling in this direction are actually calculated on rapid growth. We do not have time to take our time; instead, we actually have to make rapid progress with such economic organizations. And here I must say that the members of the student body, perhaps with very few exceptions, can help us above all by spreading understanding for such things. It has really happened in relation to other things that the student could get something from his father for this or that, could get something from his relatives. Not everyone has only destitute friends. And then there really is something that works like an avalanche. Just think about how powerfully something like an avalanche works, based on experience: when you start somewhere, it continues. Something like this continues to have an effect when you act out of the positive: try to study these brochures that have been published by “Kommender Tag” and “Futurum”, and try to create understanding for something like this.

It is this understanding that the oldest people in particular find extremely difficult to work their way up to. I have seen how older people, I would say, have chewed on the desire to understand what “Tomorrow” or “Futurum” want, how they have repeatedly fallen back on their old economic prejudices, like a cat on its paws, with which they have rushed into economic decline, and how they cannot find their way out. I believe that my dear fellow students really do have a clear understanding that could also have an effect on the older generations. We cannot make any progress in any other way. Because I can tell you: when we have come so far in relation to these economic institutions that we can effectively do something, that we first of all have enough funds to do something on a large scale – because only then does it help – and on the other hand can overcome the resistance of the proletariat, which is simply hostile to an economic improvement in the situation of students, then it must indeed be the first concern of these our economic organizations to work economically in relation to the student body.

The “struggle problems”! Yes, you see, the point is this. The Anthroposophical Society, even if it was not called that in the past, has existed since the beginning of the century, and it has actually only ever worked positively, at least as far as I myself am concerned. It let the opponents rant and rave, do all sorts of things. But of course the opponents then come up with certain objections. They say, this has been said, that has been said, yes, that has not even been refuted. It is indeed difficult to find understanding for the fact that it is actually the person making the claim who has the burden of proof, not the person to whom it is attributed. And we could really experience it, again and again, that strange views emerged precisely among academics, I now mean lecturers, professors, pastors and those who had emerged from the ranks of academics. Just think, for example, of the things said against anthroposophy, anthroposophists and so on by professors who are, I would say, 'revered' by the outside world (but I say this only with caution) – things that are so well documented that following up the evidence is a mockery, a bloody mockery, of all possible methods of making a claim in science. and so on, which are so documented that if one follows these documents with reasons, it is a mockery, a bloody mockery of all possible methods of asserting something in science. Therefore, with someone like Professor Fuchs, I simply had to say: It is impossible that this person is anything other than a completely impossible anatomist! Am I supposed to believe that he conscientiously tests his things when, after all that has been presented, he tests my baptismal certificate in the way he has tested it? You have to draw conclusions about the way one person treats one area from the way they treat another. Such things simply show – through the fact that people step forward and show their particular habits – the symptoms of how science is done today. Even the things that are presented at universities and technical colleges today are basically no better founded than the things that are asserted in this way; it is only that the generally extremely loose habits in scientific life are emerging in this way. And that is what is needed: to raise the fight to a higher level, so to speak.

And here it is not necessary, as my fellow student wished, for example, and as I very well understand, to play the game as a “fighting organization.” That is not necessary. Rather, only one thing: to avoid what has occurred so frequently in the Anthroposophical Society. In the Anthroposophical Society, this always came to the fore, as incredible as it is – not in everyone, of course, but very often: one was obliged to defend oneself against a wild accusation, and then to use harsh words, for example, say, in the case when a gentleman of Gleich invents a lecturer “Winter” by reading that I myself have held winter lectures, then invents a personality “Winter” and introduces it into the fight in a very evil way. Yes, you see, I don't think one would say too harsh words in this case if one were to speak of foolishness! Because here, even when it occurs in a general, we are dealing with a genuine, pure-bred idiot. And in the Anthroposophical Society, it was usually the case that one was not wronged by the one who acted somewhat like Mr. von Gleich, but by the one who defended himself. Until today! We have learned from experience that one must not become aggressive in this way. In the eyes of many people, to become aggressive means to defend oneself in this way. It is necessary to follow things with a watchful eye and to reject them, without emphasizing that one is a fighting organization or the like. You have to be positive about it. And then the others must stand behind them, behind the one who is obliged to defend himself. It is not a matter of us becoming fighting cocks ourselves; but it is a matter of the others standing behind us if it should become necessary to defend ourselves. And it is a matter of really following the symptoms of the world-descriptive, scientific, religious and so on in this respect in our time, taking an interest in them.

Take this single phenomenon: I was obliged to characterize in the appropriate way the philosophical, or what should one call it, scribblings of Count Keyserling – in my opinion it does not matter what you call them – because in his incredible superficiality he mixed in the madness that I had started from Haeckel's views. This is not only an objective untruth, but in this case a subjective untruth, that is, a lie, because one must demand that the person who makes such an assertion search for the sources; and he could have seen the chapter that I wrote in the earliest years of my writing in my discussions with Haeckel, in the introduction to Goethe's natural science writings. You can all read it very well. Now Count Keyserling has had a small pamphlet published by his publisher: “The Way to Perfection”. I will not characterize this writing further, but I recommend that one or two of you buy this writing and pass it around; because if everyone wanted to buy it, it would be a waste of money; but I still recommend that you read it so that you get an idea of what, so to speak, goes against all wisdom in this writing “The Way to Perfection” by Keyserling. There is the following sentence, which he made up, more or less, as I remember it – it is not literal: Yes, if I said something incorrect, that Dr. Steiner started from Haeckel, Dr. Steiner could have simply rectified that; he could have corrected me, because I have — and now I ask you to pay close attention to this sentence — because I have no time for a special Steiner source research.

Now then, you see, we have already brought it so far in scientific morality that someone who founds a “school of wisdom” considers it justified to send things out into the world that he admittedly has no time to research, that he therefore does not research! Here one catches a seemingly noble thinker - because Count Keyserling always cited omnipotence in his writing; that is what is so impressive about Count Keyserling, that he always cites omnipotence. All present-day writing has arrived at a point where it is most mired and ragged. And despite the omnipotence, there is a complete moral decline of views here. And so people have to be told: Of course, nobody expects you to do Steiner source research either; but then, if you don't do any Steiner source research, if you don't have time, then – with regard to all these things about which you should know something about the matter: Keep your mouth shut!

You see, it is necessary that we have no illusions, that we simply discard every authority principle that has arisen through convention and the like, that we face ourselves freely, really, truly examining what is present in our time. Then we will be able to notice quite a lot of it today.

I would advise you to look at some of the sentences that the great Germanist Roethe in Berlin occasionally utters, purely in terms of form – I will completely disregard the view, which one can certainly respect. Then you will find it instructive. We do not need to be a fighting organization. But we must be ready and alert to take action when the things that are leading us so horribly into decline actually materialize. Do we need to be an organization of anthroposophical students to do that? We simply need to want to be alert, decent, and scientifically conscientious people, then we can always take a stand against such harm from our most absolute private point of view. And if we are also organized for positive work, then the number of those who are organized for it can stand behind us and support us. We need the latter. But it would not be very clever of us to present ourselves as a fighting organization. On the other hand, it is important that we really work seriously on improving our current conditions. And to do that, we first have to take note of the terrible damage that is coming to light in one field or another – and which is really easy to see, because it involves enormous sums of money – and have the courage to take a stand against it in whatever way we can.

You have already done something if you can do just that: simply set the record straight for a small number of your fellow students with regard to such things, even if it happens only in the smallest of circles. Yesterday, I said to one of our members here regarding the World School Association: I think it is particularly valuable, especially with regard to such things, to start by talking to one or two or three others, that is, to very small groups, even if there are only two of them; and, to put it very radically, if someone can't find anyone else, then at least say it to yourself! So these things are quite tangible in terms of what the individual is able to do. Some will be able to do much more, as has actually already happened with a doctor who was a member and whose fellow students proved to be very enthusiastic. The point is not to make enemies by appearing as fighting cocks in a wild form, but also not to shy away from the fight when others start it. That's it: we must always let the other start; and then the necessary help must stand behind us, which does not allow the tactic to arise, because it has arisen: that we would have started. If they start from the other side, then one is forced to defend oneself; and then you can always read that the anthroposophical side has used this or that in the fight as an attack and so on. They always turn the tables. That is the method of the opponents. We must not let that happen.

As for the World School Association, I would just like to say this: in my opinion, it would be best if the World School Association could be established independently of each other in Entente and neutral countries, but also in the German-speaking area of Central Europe. If it could happen at the same time, so that things could develop independently of each other, so to speak, it would be best. Of course, a certain amount of vigilance is required to see what happens. I believe that Switzerland, in particular, should mediate here. It would be good if we could do it right now. I can assure you: things are on a knife's edge – and if the same possibilities for war existed today as existed in 1914, then we would have had war again long ago. Things are on a knife edge in terms of sentiment and so on. And we won't get something like this World School Association off the ground if, for example, it is founded in Germany now, and then the others, if only for a week, have to play catch-up. It would simply not come off; it would be impractical to do so.

