The Rudolf Steiner Archive

For many years it has been my duty to give lectures upon Spiritual Science, or Anthroposophy.

Those present at the lectures cannot but acknowledge that the foundation of Spiritual Science as presented is not a dreamy, idle pursuit for the few who have withdrawn from the common paths of life; it illumines the deepest problems and mysteries of existence.

Spiritual Science will lead the mind towards spiritual origins. It is destined to give out to man-kind knowledge of the spiritual worlds. At the same time its mission is to make life intelligible, to be a guiding star in work and action, giving us a broader and deeper understanding of what happens in our environment, through a comprehension of the underlying spiritual causes.

The confusion that exists in the average mind and the consequent spirit of dissension, are due to the endless contradictions found in the opinions of famous authorities regarding the problems of human life. Many people have, however, already felt how Anthroposophy widens the vision, and therefore leads to a wise adjustment of opinions.

Two famous modern contemporaries, whose influences are far-reaching, will be brought before us to-day; individualities well suited to present to us the vital contrasts existing in our time. It would be difficult to find two personalities in greater contrast in their thought and feeling and in their standard of right and wrong. On the one hand is the famous, the influential Tolstoy—so strong a personality that no appellation seems adequate to describe his significance for his day and generation. It is difficult to describe him as moralist, prophet, or reformer. But it is evident that in speaking of him something deeply rooted in the innermost depths of human nature is touched; that in his personality something lives which rises from the depths of the human soul—something that cannot be felt in those whose work is merely superficial. The other personality, in so marked a contrast to Tolstoy, is the American millionaire, Carnegie. Why should Carnegie be mentioned in connection with Tolstoy? Just as Tolstoy, out of the depths of his soul, strives to solve the problems of life satisfactorily, even so Carnegie, in his own way, endeavours with a practical and intelligent outlook upon life, to reach guiding principles.

Perhaps it might be said that just as Idealism and Realism are diametrically opposed, so are Tolstoy and Carnegie in relation to each other. As Fichte says, “Your opinion of life depends upon the kind of man you are,” and a man’s point of view is always connected b, finer or coarser threads with his peculiar character and temperament. Between these two personalities we find the greatest possible contrast. There is the wealthy Russian aristocrat, born in the lap of luxury, who through his social position was not only bound to know the external aspect of that life, but obliged to live with and to taste it. He is satiated with the modern way of thinking, which offers only the superficial. He looks up and beyond at the great outspread wings of moral ideals which the majority of mankind, even though admiring and willingly admitting as beautiful, still believe unattainable.

On the other hand we have Carnegie, who was born in simple surroundings, knowing necessity and sacrifice, not equipped with the advantages enjoyed by Tolstoy, but with a will to work with the endless, one may say, ideally-coloured ambition of becoming a man in the broadest sense of the word. Through this attitude towards life Carnegie evolves a kind of realistic idealism, a moral standpoint which reckons from what is seen with physical eyes of the turmoil of experiences in practical life.

Tolstoy, in his radical way, throws down the gauntlet to the modern order of things. His criticism becomes hard as it endeavours to combat modern thought, feeling, and selfish impulses. Carnegie sees life as it has developed historically. The word his soul uses to express his connection with life is “Satisfaction”—satisfaction with the existing order of things. He sees how the differences between rich and poor have arisen and how the differentiation of service has come into being. And everywhere this is his penetrating judgment: It is immaterial whether we find good or evil. Both exist, must exist. They are there and must be reckoned with. Let us work it out. From a realistic conception of things as they are, let us work out an idealism that aims at the great goal of pointing out the right way, within existing conditions, towards such an order of things as will further human progress and development.

This lecture does not “take sides” with either of these lives; but the conditions of their development must be understood in order to explain the contrasts: and if Spiritual Science has any task in regard to these men it must be that of understanding and explaining how these differences are evolved from the underlying principles of existence. It cannot be my task to offer biographical information. Only that will be said which will so illumine the souls of both men that we can enter into a deeper understanding of their personalities.

Tolstoy was from the first a man who did not have to fight for the material necessities of life, but was born in the midst of over-abundant wealth, and could easily have vanished like the many thousands who live within the realm of luxury. For this, however, he possessed too strong an individuality. From childhood only that which touched upon the deepest questions of the soul, and of life, seemed to influence him, though as a boy he did not regard critically the happenings around him but accepted them all as a matter of course. How different his attitude was later in life, when he became a censor of his surroundings.