On the other hand, we must not allow any doubt to arise about our position regarding these matters. This School of Spiritual Science is called the Goetheanum. We gave it this name during the First World War while we were still here. The other nations, insofar as they have participated in anthroposophy, have adopted the name and accepted it. We have never denied that we have reasons to call the School of Spiritual Science 'Goetheanum', and it would therefore not be good if in Germany things were allowed to appear as some kind of imitation from the other side.

So it would be a matter of proceeding in this regard — forgive the harsh word — a little less clumsily, of doing it a little more skillfully in the larger world cultural sense! Switzerland would now have to work with full understanding here. So it would actually have to be taken up simultaneously by Central Europe, by the Entente and by the neutral countries.

For the time being, I don't know whether it will take off in just one or two places. This morning I received the news that the committee, which was convened yesterday and which wanted to work so hard, went to bed a few minutes after yesterday's meeting left the hall; it was postponed until tonight. We will wait and see if they meet tonight. We have already had very strange experiences; and based on this knowledge, that we have already had the most diverse experiences, I have taken the liberty of speaking to you here about the fact that the experiences made should be taken into account in the further course of the movement.

On the other hand, I am convinced that if the necessary strong impulse and proper enthusiasm can be found among my fellow students, especially for what I myself and other friends of mine have mentioned in the course of this lecture: enthusiasm for the truth – then things will work out.

I would also like to say: I recently read an article from a feature page, and I can assure you that what recently took place in Stuttgart is not the slightest bit an end, but only a beginning, and I can assure you that things will get much, much worse. I have often said this to our friends here – a very, very long time ago already. I recently read a piece from a feature article in which it says: “Spiritual sparks, which flash like lightning after the wooden mousetrap, are thus sufficiently available, and it will take some of Steiner's cleverness to work in a conciliatory way so that one day a real spark of fire from the Dornach glory does not bring about an inglorious end.

I really do think that whatever must occur as a reaction against such action, which will grow ever stronger and stronger, will have to be better shaped and, above all, more energetically carried out. And I believe that you, my dear fellow students, need to let all your youthful enthusiasm flow in this direction, in what we have often mentioned here during this course: enthusiasm for the truth. Youthful enthusiasm for the truth has always been a very good impulse in the further development of humanity. May it be so in the near future through you in a matter that you recognize as good.

Address in Dornach after the fire of the Goetheanum on New Year's Eve 1922/23.

My dear friends! Esteemed attendees! I would have to read you a book if I wanted to share with you all the extraordinarily kind words and the words of heartfelt connection with what has been lost here as a result of the terrible catastrophe; I will therefore take the liberty of just sharing the names of those who have signed such words of sympathy and devotion to the cause. Some of them are a sign of how deeply the hearts of many people have been touched by what may be communicated from here to the world. Some of them are also signs of truly heartfelt desires and energetic resolutions of will to regain what we have lost. The widespread sympathy for our work and for our loss will certainly be a source of strength for many of you, and for this reason alone I am allowed to communicate all this here. For our cause should not be merely a theoretical one; our cause should be one of labor, of philanthropy, of devoted service to humanity, and therefore, what should be said from here should also include the communication of what is being done or intended to be done. I will only take the liberty of mentioning those names that do not belong to personalities who are here, because what the hearts of those who are here have to share has been expressed more silently, but no less deeply and clearly, in these days, in these days of truly painful togetherness. So you will allow me not to mention the dear friends of the cause who have expressed their sympathy in writing. You know them, of course. [The names are read out.]

We may assume that what has been attempted here is deeply rooted in many hearts, and I would like to fill this evening's lecture by interrupting the reflections of these days, as it were, and remember that it was a course that brought a large number of friends from outside to join the friends who otherwise try to work on the anthroposophical matter here at the Goetheanum. And in particular, I would like to turn first in thought to the young, to the younger friends who have come here for this course and who, to the greatest satisfaction of all those who are serious about anthroposophy, have recently found their way into this movement in such a beautiful, deep and heartfelt way.

We must be absolutely clear about the significance of young souls, souls that are striving to acquire all that can be acquired by a young person today in the way of science, art and so on, finding each other to work within the anthroposophical movement. These younger friends who have come to this course here are among those who came here recently, saw the Goetheanum, saw it again and probably thought that they would leave it in a different state than they are now on their return journey. And if I turn first to these younger friends in my thoughts, it is because everyone who cares about the anthroposophical movement must feel that everything that concerns any group or individual within the movement is their direct concern. Most of our younger friends are people who want to find their way into anthroposophical work through what is today called spiritual life. And I would particularly like to speak first to those who belong to academic life and have felt the urge — but hardly generated by it — to join with others within the anthroposophical movement for further striving.

Above all, it is the holy earnestness of the striving for the fulfillment of the human soul with spiritual life that has driven these young people. Within anthroposophy, however, there is talk of a spiritual life that cannot be acquired in direct contemplation in the easy way that is particularly loved today. And it is made no secret of the fact – not even in the literature, from which everyone in the broadest circle can see for themselves what they will find within the anthroposophical work – that the paths to anthroposophy are difficult. But difficult only for the reason that they are connected with the deepest, but also with the most powerful, of human dignity, and because, on the other hand, they are also connected with what is most necessary for our age, our epoch, what may be said that the discerning person, who correctly appreciates the phenomena of decline in our time, must recognize the necessity of such progress as is at least attempted by the anthroposophical movement.

Now it should certainly not be forgotten that the anthroposophical cause can be of value to the modern man in many ways. He can indeed benefit from it if he tries with true inner devotion to gain a direct insight into the spiritual worlds, and thereby convince himself that everything that is communicated from the spiritual worlds is absolutely based on truth. But I must emphasize again and again that, however necessary it may be for individuals, or perhaps for an unlimited number of people, to take this serious and difficult path in the present day, anyone with unbiased, common sense can gain an insight into the truth of anthroposophy that is based entirely on real inner reasons.

This must be emphasized again and again, lest the objection, which is quite invalid, seemingly gains validity: that actually only the one who clairvoyantly looks into the spiritual world can somehow gain a relationship to what is proclaimed as truth in the anthroposophical movement. Today's general intellectual life, general civilization and culture, they indeed bring forward so many prejudices that it is difficult for man to come to full consciousness in the healthy human mind, to convince himself of the truth of the anthroposophical cause without clairvoyance.

But it is precisely in this area that the Anthroposophical Society should lead the way and focus its work, so that the prejudices of contemporary civilization are increasingly overcome. If the Anthroposophical Society does its duty in this direction, then one can hope that those inner powers of knowledge will arise even without clairvoyance in those who, for whatever reason, cannot strive for the exact clairvoyance that is being spoken of here, but that they can still come to a fully-fledged conviction of the validity of anthroposophical knowledge.

But there is another very special path that younger academics can now find for themselves to anthroposophy. Consider what academic study should and could actually provide today as a solid starting point for coming to one's own view – and I say this expressly: for coming to one's own view – of the anthroposophical spiritual knowledge, if science and knowledge and inner life within our school system were present in the way that the possibility for this is actually available today.

But consider how little younger people today are inwardly connected with what they are supposed to strive for as their science, as their knowledge, within the present civilization. Consider how it cannot be otherwise today, for the most part, than that the individual sciences approach younger people more or less as something external. They approach with a system that is not at all suited to letting the often extraordinarily significant, so-called empirical knowledge speak for itself in its full value. Yes, my dear friends, today within every science that is cultivated, there are harrowing truths, sometimes harrowing truths in details, in specialties. And there are, in particular, such truths that, if properly presented to young people, would act as a kind of mental microscope or telescope, so that, if properly used by the soul, they would unlock tremendous secrets of existence.

But precisely those things that would be tremendously revealing if they were properly cultivated, that would carry hearts and minds away if they came from the depths of humanity and personality within academic life to the youth, precisely those things must be said today in many cases are often brought to young people within a spun-out, indifferent system, often with indifference, so that the relationship of young people to what our empirical science has produced in the most diverse fields of information remains a thoroughly external one. And one would like to say: many, indeed most, of our young academics today go through their studies without any inner interest, letting the subject pass by more or less as a panorama, so to speak, in order to be able to take the necessary repetitions for the exams and find a permanent position.

It almost sounds paradoxical to say that the hearts of academic youth should also be involved in everything that is presented to them. I say that sounds like a paradox, although it could be so. For the possibility exists, because for those who have a subjective disposition for it, sometimes even the driest book or lecture can be enough to be deeply moved, if not by the power of the writer or lecturer, then perhaps by one's own strength, even in one's heart. But I must say that sometimes it goes quite deeply to the soul when one notices, perhaps even in the best of the young friends who come to the anthroposophical movement, that through no fault of their own, but through their destiny within today's civilization ization life, not only have they received nothing for their hearts from the current knowledge base, but — perhaps some will not forgive me for saying this, but most of the young academics here will probably understand — they have also received nothing for their minds.