A long account could be given of how Tolstoy became acquainted with the dark and miserable side of modern social life, especially during his period of army service; how, having learned the misery of war, and the superficiality of the social and literary life of St. Petersburg, he became disgusted with the ethics of the ruling classes. All this is well known. But what interests us more are the great questions which shone out before Tolstoy. Forcing itself more and more into his being, was the question, “What is the centre of life amidst all these conflicting conditions surrounding us? Where is the middle ground to be found?” Religion became for him the great and vital question. He could not at first tear himself from the conventional forms, and though religious considerations grew in importance as he asked himself, over and over again, “What is religion? What does it signify to humanity?” he could not recognize the connecting link between the soul and an unknown spiritual source. It seemed to him that all he had learned of true religion from the men of his own class, had been torn away from its source and had hardened and withered away.

At this time he became interested in the lower classes. As a soldier in the Caucasus he learned to know their inner life and found in them something of the primeval, that had not been torn away from the first cause. His eyes opened to the fact that in the naive existence of these lower, inferior people of the soil, truth and reality must abide more than in the artificialities of the class to which he belonged.

Problem after problem confronted him, none of which he could solve. “Yes; now I have seen those who have departed from the truth, and have become hardened in the periphery. And I have sought a way to religious depths through the souls of primitive people: But the answer to my question founders on the fact that the so-called educated can never be understood nor be in harmony with this primitive state of the soul.” No answer could be found to the burning question. So on and on until the contrasts and contradictions in life become plain. By reading his War and Peace, and Anna Karenina it can be seen how everywhere, even though the artistic form is paramount, the longing to understand life in its contrasts, and most of all the contradictions of the human character, permeate these works.

In later life, after he had become the great moral writer, he said: “The endeavour to portray a character ideally and soulfully created, yet in harmony with reality, has cost me untold misery, and I know that many of my contemporaries have had the same experience.”

It troubled him that such contradictions exist between that which one recognizes as the ideal and that which actually appears; for order and peace should reign in the world. This disturbed him as long as he was artistically active.

Tolstoy was not simply the objective onlooker all this time. He had been in the midst of life. He had experienced all these things, and could feel the intimate pricks of conscience, the inner reproaches that come to all who suddenly realize themselves to have been born into a certain class, and consequently under an obligation to conform to existing customs. It seemed inconsistent to criticize them. Such personalities are often driven to the verge of suicide by the turmoil in their minds.

Infinitely more can be learnt by introspection than by criticism of externalities. As from within outwards the horizon of Tolstoy broadened, until from the keen observation of his nearest surroundings he reached the broad plain where he overlooked the whole evolution of mankind, he saw to how wide and universal an extent the great and pure religious impulses of humanity had degenerated.

Then in all its depth, and in all its strength, the great impulse which was given to the world through Jesus Christ appeared to Tolstoy. But at its side also appeared the great Roman world of the Caesars which made Christianity subservient to power, representing only the outward form which had failed to save humanity and had become a mystery to men. And so his criticisms and his opinions became harsh and warped—and they are surely harsh enough.

It was most difficult for him to understand the contradictions in humanity. On the one side tremendous wealth; on the other dire poverty which resulted in the deplorable stunting of the soul’s life, so that humanity, through restriction of spiritual opportunities, could not find its way to spiritual wisdom specially to that which can be found in the original Christian teaching to which it must eventually penetrate.

Thus this comprehensive problem confronted him, this contrast between the luxury of the ruling classes and the spiritual and mental oppression of the masses. Experience of this problem ripened into a conviction, and he developed into a critic more penetrating perhaps than any before him—a critic who does not tire of describing things as they are, and of doing so in such a way as to impress us with their horror. It is natural to judge his attitude towards life from the trend of his contemplations. He said he would have liked to write a fairy tale with the following contents:

“One woman, having had a very bad encounter with another woman, disliked her intensely and wished to do her the most atrocious wrong. Accordingly she consulted a sorcerer, and acting upon his advice stole a child from her enemy. The sorcerer assured her that if she could take the child, who was born in great poverty, and place it in a home of wealth she could thus fully accomplish her revenge. This she was successful in doing. The child was adopted. It was taken care of according to the manner of the rich—spoiled and pampered. The woman had not expected this development, and was very angry. She went back to the seer to complain that he had given her wrong advice, and had betrayed her. ‘Wait,’ he said, ‘you have done the worst one could do to an enemy. When this child develops further and his conscience is awakened to an inner contrast with the outer world, he will know that all he longs for must be in another world: but he will not be able to find it. He will say, “The manner in which I have been brought up has robbed me of the ambition and determination to seek and follow the way which leads to the underlying causes of existence.”’

This results in intense suffering for the developing man. Tolstoy understands the soul torture of such an experience, and appreciates the temptation to suicide created by this inward unrest and uncertainty. This illustration reveals his attitude toward the social order of things.

Now to consider Carnegie, who was the child of a master-weaver. So long as the big factories did not exist the father was able to find work. In the midst of this prosperity Carnegie spent his infancy. Then through the growth of the large factory his father found himself out of work, and was obliged to emigrate from Scotland to America. Only through the most strenuous efforts was he able to provide the absolute necessities of life. The boy was obliged to work in a factory, and as he relates his experiences we recognize in the description the same groundwork, the same depths, that are to be found in the soul experiences of Tolstoy. Carnegie describes what an event it was, his first-earned dollar. He has since become one of the richest men of the day, one who is actually obliged to seek ways and means of using his millions; and he is wont to say, with characteristic frankness: “None of my income has ever given me such a keen satisfaction as those first dollars.”

He worked in the same way for some time to support his family; but something lived within him like a hidden power, shaping his life so that he became a “self-made” man. This brought him supreme satisfaction. Even as a boy of twelve he felt himself fast becoming a man, for he who can earn his own living is a man. This was the thought of his soul. Then he went on to another factory, where he was employed in the office, and later became telegraph boy and earned more. He tells us: “A telegraph boy was obliged to memorise all addresses. I was afraid of losing my position, so I learned every name on the streets.” So once more his position was self-made. Then he stole into the office before hours, with other messenger boys, to practice telegraphy.

There his highest ideal was to become an operator, and he soon achieved it. Then his happiness was increased by finding a friend who lent him a book every Saturday. How eagerly he looked for each new book! Soon followed events of vital importance to him. A high official advised him to take shares in a certain company and thus advance his prospects. By sacrifice and thrift he accumulated the necessary five hundred dollars. Previous to this time had had used all his energy to support those dependent upon him, and he found it possible to make this investment largely through the economies of his mother.

This purchase of ten shares of stock was an event of the greatest importance, for upon the receipt of the first dividends it seemed to come to him, as the solution of a problem, that money makes money. The meaning of capital became clear to him, and this understanding meant the same to him as the working out of any difficult problem to a deep thinker. Before this time money had seemed only the compensation for hard work. Here it is most interesting to observe the result of such an experience upon such a character. From that time he was alert to every opportunity for making money. With the invention of the sleeping-coach Carnegie immediately became interested in it. Thus step by step he seemed to learn to understand and profit by the signs of the times.

The old custom of building bridges of wood was abandoned in favour of iron and steel construction. Of the opportunity offered by this change Carnegie took advantage, becoming richer and richer, until he was known as the “Steel King.” Then moral obligation faced him, and with it the questions, “What is my duty? How shall I distribute this wealth so that it may best fulfil its mission?”

That which Tolstoy experienced does not exist for Carnegie—there is no criticism of life, but instead an acceptance of life’s conditions as they are. What appeared to Tolstoy as utterly in-consistent, Carnegie regarded as natural. Looking back far into ancient times, we find princes living in the most primitive conditions, differing very little from their subjects in their mode of life. No luxury, no poverty, in our acceptance of those terms. Therefore we feel they did not know the things wealth brings, and there was no difference between rich and poor. From this primitive life everything has developed. Stronger and stronger become the contrasts. “It is well,” Carnegie says, “that beside the hut stands the palace, for there is much they should hold in common.”

We must understand his limitations. What struck him forcibly was the personal, brotherly feeling between master and servant under earlier conditions. Our relations have now become impersonal. The employer stands face to face with the employee without recognizing him, without knowing any of his needs. In this way hatred develops. But as it is so, it must be accepted. Carnegie’s view is an absolute endorsement of our outward daily life.