Today, in this age, as a result of the development of science, which I have tried to characterize during this scientific course, we have reached a point in the development of civilization where it is possible that, without any Anthroposophy, through the mere practice of the life of science and knowledge by fully human beings, young people would have to experience what I would call a kind of deep mental oppression from ordinary natural science. Yes, contemporary science is such that precisely those who study it diligently and earnestly and take its things seriously feel something like a mental oppression, can feel something of what comes over the human soul when it wrestles with the problem of knowledge. For anyone who looks around a little from this or that point of view, which is available within natural science today, is confronted with great world problems, world problems which, however, are often clothed, I might say, in small formulations of facts. And these formulations of facts urge one to seek something in one's own soul, which, precisely because these scientific truths exist, must be solved as a riddle; otherwise one cannot live, otherwise one feels oppressed.

Oh, if this oppression were the fruit of our scientific studies! Then not only the longing for the spiritual world would arise from this oppression, which takes hold of the whole person, but also the gift to look into the spiritual world. Even if one takes knowledge that cannot satisfy the human being, it is precisely through the unsatisfactory, when it is brought to the soul and heart in the right way, that the highest striving can be kindled.

That, my dear friends, is what is sometimes felt as so terrible, so devastating, within the realm of knowledge in the present day, that no claim is made to allow people to feel how the things that are present in the present in such a way that he is prevented in his young life from even approaching what is most human in nature, if he does not, precisely because of a particularly strong yearning, free himself from that which only afflicts him with the obstacles that are placed in his way.

And if we look away from the natural sciences to the humanities, we see that during the age of natural science they have reached a state in which, if a young person were to be given instructions that would treat these humanities from a fully human point of view, they would be able to devote themselves to them in such a way that they would at least receive what I would call a spiritual sense of urgency. All the abstract ideas, the results of documentary research and all the other things that are contained in the humanities today, if they were at least presented to young people with a human element, could pursue the goal of awaken in him the urge to ascend into the fresh air that is to be brought into the field of today's spiritual contemplation through anthroposophical world view.

Anyone who has followed the spirit of my lectures on the scientific development of modern times will certainly not be able to say that I have criticized this natural science of the present unnecessarily. On the contrary, through my lectures I have proved its necessity, have tried to prove that natural science and, finally, also spiritual science of the present time can be nothing but foundations, for they served and must serve as the foundations of civilization, which must be laid once so that further building can be built on them.

But man cannot help it, being human, being full of humanity in body, mind and soul. And since today's young people have to live in an age in which they are inevitably confronted with something that does not include the human being at all, the noblest and most powerful human striving could nevertheless be aroused if only that which is necessary but not humanly satisfying were to be offered to them today in the highest sense of the word, out of full humanity. If that were to happen, our young people would need nothing more than to hear about the achievements of today's physical science and today's spiritual science at the academies themselves; and from this they would receive not only the innermost urge but also the ability to absorb spiritual science in full humanity. And from what would then live in young people, it would arise of its own accord that the anthroposophical form of science would also become that which is necessary for us to progress in human civilization.

I believe that our younger friends, if they reflect on the words I have spoken, which may sound somewhat paradoxical, will find that they go some way to characterizing the main difficulties they have had to endure during their academic years. And I can assume that this difficulty is the reason why they have come to us. But for many of them, this difficulty belongs to the past, a past that can no longer be made up for. For what one should actually have in a certain period of youth can no longer be had in the same form later. But nevertheless, I believe that one thing can serve as a substitute. What should be a substitute for what one can no longer have is the realization of the task that younger people in particular have among us to cultivate anthroposophical life in the present. |

Set yourselves this task: to do for the anthroposophical movement what you already know, from your own conviction, can be done for it, or what you can, in the course of time, become convinced of in your innermost being, in your very individual innermost being, that it is necessary for the further civilization of mankind: then you will be able to carry something in your heart for longer than this earthly life lasts: then you will be able to carry the awareness of having done your duty to humanity and the world in an age of greatest human difficulties. And that will be a rich reward for what you may rightly lose.

If you have a true sense of the situation of young people in our age, you will also look in the right way at the fact that academic youth has found its way into our circles, and then, if I may may say so, the talent will gradually arise within the Anthroposophical Society to gain a relationship with this youth, on the part of those who, let us say, do not belong to it as youth in this or that respect.

But I believe that there is a word that can come from our present mourning, that I can also speak to the oldest members of the Anthroposophical Society, and that is this: that the human being who today can truly understand himself as a human being within the Anthroposophical Society, and that this, in turn, must be taken seriously if civilization is to continue for humanity, if the forces of decline are not to gain the upper hand over the forces of ascent. It has almost come to this within general culture and civilization of the present day, that it almost sounds funny when someone says: When a person is in his spiritual-soul life between falling asleep and waking up, he should have ensured that his spiritual-soul life can behave in the right way during this time. But within the anthroposophical movement, you learn that this spiritual-soul, as it lives between falling asleep and waking up, is the germ that we carry into the eternity of the future. What we leave behind in bed when we sleep, what is visible to us when we perform our daily work from morning to evening, that we do not carry out through the gate of death into the spiritual, into the supersensible world. But we do carry out into the spiritual, supersensible world that which is subtlest in our natures and exists outside the physical and etheric bodies when we are between falling asleep and waking up. We shall not concern ourselves here with the significance of the life of sleep for man here on earth. But it can be made clear to man through anthroposophical spiritual science that this fine, substantial something, imperceptible to ordinary consciousness, , lives between falling asleep and waking, is precisely what he will carry within him when he has passed through the gate of death, when he has to fulfill his task in other worlds than this earthly world. But the tasks he has to perform there, he will be able to perform them, depending on how he has cultivated these spiritual and mental abilities. Oh, my dear friends, in that spiritual world, which is around us just as the physical world is, those human soul beings also live a present existence who are not in a physical body right now, but may have to wait for decades, centuries, for their next embodiment on earth. These souls are there just as we physical people are there on earth; and in what happens here among us physical people, what we later call historical life, not only do the earthly people work in it, but also those forces that reach out from people who are currently between death and a new birth. These forces are there. As we stretch out our hands, so these beings stretch their spiritual hands into the immediate present. And it is a desolate historiography when only the documents are recorded that deal with the earthly, while the true history that takes place on earth is also influenced by the spiritual forces from the spiritual world of those who are between death and a new birth. We also work together with those who are not embodied on earth.

And just as we commit a sin against humanity if we do not educate young people in the right way, we commit a sin against humanity, a sin against the noblest work to be done from invisible worlds by not embodied human beings, we commit a sin against the evolution of humanity if we do not cultivate our own spiritual nature so that it passes through the portal of death in such a way that it can develop there more consciously and more consciously. For if the soul and spiritual aspects are not cultivated on earth, it happens that this consciousness, which in a certain way immediately and then more and more between death and a new birth begins to shine, remains clouded in all those souls who do not cultivate a spiritual life here. When a person becomes aware of his full humanity, then the spiritual belongs to it.

Those who truly understand the impulses of the anthroposophical movement should take it seriously, knowing that what has been acquired through anthroposophical spiritual science is a world-life treasure, a world-life force. It is a sin in the higher sense to neglect to cultivate that which must be there in order to further develop the earth, in order to further develop mankind on earth, because its absence must lead to the downfall of the earthly. And in many ways, it depends on feeling the deep seriousness of connecting with a spiritual and comprehensive human cause, in addition to what one may more or less accept in theory from spiritual science.

And that, my dear friends, is something that does not apply to a particular category of people, it is something that most certainly applies to young and old alike. But that also seems to me to be the one thing in which young and old can come together, so that one spirit may prevail within what is the Anthroposophical Society.

May the younger people bring their best, may the older people understand this best, may understanding on one side find understanding on the other: only then will we move forward. Let us, from the sad days we have gone through, from the painful suffering we have been imbued with, let us let resolutions enter our hearts that are not mere wishes, not mere vows, but that are so deeply rooted in our souls that they can become deeds. Even in a small circle, we will need deeds if we want to make up for the great loss.

Youthful deeds, if they are in the right direction, are deeds that can be used around the world. And the most beautiful thing that one can want as an older person is to be able to work together with those people who can still perform youthful deeds. If one knows this in the right way, oh, my dear friends, then youth will indeed come to meet you with understanding. And only then will we ourselves be able to do what is necessary to compensate for our great loss, when young people, who can offer us what was once necessary for the future, can see – and most certainly then to their own satisfaction – beautiful examples of what older people can do to compensate for this loss.

Let us endeavor to see the right and powerful in each other, so that strength may be added to strength, for only in this way will we make progress.

When we consider man from the anthroposophical point of view, as we have done before, we first have to distinguish in him the physical organism. We have this physical organism penetrated by the etheric organism, and with this system which is formed by physical and etheric organism we have joined the astral organism and the ego. From the way that man goes into the sleeping state and from there over again into the waking state, we see that on one side the physical and etheric organism are connected more closely and on the other side ego and astral organism. Though in waking state these four members are united, yet in sleep they are separated, so that on one side ego and astral body, so to speak, hold together, and on the other side physical and etheric organism. So that the astral and etheric organism do not unite as strongly as, for example, ego and astral organism, or physical and etheric organism.

If we want to consider these things in detail, we have to put them before our soul once more in their effectiveness. Now, I would like to start with something concrete. What does it mean: man sees the surrounding world? If, for once, we look merely on the factual act, it means that something makes an impression on him. But if we have the whole human being in mind, we must ask: on what, in him, has the surrounding an effect?

For a superficial observation it might look as if the effect on the physical organism is that which comes about from seeing the surrounding. Yet it is not so. We do have, when we are seeing, the physical eye, (diagram, bright) but everything that goes on in the physical eye is only something mediating. In reality, what happens first is a play of processes in the ego and the astral organism. I will indicate this by mingling the eye with this (yellow diagram) as the ego (naturally, it then goes farther into the organism) and with this “red” as the astral organism. We have to be absolutely clear about this: what first comes into consideration in seeing, are the processes in the ego and in the astral organism.

You can acknowledge this immediately, if you observe your seeing not superficially, but in a more intimate way. You only have to call to your mind, if you can, while seeing somewhere a red color, distinguish yourself, in regard to your ego, from this red. You cannot do that. You are this red. You cannot distinguish yourself from the red. This red is something that fills your consciousness completely, you are nothing else than this red. You can realize this especially well, if you, let us say, imagine that this red is the only thing you see. You see a large surface. You first have to make it clear to yourself, while looking at this large red surface, that you are an ego. You have to separate first the ego. But, while looking at the large red surface, during this time, the red and the ego have flown together. And it is the same with the astral organism of man.

So, the first thing we have to look at, where we are seeing, are processes in the ego and the astral organism. With the eye, there comes into consideration (just see for once the complicated way in which the eye comes into consideration) that man has a kidney system,—I design it here schematically (diagram, dark blue). This kidney system belongs first of all to the physical organism of man and has in itself parts that are solid. You know, I have told you quite often: man does not have so extraordinarily much of the solid, the mineral, in himself: 90% of him is a column of water. Nevertheless, he has firm parts in himself. These solid parts really swim continuously in a liquid; in something watery. Therefore we have to look at the kidney system as the starting point of the watery, which is not only there in excretion of the kidney system, but goes through the whole organism; among others, it also goes up to the eye.

But this liquid that, as it were, radiates from the kidney system into the whole organism and also radiates into the eye, is by all means not a dead watery substance, but a living water. You would get a totally wrong idea of what the water (the watery) is in man, if you had the picture that within the living human organism, one might find water, as it runs in a brook (see diagram, blue). This is not the case. In the brook, we have dead water, in the human organism we have a living liquid. Not only the plasma-liquid is living, all that is liquid in the human body is living. And in this liquid there are finely dissolved those solid parts, mentioned before, which are carried forth as it were, on the waves of the watery, also up into the eyes. Two different things meet now in the eye, the etheric organism of man (blue) fills out the eye, which is the optic nerve of the eye; and what is streaming now into this liquid which is filled by the etheric organism,—that is the astral picture which arises in the human astral body (red). And this (yellow) is what arises through the ego. That is what streams into here, and also streams further on.

Therefore, there are coming together on one side in the human eye and also in the human optic nerve, the impression from outside, which had at first really been in the ego—and the astral body and then from inside the physical and etheric body—the physical born from the mineral parts of human nature and the etheric body on the liquid parts of the human body.

Now, it is so, that this does not stay with the eye. Instead, what the eye is mediating, radiates into the remaining organism. In seeing, we have to deal altogether with an encounter of those processes, which occur in an extraordinarily complicated way in the ego and astral body and those which come to meet these as physical and etheric bodies but as physical body in the mineral constituents and as etheric body on the waves of the living liquid.

What I have shown you here for the act of seeing, continuously occurs in the human organism. Continuously in the human organism the etheric body—I would like to say—under the impulse of the physical body and on the waves of the living water, meets the astral body with all that which outer impressions are under the impulse of the ego. On the ways and means, how these two currents meet our whole human constitution, our-whole inner situation depends, because they have to meet in the right way. What does that mean: to meet in the right way? Well, we have to deal again with something extraordinarily complicated. The head-organization of man is, at first so (see diagram 1) that the head is a plastic image of the forces which man had as a soul-spiritual being in pre-earthly life. The head is formed by plastic forces, it is also developed very early during embryonic life, and it retains really only the power to give form. If the human head did not have this power to give form (zu gestalten) it would be indeed only a dead body. This human head is a marvelous creation (Gebilde). It is a faithful impression of the physical, etheric, even of the astral and even of the ego; it is an image of their descent from super earthly worlds into earthly existence. The head forms itself truly as an image of those cosmic experiences, which man went through in pre-earthly existence and retains only the plastic formative forces. If we look at the child we see that all plastic formative forces start from the head. Man receives from his head radiating into the remaining organism that which gives the plastic configuration to his organs during his growth correspondingly.

Then, it is throughout only the plastic forming force, which goes out from the head. If something enters the head, as it happens in seeing, it is right away received in a way that a force is forming which wants to give shape. What is entering there the eye wants to take shape inside of man. Most of all it wants to form the nerves,'the nervous system, in a way that in the inner organism there will be, so to say, a copy of that which had been the outer impression (diagram). One can say in this direction (arrows from above downward) from the senses going inside, goes a forming force. This force wants to make man, as it were, into a statue. It is really so: everything we see, wants to make us into a statue in a certain fine way. Against this force—for example, from the kidney system (arrows from below to above) another force comes forth, which continuously dissolves. What wants to be formed there? Imagine, how that is. If I wanted to trace this down for you I would have to say: Coming from the eye a very fine picture wants to form; up to a physical shaping of forms this wants to go. There is always a tendency like that taking place, that salty substances which otherwise are dissolved stick together, that is, they want to become salt. So that we continuously have a tendency for form shaping. Now, from below there always arises a tendency to dissolve that again. So we have continuously a tendency in the human organism from without towards the inner that should become a statue, and from the inside continuously it is dissolved again.

This process that takes place through the encounter of the astral with the etheric, that comes to meet the astral on the waves of the watery, is of immense importance for human life, basically it really means the whole of human life.

Imagine, someone tells you something tonight. It is also an impression. It occurs differently in the way of the senses, than when you see a red plane, but it also is an impression. What has been communicated to you there, again wants to take form in you. If it can take on form, then it stays in you as remembrance. And if you happen to have a head which is very much inclined to salt (to pickle) right away all impressions, then you will have a marvelous memory. Like an automaton, you can always repeat everything that someone communicates to you. But with most people it is not that way, because with most people there is the strong tendency to dissolve this in turn; what, as radiation of the watery element in connection with the etheric body comes to meet the plastic formative forces, dissolves this again. In reality it is a warm current which continuously is dissolving. If one looks at this matter, something extraordinarily interesting will result.

If one wants to remember things as a human being—not as a human automaton—then one must not get such a rigid inner salt-formation right away, when someone tells us something, so one can always repeat (abtratschen—like a parakeet) the matter right away. There are such people, but they become dependent, they are not themselves any more, who remember things, but the things take hold of them, one becomes an automaton. If one wants to be an independent human being, the following procedures have to happen:

What someone is telling you, or what one reads is, at first, in the ego and the astral body and wants to penetrate now through the organization of the brain, of the head, first into the liquid, and then wants to consolidate,—to call forth a sort of mineral salt-like formation. But it is good when the inner current comes and extinguishes this presently, so that, at most, the impression penetrates the liquid (but it dissolves) and at present no rigid form can come about. Since, at present, it cannot become a firm shape, the matter remains in the astral body. Now one is asleep, the next night. There it goes out with the astral body and the ego. There it reinforces itself somewhat during the state of sleep. (See diagram 3, right) Then it comes back in again with awakening (left), and will possibly be extinguished again; and this happens as a rule three to four times. Only after the fourth, having been asleep, the extinguishing force will not be strong enough anymore, and then this is fixed so firmly, that this plastic formation (Gebilde), which cannot be dissolved in there anymore, becomes the basis for memory-representation, for recollection.

You will say: But I can remember those things also, that I have heard yesterday, when I did not sleep a couple of times afterwards. That is right, but this is not the question now. That you can remember those things which you have heard yesterday has its cause from the fact that the matter is still in the astral body, and perhaps makes, an impression into the ether body; but one does not forget really after one day, not after the second or the third. If the matter really is forgotten, then the inner dissolving force is still so strong after the fourth day, that the whole matter will be dissolved; then it is dissolved. Because, if it is, then there is so much strength existing, that it comes in a fourth time and can still be dissolved, then we forget the matter unrefutably.