Penetrating more deeply we see that Carnegie is a keen, sharp, practical thinker of his kind, and that he stands in the centre of industrial life knowing all the different channels into which capital flows: therefore he has developed a wise and a sound judgment. It cannot be denied that this man has endeavoured to solve the problem of right living, and there is something in him which persuades us that he experiences a satisfaction with life impossible to Tolstoy.

His practical morality brings up this question: “How must this life be shaped so that that which has arisen of necessity shall have meaning and sense? Old conditions have brought about the custom of inherited wealth. Is this still possible under our present conditions, when capital of necessity produces capital?” he asks himself sharply. He studies life with keen interest and says, “No; it cannot go on in this way.” After considering all sides carefully, he comes to the peculiar and characteristic conclusion that when the rich man regards himself as the distributor of accumulated wealth, for the benefit of humanity, then and then only has his life any significance. He says to himself: “I must not only earn money, not only support my family and relatives, but in so far as I have used my mental powers and forces to bring it together, pouring into my work all my capabilities, this must be turned to the benefit of mankind.” This then is his code, that man, while adapting his powers to the conditions of this age, should earn as much money as possible, but not leave any; he should use it all for the improvement of humanity.

Therefore, “to die rich, dishonours,” is characteristic of Carnegie’s view of life. He says it is honourable at one’s death to leave nothing. Naturally this is not meant pedantically, because the daughter must inherit enough to live upon; but, radically expressed, “to become rich is fate, but to die rich is dishonour.” An honourable man to Carnegie is the one who “makes an end,” completes a life, leaving no uncertainty concerning that which his ability has brought together.

We must recognise the difference between these two characters—Tolstoy and Carnegie. The latter himself feels it and has commented on it in this manner: “Count Tolstoy wishes to carry us back again to Christ; but it is in a way that does not fit in with our present manner of living. Instead of leading us back to Christ, he should demonstrate what Christ would advise man to do under present conditions.’ In the sentence before quoted, “To die rich, dishonours,” Carnegie finds the true stamp of Christian thought. And it is evident that he believes Christ would say that he, not Tolstoy, is right.

We see in all this that Carnegie is a noble man, with a progressive, not an indolent, nature, unlike the many who, with little thought, accept things as they find them. He has sought, in many ways, to solve the problem of the distribution of wealth.

Is it not wonderful that life presents such marked contrasts as those afforded by these two strong personalities who, with the same objective point, pursue such very different courses? To understand this is truly most difficult for some minds. It is not at all marvellous that, on hearing Tolstoy preaching his lofty ideals, some will feel, “Oh, my soul responds to that!” and will sense the uplifting influence. It must be remembered, however, that life has a practical side, and he who is not an abstract dreamer, but in a truly realistic and earnest spirit tries to follow Carnegie’s train of thought, must admit that he is right too.

This shows, too, how impossible it is for the man who gives himself up to the practical side of life to acknowledge the greatest ideal, or to believe in its fulfilment.

Tolstoy succeeds in making what he believes is an absolute defence of the original Christian religion. He criticizes all that has appeared from time to time in the guise of Christianity; he has hoped to find the great impulse, or foundation, of real Christianity. In the simplest way he puts before us this impulse as it appears to him. And when a man understands this impulse, it is clear that he has within himself a spark of the Infinite, the eternal world-illuminating spirit of God. Another conviction is that in this spark is the germ of man’s immortality, and that with this understanding he cannot fail to seek for the higher and deeper nature throughout the whole of humanity. From this comprehension he knows that within himself is the real man, who cannot fail to overcome all that is base and unworthy within his nature. He devotes himself to the cultivation of the spiritual or higher self which lives eternally, the Christ.

How would a man, I will not say Carnegie, but one who considers things from his point of view, regard the philosophy of Tolstoy’s Christianity? He would say: “Oh, it is grand, magnificent, to live in Christ. The Christ within is one’s Self; but under our present conditions such a thing is impossible. How could civic affairs be conducted in accordance with these strict Christian requirements?”

Although the question is not put before the other side in a corresponding way, Tolstoy gives as definite an answer as possible, saying, “What will happen to the outward order of things pertaining to state and historical events is beyond my knowledge; but I am positive that humanity must live in accordance with the true Christian doctrine.” So, for him, the words, “The kingdom of God is within you,” expand into a deep, significant certainty that man may reach the heights, that he may know the Holy of Holies. This certainty, that the soul can know the truth about this or that, is to him a fact. We see in no other character of our time such a strong faith in the inner man, and such a firm belief that through this faith the outward results must eventually be good. For this reason scarcely any one else has professed such a view of the world with such personal, individual sympathy and such conviction as Tolstoy.