You see, this is a very interesting fact. And this fact, which one can observe by the way of imagination, if one simply sees how things are remembered, leads us to something else. It leads us to the realization that the head of man is altogether a much slower fellow than the rest of man. When we talk about the threefoldness of man, and keep at first the rhythmic organization in the middle, on one side his nerve-sense organization, that is the organization of the head,—on the other side the metabolic-limb organism, then we can say: the head-organism in its whole development, in all its being and becoming takes up a much slower pace than the metabolic-limb organism. And it is so, that while this inner consolidating (diagram), this shape-giving, would take a second for any impression (it is not so, but I say it as an example) there would have been already four impacts of dissolving from the side of the kidney-system. This can be seen in the fact that our pulse beats four times, while we inhale once. The respiratory system works upward From the rhythmical system towards the head and imparts to it the four times slower beat. That which comes to expression through the four times faster beat of the blood circulation which brings about the dissolving factor. What expresses itself in the four times slower pace of the head has in its working all that which tends to solidify, which makes man into a statue.

It is indeed interesting that this encounter which I have described to you, that is, the surging upward of the thrusts coming from the kidney system and the downward beat of the thrusts, which derive from outer influence that indeed while the impression is happening, four times an attack of dissolving is made on one. And that is the reason that we have to sleep four times over it, so that the act of striking from outside will be sufficiently fastened.

All these things fit (gliedern sich) together in a marvelous way if one can enter truly into the inner configuration of the human organism. But this is still connected also with something else.

You see, in going upwards in man and coming to the head, we find a pace of life (lebenstempe) which is four times slower than the one we find when we go, for example, to the organs of digestion, or, let us say, to the kidney-system. The kidney system works very fast and brings its inner working to the etheric, which swims on the waves of the living water. If man closes his eyes and subdues his brain consciously and then looks through that which flows out from the kidney; these are the imaginations, which swim on the living water—in such a way that his own inner life presents itself to him in imaginations. This is an extraordinarily interesting formation (Gebilde). If there is here (see diagram 4) the kidney system, then from the kidney system the living water flows towards the whole organism. What is excreted there, is only the superfluous, which goes to the outside through the relatively solid influx; but at the same time, this living water, which is permeated by the etheric organism goes also towards the whole organism. But, when the kidney is sick, and because of the sick kidney a radiation which is too strong takes place, then all kinds of images will form in there and the well-known subjective phenomena will come about, that people with sick kidneys will show. What is working there, what basically is a thrust pulsated through by inner body warmth, what then meets with that which comes from the outside wanting to become a form, this works four times faster than what comes from the outside towards the inner. This shows itself again in certain periods of our life in so far as these periods are regarded as coming about from the etheric organism, which I have drawn here this way. We must speak of seven year periods as you know; of the change of teeth, of puberty and so on. But against these periodical rhythmic processes, which go on from seven to seven years, something coming from the head is working, that wants to slow down these processes, because the head is going at a much slower pace. The head arrives at the end of the 28th year only where the main organism of man is at the end of the seventh year. This is a very important secret of human individual development.

On the outside, it expresses itself only through the fact that we can call ourselves completely grown up inwardly and outwardly in the late twenties. Everything that comes from the head completes itself really only at this time. The head is in reality only seven years old at 28. So, this is something, which one has therefore in the entire being of man. As one has on one side respiration and blood circulation—how blood circulation is in relation to respiration—the same way in life, in the whole becoming of life, the processes of the head are in relation to the processes, which proceed from the digestive system, altogether form the metabolic limb system. That also has one to the other the beat, of one to four. This is of great importance for life. It means, for example, that everything we bring to a child in education or instruction between the seventh and 14th years lives only in the head very slowly and has come to an end there, so that it is caught up in the head up to the 35th year; only up to the 35th year of life its vibrations in the head have completely come to an end. Four times seven years come into consideration. (The four times seven year periods are repeated from the seventh year on) Then at 35 only, the head has really caught up.

This throws an extraordinarily important light on a right method of education and teaching. It shows you, that teaching and education must be arranged in a way that it lasts long enough. You can, if you look only out for that which the child takes up from the seventh year to the 14th year, and which occupies him and what he comprehends, teach the child what he wants to grasp at the present moment. But these processes in the metabolic-limb system of man which are first the physical carrier of what has been grasped, leave after seven years. Now something must remain, even when matter has left; must be taken up by the head, must last up to the 21st year. Then again, the physical matter is gone, it must last up to the 28th year, then again matter is gone and it still must last until the 35th year. Now it finally is entirely in the ether body and from there it is not so easily ousted because the ether body is not always excreted in the same way.

You see how in life things work into each other, that we truly have to know that, being 28 years old, we would be only seven years in reality, if we were a head being only. If we are 35 years old, we would be in fact only 14 years if we were only head. We are continuously attacked in our quiet development by the metabolic limb system in regard to what the head of man really wants. Therefore, if one wants to understand man one must not regard the substantial constitution of the rest of the body. Instead one has to see the interplay between the metabolic? limb system and the head organism in their rhythm. But this enters into every single organ.

Diagram 5 Click image for large view

Take the eye. On one side you have the optic nerve, on the other side are blood vessels (diagram 5, red). Since the blood vessels spread,you have the metabolic-limb system in the eye. Through the optic nerve being there, you have the sense? nerve organism in the eye. Now look into the eye. There exists a relation of one to four among the processes in the optic nerve, the retina and the thrust of, the blood beat. Inside the eye things are continuously vibrating into each other, whose rhythms are related as one to four. On this vibrating into each other of two different rhythms the inner processes of the eye are based. What takes place in the arterial skin of the eye wants to dissolve; already in the eye, what wants to consolidate in the nerve of the eye. The nerve of the eye wants to create continuously forms with contours in the eye. The arterial skin with the blood flowing there wants to dissolve this continuously.

Diagram 6 Click image for large view

It is not as coarse as one generally presents it; instead it is so that the arteries of the blood have their own course and the veins join in again (diagram red), so that not one also loins the other. In the eye especially, the artery runs so that the blood flows out so to say, and is there only then absorbed in turn by the vein, so that a slight flowing off and a reabsorbtion comes about in the eye.

It is an entirely false and coarse view, if one believes that arterial blood immediately goes over there into the veinous blood. It is not so. A fine flowing out and again an absorbtion takes place. In what takes place as the outflowing vibrates the rhythm of circulation and in the nerve adjacent to it, the rhythm of the respiration vibrates really in these two rhythms which hit into each other. Imagine these two rhythms were alike, then we would not see.

Imagine you run along next to a wagon. If you run just as fast as the wagon, you will not notice the wagon. But when you walk four times slower and yet hold the wagon, then you will notice the pull. The wagon will go on and you will have to hold back if you want to slow it down. And so it is inside the eye. That is the function of the optic nerve which wants to hold back the rhythm which is four times faster. In the arresting is formed what then is perception, which appears as perception of sight, just as you notice the wagon if you run times slower; if you run in the same speed you will not feel it.

And you yourself, how do you experience yourself as an ego? You experience yourself because your head runs four times slower than the rest of your organism. That is the inner sensing of one's self, the inner perception of one's self, the running after the tempo of the limb-metabolic organism with what is function of the head.

Numberless cases of illnesses in people are based on the following; a certain measure of balance exists for every organism between four and one. One can always say: according to the way a person is orgainized a certain measure of balance is there. Of course, it never is exactly one to four, but there are all kinds of possible conditions; in this way people are individualized. But for every human individuality a certain relationship exists. If that is disturbed and if conditions would arise, by which the relation is then not one to four, but one to 4 1/7 the dissolving force then works too strongly, then the person cannot become a statue sufficiently. You only have to remember certain forms of illness, where man dissolves too much in himself, and you have the type of such kind of illness.

The other condition can come about just as well. Then those phenomena appear, which present cramp-like conditions. When the astral forces vibrate too fast through the etheric and physical organism, when the astral forces quiver through too fast and do not approach slowly enough, the cramp-like phenomena come about.

For example, take the ordinary children's cramps. These common cramps are based on nothing else than on the necessity that with the child the astral organism and the ego have to permeate first the etheric and physical organism in the right way. Now imagine, the astral organism and the ego which vibrate then into the limb-metabolic man, are vibrating too fast. The other part of man cannot take that right away. If it vibrates in the right way then you have, for example a part of physical and etheric man, which have to be permeated by astral and ego-man so that it gets slowly permeated. I would like to say:: every current of the astral force seizes always in the right way a droplet of living water, through which the etheric flows. It adapts to each other, if the right tempo is in it. But if that vibrates in too fast (see drawing 6, red, light), then the astral bursts through the etheric and with that also through the living water, cramp-like conditions come about as can especially appear in children's cramps, because here the right rhythm must assert itself first in the entering of this streaming in. (red, blue drawing 7)

This has a far reaching meaning. It has for example, the meaning that a very bad form of illness, which causes much headache today, finds its explanation here at least: namely that the right beat together is disturbed in a special way. Such an illness for example, is the bitterly bad illness of polio, which can be explained this way, though the healing is not found at the same time, because conditions lying farther back have caused that things are not tuned in together.

Altogether it is possible only to look into the human organism if one can take into consideration such conditions seriously if one knows that in that, which is outside at night of one's physical and ether body, the impulses are lying for a much slower activity of life than in that part which remains back at night, if one knows that man sleeps not only in an abstract way with his ego and astral body outside of his physical and etheric body. At sleep man is nearly all limb-metabolic man up into the brain, because everything proceeds then under the influence of metabolic-man.

Now, inwardly man is in regard to what underlies the slow rhythm exposed to a high degree to the ahrimanic forces, in regard to all, that corresponds to the fast rhythm his exposure very strong to the luciferic forces. Therefore, you could also say if you might look once at the wooden carved group; here everything ahrimanic has the tendency towards the slow rhythm, which hardens the forms and makes them pointed and rigid. In all that is luciferic, everything is worked towards the fast rhythms which makes everything round, because it runs off faster and therefore rounds off everything; it does not make things rigid, but wave-like. You can see it at the plastic forms there, that one deals with a beating together in the relation of three or four to one.

These matters are important as well for the understanding of the healthy human organism as they are important for the understanding of the sick human organism. One will see how one will have need in science of this completion which can come only from the side of what is called here anthroposophical spiritual science. I will continue these considerations intending to close them off in a way that on one side out of man history, and on the other hand out of history man will come to meet us.

Today I would like to indicate how everything which can be comprehended about man can serve as a basis which can enable us to take greater connections of history into consideration. So that tomorrow we can go onto understand something in this direction about our present time. The day before yesterday, as you know, I spoke about man himself in his constitution. I would like to do this today from a different point of view.

Let us look at man simply, as he stands in life from day to day and From the very ordinary side this time. Man needs nourishment to sustain himself. He has to take up into his own organism what we call substances from nature, from the animal, plant, and also partly from the mineral kingdom. But what man takes into himself from the outer environment undergoes a very powerful change inside his organism. The first one is that when we take up food we receive it ordinarily—at best prepared by cooking—as it is outside in nature, maybe just made ready in some way. Besides that we receive the air through breathing again 'in that state as it exists in our environment. Let us look at first other things, which basically are still more important, as for example light, which we also receive from our surroundings, as it is as light. But also the foodstuff and the air must undergo powerful changes inside our organism, so that they can satisfy and become human, so to say, inside our organism.

Described externally the process is very well known today. We take up the food—staying with this now next—perhaps somewhat prepared already, as said before. Next we inwardly digest particularly through the excretion of the glands, through the other digestive apparatus. We take it into us, wash it, saturated with a substance called ptyalin, which is excreted by the salivary glands of the mouth. We then bring the food farther into our digestive apparatus. I don't have to characterise here the way the whole process is taking place. By taking articles of food into ourselves and assimilating them, they will already be somewhat changed in regard to what they are in our surrounding outside. The foodstuffs never could become through outer proceedings what they become inside our organism. We can work at the substances, that present our food in the most different ways inside chemical laboratories—but never can occur there, what happens to the food when we bring it into our stomach and from there into our digestive apparatus. There the foodstuffs change over into something entirely different from what they were outside.

First every trace of life is extinguished, so to say. People eat meat. This is taken from the outer surrounding, from the animal kingdom. But by eating it man drives out right away just through the first stage of digestion (varverdauung) I would like to say—and through further digestion all that what these substances present in the body of the animal. Also, all what the vegetable foods—since they were part of a living being in the plant—have as life in themselves, has to be driven out. Only the real mineral particles we take up as outer material substances. Where we add to our meals salt, which is already of an outer mineral substance, if we add sugar, which through outer preparations—though originally it might come out of the organic has been driven so Far, that it has become dead, we have taken up something already dead. These underlie the least transformations in us; they really undergo only a transformation, which one could accomplish already also in an exterior way inside a laboratory. But everything that gets into our organism from the animal or plant kingdom, has to be thoroughly killed, if I want to express myself that way.

In our cooking we accomplish also a sort of advance killing by subjecting the food to heat and so on. This is done more thoroughly through our digestion, so that—where our foods have undergone a certain inner development until they get into the bowels, where they have approached these lower digestive organs—essentially all has been driven out what they are externally by being, for example subjected to the etheric body of the plants, by being subjected to the astral body of the animal etc. Consequently it must first be achieved on the way from the mouth to the bowels, that all foodstuffs are dead.

Diagram 1 Click image for large view

Because, when now the foodstuff gets to the glandular organs, which transmit the articles of food from the bowel into the lymphatic glands and then into the vessels of the blood, on this way back a reviving of the food must take place. The food at first must become dead in us and then must be revived again. We cannot tolerate in our human organism a continuation of that kind of life, which exists in the animal or the plant from which we take the food. We can at most take up the inorganic nature so that it presents us our own laws. We cannot, let us say, eat cabbage, cannot let it arrive during the digestive process at our villous intestines so that the same etheric forces would be present there, which the cabbage has, because it is a plant. The etheric, the astral, what the foods have, these must be first removed. Then, what we receive this way must be taken hold of by our own etheric body, so that it can be revived again. Life of the nourishment inside us, must come from us. And this happens on the way from the intestinal organisation through the vessels toward the heart. So that you can have the picture: where the foodstuffs coming from the mouth reach the intestines, the last traces of the outside world gradually have been lost (see drawing 1, red) but here they will be revived anew on the way to the heart. Being enlivened anew means, that they are taken up by our own etheric body. But now they would have too little of a character of the earthly, if only would happen what I have described to you up to now. Namely we would have to be beings who have a mouth—and a digestive apparatus only up to the heart, and then we would have to begin to be angels, because our ether body would take up the foodstuffs and completely dissolve them. We would not be able to be earthly beings. We would be a kind of mouth flying about with an esophagus attached to it. We would still have a stomach, intestines and heart and then you see, all that would be taken up by our ether body. But then we would be just an ether body and in the ether body the food would then dissipate. We would be able to be earthly beings. That we can be earthly beings is brought about by oxygen which is taken up now from the air. Thus, into what has been permeated by the ether body as foodstuffs oxygen of the air is taken up. Therefore, the possibility stays with us to be earthlike (flesh-like) beings here on earth between birth and death (diagram 1, white). It is oxygen that makes us again into an earthly substance that otherwise would dissipate in our ether body. Oxygen is that kind of substance which brings into the earthly state, what other wise by itself would form only as something etheric. The heart would not yet make us into an earthly human being but would bring us only far enough that we would unite our heart with the ether body and fly around on earth as such angels. But since the heart is connected with the lung and takes up oxygen the food that is taken up is not only etherised but also made earthly.

Now the necessity arises that what is taken up by our ether body and is saturated by oxygen, so that we can be earthly human beings, has to be inserted into the astral body. So far, it was not taken up by the astral body, only by the ether body. Now an activity has to be developed that everything that had been formed up to the heart-lung activity, will be taken up by the whole organism; but in such a way that also the astral organism has something to do with it. This is mediated by the human kidney system, which excretes now, what cannot he used of the matter that had been taken up, but leads the remaining into the whole organism on paths which today's physiology does not really describe at all, but which do exist.

And now the whole pulp—if I may express myself that way which now already stays alive—it was only completely killed inside the intestinal canal and has now been revived, and saturated by oxygen—is forwarded into the astral body through the activity of the kidney system which extends over the whole organism and radiates everywhere, so that this' astral body can cooperate in the further configuration of all that, what is effected in us through the food. (see diagram 1, yellow)

This astral organism in so far as it receives its impulses from the kidney system is in turn connected with the head-sense-system, which, so to say, is like a ceiling above. Kidney-system and head-system together work continuously, so that all which is liquid and dissolving through the activity of the heart, will be formed now into the special organs. We would not have firm organs if only mouth, stomach, intestines, heart and lung were there. But the stomach itself would have to be a dissolving organ movable in itself, the same with the heart, the lung. All that could not be firm. These organs get their configuration through the kidneys, and the kidneys are helped by what comes forth from the head.

These organs have not only to be formed during childhood, but continuously because our organs are continuously destroyed. Such an organ as the stomach is completely destroyed in the course of 7–8 years. Its substance is completely demolished, altogether removed, and is always renewed again. There have to be always form—giving forces existent, which renew these organs. Still much more has to be worked on this in childhood. But later on these form—giving forces are also there.

Diagram 2 Click image for large view

This happens as follows: (diagram 2). The kidney system, which radiates forth these forces on one side would bring these organs about only in a one-sided way. Or, for example, it would form one lobe of the lung in a way that it would be quite well defined backward, but in the front it would dissipate. Here the force of the head must come and meet, so that the frontal surface will be formed by the head; so that the single different forms of the human being are always formed in a way that the kidney radiates forth the forces and that from the head then the forces come and restrain, in order that the organs get contours, that they are rounded. By the head the surfaces are formed at the exterior. But the kidney delivers a kind of radiation into the organism. It is approximately somewhat as if I wanted to build something plastically. I take mortar, or any soft substance, into the hand and then I teach myself to throw the mortar upward (see diagram 2a, yellow—red)

Diagram 2a Click image for large view

Here you have what man receives, as nourishment driven to the point where it is taken up into the astral body of the human organism. These processes, as I have described them to you, take place also in the animal, though somewhat differently. The animal also has these processes going even still farther in the higher animal. But only indications take place in the lower animal of what is coming now. The higher animals have it, because they were branched off from the human race, they still have it, but it is deformed and degenerated with them.

Now something else is radiating into all that which is being formed there. First we have the foodstuff driven to the point where they are killed. Then we get approximately so far that we have the pancreatic gland as one of the last glands which bring the foodstuffs far enough that, while being pushed towards the lymph and being revived, they can be taken up by the ether body; so that then through the communication from the heart towards the kidneys the whole can he driven into the astral body. But now the ego also must be engaged. Everything we have in our organism must be occupied by the ego.

I have shown you now how that which unites itself with us is claimed by the etheric and astral organism, how it is taken up by the kidney system, radiating into the astral, and how with the help of nitrogen it is made into an earthly thing. Otherwise we would have to become angels again, if nitrogen were not working in us, which maintains us through the astral body within the earthly realm through the kidney system. But all this would not give us a configuration in which the ego takes part in the whole, if the liver-system would not be there. (see diagram 1)

The absorption through the lymphatic vessels is still something that belongs to the heart. As a rule, the heart is that organ, which together with the lung is driving the outer substances into our own etheric organization. From thereon it is the kidney system, which drives them into our astral organization. And then only the liver system with its gall excretion drives the whole into our very ego. The gall and liver-system is also found only in the higher animal kingdom, not with the lower animals, not even the gallic acid will be found with them in the bodily substances. Thus the liver-system then with its peculiar construction of the portal vein and so on—one can also verify this anatomically in every part—conducts the whole now so, that it is taken hold of by the ego. If only that what is radiated out by the kidney were there inside the body, it would be taken up only by the astral body. Because of the liver being there and the gall being excreted by the liver and mixed already with the chyme inside the intestines and the whole is permeated already by the liver products (diagram 1, blue), all this is driven into the ego organism. This way also our ego organism takes part through the liver, which has as its representative essentially hydrogen, in the whole building of the human organization. Man, in fact, has to take up nothing living, nothing astral from outside. All this he has to transform first inside his own organic system in such a way that it can be taken up into his astral and his own etheric being and into his ego-system.

Here, we have then the whole normal organization of man. Imagine, how all this has to be in time together. For example the activity of the kidneys must not be interrupted. If this should happen through a shrunken kidney, the astral body will not be engaged. In reality, the reverse is the case: if the astral body does not function in the right way, a shrunken kidney will develop. Therefore, if a shrunken kidney exists, we will have an exact picture with a degenerate heart of that which is going on in the ether body. I have told you last time, that there is even a going in accord of the rhythm. There are always 4 thrusts present in the radiation coming from the kidney (diagram 1, yellow) while what happens in the rounding forces, coming from the head only one thrust is there. That is the same relationship as it is expressed in the relation between respiration and pulse. Therefore, I should say if I may use this comparison again, the rounding forces are 4 times slower here than with the hand. That is the way namely, the organism is doing it.

All this must be tuned together in the finest way. Otherwise it will not work. Being ill means, that it is not in tune. Take for example the following: the ether body is completely in order, but the astral body is not strong enough to take up all that is flowing from the heart towards the kidneys and to work it through sufficiently. This can happen through' the etheric body, if it is working too strongly. I had said, the ether body might be all right;, but let us assume now, that it is working too strongly. If this is the case and the astral body is normal, the shrunken kidney can develop with its peculiar consequences. The etheric body being in the right condition and the astral body working too strong the kidney is not engaged enough. What is radiating across, because the astral body is working too strongly, will be claimed by it without the kidney working along in an orderly way in the right regulation. The kidney is put out of use thereby and the shrunken kidney develops. At the same time, because it causes a reaction, this will lead to a generation of the function of the heart and of the heart itself.

You see how one can look this way in a summary on what is going on in the human organism and that one can see by the degeneration of the organs how the members of the human being, physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego are not working together in the right way.

One has to make it clear for oneself how all these things must be in accord with one another and how they have to work in the right way. Let us assume, for example, that any area of the system of the organs is not permeated in the right way, but wrongly, by any member of the human organism, perhaps by the astral body. This can happen in a twofold way. Either what is coming forth from the kidney-system (as mentioned before, the rounding forces go out from the head, while from the kidney-system come the radiations) is stimulated too strongly, so that really everything that is working from the heart towards the kidney-system will be too much of a stimulation for the kidney system. In such a stimulation, which is too strong, you finally discover the original causes for all inflammation and ulcerations in the human organism. One has to find the way in which anywhere in the organism such an inflammation develops. One has to try there to balance the matter by medication in such a manner that one reduces the too strong effect on the kidney activity.

Diagram 3 Click image for large view

The simplest means to achieve this is to try to dam the too strong development of radiating inner body warmth, to induce an inner cooling off. Perhaps this might be done with the help of application of substances which are generated in the blossoms (organs) of plants. It is the peculiarity of these substances, which are generated in the blossom organs of plants, that one can counteract inflammations through them and bring about an inner cooling off. Or, it can also be that the plastic activity of the kidney, is working too strongly. Then some tumorous formations will arise. Here the plastic, the rounding off, the crystalising activity—I would like to say—is too great. Then one has to envelop the tumor through warmth from outside (see diagram 3, yellow, red). All tumors are in fact healed from outside. One only has to bring about in the organism, through injections of substances that diffuse in a certain way, the possibility to get the tumor enwrapped by radiation of such substances (diagram, red). If you succeed in getting a radiation into and around the tumor, then it will dissolve, crumble, and stop. If you have an inflammation, you have to bring the remedy into the organ through the digestive apparatus, where the inflammation is located. You have to bring something cooling, by way of the digestive apparatus. An inflammation has to be treated from inside (diagram 3a).

One only has to find the way here. Every substance has a specific way of spreading in the human organism. For example there are substances which, given by mouth to a human being, don't pay heed to the esophagus; it doesn't matter at all to them—all the pepsin, ptyalin and so on—they care, for example, only for the heart. To others the heart does not matter: They are conducted first through the stomach, through the heart, to the kidneys, and become active only there. So every substance has its affinity; one only has to apply the right substance. But there are also those substances which, if you vaccinate them, would not pay heed to a stomach-carcinoma at all, but would take care very much, let us say, of a breast carcinoma.

Therefore one has to find the way to attack an ulcer or an inflammation internally, to take something on from the outside, to besiege it, as it were. The tumors have to be besieged from outside. Things have to be studied this way, and they must be tuned together in a thorough way. Of course, to do this one has to know the higher members of human nature. It is impossible to talk at all about the kidney if one puts man on the dissecting table, simply, and opens him up after he has died. Then the kidney is lying next to the liver, as far as I am concerned; but what does one know more about the kidney and the liver than that both consist of cells, that both are built up, in different ways, of cells! But the kidney has an intimate. relationship to the astral body and the liver to the ego. That alone gives them their character. Without considering this, it is altogether senseless to define or to consider the whole matter.

Now, take an organ like the spleen. Ordinary physiology and medicine don't have much to say about it. You will find in all corresponding textbooks the notation: about the spleen one does not yet have anything to say today. You will find that everywhere, if you look it up. That is not very surprising. You see, the speech genius is really wiser in this respect than science. In this case,—in other cases it is the German speech genius which is extraordinarily wise,—it is the English speech genius who designates the (Milz) as “spleen”. And that is an extraordinarily favorable designation, because the spleen is connected with all those activities of man which go beyond the ego, which approach the spirit-self. The spleen is even directly the organ of the spirit-self. It enters fully into the spiritual realm. Only one must be able to stand. it. Most people cannot take the real spiritual element. Therefore they are not in any way animated through the activity of the spleen to an activity that is spiritual, but become “spleeny”. In reverse, they are tuned down. The “spleen” is nothing other than a spirit which, instead of going into the head, twists itself into the bowels. Therefore “spleen” is an extraordinarily good designation, which points directly towards the spirit, for which the spleen is the corresponding organ.

The spleen is effective in bringing about a balance, as presented in the pamphlet,—which has been worked out in our institute of physiology particularly by Fr. Dr. K.,—where the activity of the spleen is presented in relation to the formation of the development of membranes and the whole digestive process.

(Dr. Steiner then expressed his disappointment that this, which was being worked out inside the society, did not reach the outside world. Also that the members did not pay attention ...) This is what I want to say today only in parenthesis.

Indeed we can understand the human organism only if we understand its higher organization. You see how these things have to fit together. There is something out of order in the organism, if something which does not proceed in the right way works into the astral organism, because in that moment the kidney does not work in the right way, then all the phenomena that follow up a kidney which does not work rightly will appear.

But this is not so for man in general, instead, this changes from one era to another. The organization of man is an extremely fine one, but it is not always the same. If we go back a few centuries only—a couple of centuries are not much for the whole of evolution, it seems—then we come to a time where our present age, the real epoch of development of the consciousness soul, has begun. We go back from the 15th, 14th, and 13th centuries into the post-Christian time. It has been so,—as grotesque as this might appear to man today, especially in the civilized world,—that approximately during the whole time from the 4th until the 14th century the activity of the kidney was most important. Since then, the activity of the liver has become that which is most important for the entire nature of man. The anatomy and physiology of man really changes in the course of centuries, and especially of millenniums. One cannot study history if one does not enter into the fine structure of man, so that one knows how such transformations regarding outer phenomena in civilization, such as that from the middle ages into recent time, are also connected with a transformation of the whole human organization.

One has to come back again to such matters; otherwise on one side science will always come to a standstill, becoming more and more irreligious and antireligious, since finally it will only grope about with the probe and the dissecting knife, and so on,—and on the other side, there is religious life, which does not have anything to say anymore about the world, but addresses itself only to the egotistic instincts of man for life after death. These things are standing side by side. Our religious attitude of today has simply forgotten that God has created the world, and that one can find everywhere in the things of the world traces of divine creation. But one must not talk of abstract cloudlike changes of civilization in history; one must know how, especially through the delicate human organization, through this tuning in of the infinite fine clockwork of man's organization, the divine, creative forces transform man. As at one time they tighten the strings of the kidney activity somewhat more, then they relax and tighten the strings of the liver-activity, and a completely different music of civilization comes about.

Only if we don't restrict ourselves to looking at a God who is separate, but instead follow God into detailed activity, will we arrive at that which mankind needs in the future. Otherwise mankind will finally care only for the abstract, and arrive at a purely materialistic science. Only and solely if we can penetrate into concrete details, the effectiveness of matter in divine creation, will we get where we can permeate religion with science and lead science back to religion.

You see, around the turn of the 12th, 13th, and 14th centuries an attitude comes about in Europe, which I have already characterized from very different sides. It is expressed in the legend of the Grail, in the Parsifal legend, in all that has been written by poets like Wolfram von Eschenbach, Hartman von der Aue, Gottfried von Strassburg, and so on. There the motifs emerge. In the Parsifal epic, in the true Parsifal epic one motif especially arises. It consists in the sudden desire, to now present how man has to develop himself towards something one called at that time “Sälde”. It is the feeling of a certain inner sensation of happiness—Sälde—related to what we would call “bliss” but it is not the same. Sälde means being penetrated by a certain feeling of happiness. This emerges and dominates the whole civilization of the 13th and 14th century. All poetic motifs, but in particular the Parsifal motif, are permeated by it and everything strives towards it. One strives towards this Sälde, towards this inner feeling of bliss, which should not be irreligious, or perhaps a state of blissful comfort, but a state of being ensouled with the divine forces of the Creator.

Why does this arise? It arises because the transition from the kidney activity to the liver activity takes place. You will be able to understand this if you are aided by physiology. The earlier physiologists, of course, were better physiologists in many respects than the materialistic physiologists of today. Those, I mean, were the writers of the Old Testament, where one, for example, said, if one had had bad dreams—I have already drawn attention to this—“the Lord has punished me this night through my kidneys.” The knowledge of certain connections of an abnormal kidney-activity with bad dreams continued, and in the 8th, 9th and 10th centuries, for example, one was still deeply permeated by the conviction, that one becomes heavy through the activity of the kidney. The activity of the kidney had developed into something like heaviness for man. Of course, one spoke outwardly only about something that became heavy for man. One couldn't quite get out of it. One was stuck to the earthly. And then one sensed that one became penetrated by the gall from the physical side—but in a way that was connected with being “inwardly permeated by Sälde”—as a deliverance, an inner redemption—but it was an inner God-filled feeling of bliss,—a striving away from the dullness of the kidney. It is so, that the kidney also develops an activity of thinking. The kidney develops the dull thought-activity in man via the detour of the ganglious system. This is then connected through induction with the system of the spinal cord and the system of the brain. It develops in particular that kind of thinking which has also played a direct role in the middle ages. One called it at that time “dullness”, (Tumpheit). And this development from Tumpheit to illumination, Sälde; this was what became the motif of Parsifal. Parsifal develops from dullness to Sälde.

One must not only look at this in an abstract manner, but one must also look at it with feeling and a sensitivity. In the beginning Parsifal is as one arising out of a culture that has become heavy. One cannot quite get him in movement. Only later, after he has passed through his doubting, does Saelde permeate him. This doubt in him arises through being jolted by the heart-lung system. After he has gone through that, he finds the entry into Sälde.

It is possible to follow up into the members of the human organism what has gone on in the larger history of the world. One can say: leading individualities, like those who have fashioned the Parsifal-motif, they were pioneers, the first precursors of the modern human corporeal organization, which has proceeded from the old kidney-activity to the newer liver activity.

One must not feel contempt for something like that. One must not say: that is only the lower sensual nature. Even God did not despise the creation of lower matter—in fact, He was its Creator! By the same token we are obliged through cognition, to pursue the divine activity of the creator into the outermost ramifications of what is material. One should not be a dignified historian who describes Parsifal and says: If one describes Parsifal, one must not look at the same time at something so low as the physiological activity of man.

The world is a unity, and to understand the great historical connections, one has to be able at the same time to illuminate the different human connections. Men of ancient times, and even up until the Middle Ages, still had traces of such knowledge. You can follow that up in descriptions as that of “Armen Heinrich”, where we see that healings of a moral nature are still occurring, and so on.

These matters discussed today should be a preliminary indication of the fact that all human cognition presents a great unity. One can descend from what has to be conceived as the highest religious ideas to something that people often regard as being so low, that they don't want to look at it. Present-day science is guilty of such an attitude, because it does not at all realize that one must follow the spirit into the outmost ramifications of matter. But only then does one learn to understand the world. Only then does one also learn to strive upwards towards a true religious comprehension of the world. Otherwise one generally has just an egotistic point of view, which speculates on the egotistic motives of man, but does not enter into cognition and will lead us into decadence, instead of a renewal of civilization.

A new arising of civilization is connected with people receiving Light into themselves and contemplating the world in this Light, and not in darkness. Today's physiology and anatomy, just places people on the dissecting table and looks but at those symptoms which can still be observed in sick people by materialistic science. But this never attains to a real understanding of man.

One can say: foodstuff taken up, killed, revived, astralized, transformed into the ego—only then one understands ptyalin, pepsin, in the food that has been taken up and killed, and then transported into the lymphatic glands conveyed to the heart, fired by the heart. The kidneys then radiate through it, and all is astralized, taken up by the liver functioning and conveyed to the Ego. Then the whole can be caught up by the activity of the spleen and then, under certain circumstances the person will be made into an enthusiast, one who receives strength from the spiritual world through the activity of the spleen,—or otherwise he will be made into a “spleeny”, depressive person—one without the will to hold his head upright—through the activity of the spleen—one who only wants to sit on his chair and preFers not to he permeated by the spirit, who does not want to do any thinking. There are many people like—that today. They sit on their chairs, really only a big lump, as if they did not have a head at all. The activity of the spleen, which could be something lofty in man, really has a crushing effect on these people. Instead of enthusiasm, they have “spleen” and the “spleen” appears today already in a variety of forms.

But what one needs today is the kind of work that transforms spleen into enthusiasm, into fire so that men do not have a sleepy, but rather a wakeful civilization. This is what should come forth from Anthroposophy: to be awake, to have enthusiasm, to transform cognition into true activity, into deeds, so man does not only know more but will become something through Anthroposophy. Only then has Anthroposophy a goal and can such a goal be truly attained. But to become sleepy through Anthroposophy means that one gives much too much respect to the physical quality of the spleen and that one does not fructify the high spiritual nature of the spleen. But this points towards something that present-day mankind sorely needs. Men need fire, they need enthusiasm, they need to be inspired about something. As long as we cannot do that, as long as we think only about ourselves, we are placing too much value also on that which is excreted by us as urea, uric acid, which is not meant to be contained in the sphere of a cell, of protein—but should be brought into the state of fluctuating protein, which we are in our whole being. Basically we are something like a living, but large cell-like being, that stays in continuous, vivacious movement. Because we have carbon in us, we receive oxygen through the etherisation of the food, we get nitrogen, because the food substances are radiated through by the activity of the kidneys. We receive hydrogen, because the activity of the liver plays into it, and in connection with the activity of the senses, we do also receive sulphur—either the unsuitable one, which is the one mostly discussed today—or the proper sulphur. We really get what is necessary, so we are a living being who consists of protein—carbon, oxygen, nitrogen and also sulphur—but it must he the proper sulphur. (This is related to a joke about a philosopher in Wurzburg, on whose door students had written “sulphur—shack”.) That I don't mean. But man must be alive through and through, through and through ensouled, through and through permeated by spirit. This is something one also can learn, especially if one observes this in the outermost ramifications of matter. Only then will we get a physiology, then also will we get something which can really approach therapeutically the nature of man.