Carnegie reasons: “What relations must men sustain one to another?” And: ‘It is not good to give to beggars promiscuously, because it is apt to foster laziness. It is necessary to know the exact needs of those whom one helps. Really, one should help only those who are willing to work.” This is the basis of his philanthropy. He says he knows very well that the man who gives simply to rid himself of the beggar causes more havoc than the miser who gives nothing. We shall not judge in this matter; we are only characterizing.

On the other hand, let us consider Tolstoy. He meets a friend. This man has a great affection for his fellow men, and Tolstoy sees in him a wonderful new birth. Some one robs this friend; sacks of things are stolen, but one sack is left behind. What does the friend do? He does not prosecute the robbers, but carries them the remaining sack, saying, “You certainly would not have taken them had you not needed them.” This Tolstoy understands perfectly, and he be-comes his friend’s admirer. So much for the different ways of looking upon the parasites of society. These men are human brothers. The differences of opinion are the results of the different attitudes of soul. It must be admitted that Tolstoy is not only a hard critic, but having grasped the source of human certainty he has reached a remarkable point in the development of his soul. Herein begins what is foremost in his greatness, shining out for all who can appreciate it.

One result of his strong convictions, that calls forth admiration, is his attitude towards the value of science to the present generation. Because of his ability to look into the souls of men he could see through the vain endeavours and methods of our worldly sciences. Certainly it is easy to understand the teachings of physical and material sciences, and to follow and to realize all that they demonstrate. But what so-called science cannot do is to answer the questions: “How are these different physical and chemical processes united to life?” and “What is life?” So we face the deep scientific problem, the problem of life, and attempt to understand and to solve it.

It is significant to note Tolstoy’s remarks on the attitude of our western science in regard to the riddle of life. “People, who in the name of modern science endeavour to solve this riddle, seem to me like men trying to recognize the different species and habits of trees in this manner. Standing in the midst of the trees they do not even look at them, but taking a glass they gaze at a distant hill, upon which they agree should grow the kind of tree they are endeavouring to understand. So appear to me those who, instead of seeking in their own souls the solution of this problem of life, make instruments, create methods, and try to analyze that which exists in nature around them; more than ever they fail to see what life is.”

Through this comparison Tolstoy reveals what he understands and feels upon these questions. A careful study of his point of view shows that what he has written on the problem of life is of more value than whole libraries of western Europe which treat it from the modern scientific standpoint.

It is good to realize the value of such soul-experiences as Tolstoy’s, and his experience of the certitude of the Spirit is of great importance. We can admire Tolstoy’s way of solving in five lines that which our modern scientific methods fail to solve with long, complicated processes of thought, in whole books. Tolstoy shows great concentration in this power of expressing these great solutions in a few magical strokes, and making great problems intelligible in a few words rather than in the prolix, so-called scientific, philosophical treatises of many modern writers.

Tolstoy stands unique in the depth of his soul-character, and only when this is realised can we comprehend the spiritual reasons for the coming of such a man as he on one side, and on the other such a man as Carnegie—for the latter in his way is as important for his generation. To understand more fully the spiritual sources which lead on the one hand to Tolstoy and on the other to Carnegie, we should regard them from the standpoint of Spiritual Science.

The spiritual discoverer sees in the progress of humanity something quite different from that seen by the ordinary man. As the Spiritual Scientist sees in the man standing before him a being of four parts—sees in the physical body the instrument of higher spiritual forces, and behind this the etheric body, the astral body, and the I, or ego—so he sees behind what appears as social order in human life as folk or race or family, the spiritual reality. To-day the “spirit of the people” or the “spirit of the times” has no real meaning. What does he think who speaks of an English, German, French or American “spirit of the people”? Truly, as a rule, only the sum-ming up of so many human beings. To the average mind they are the reality, but the spirit of the people is an abstraction.

There is little realisation that that which appears outwardly as so many human beings is the expression of a spiritual reality, exactly as the human body is the expression of an etheric body, an astral body, and the ego. Humanity has lost what it once possessed—the faculty of being able to see such realities. An old friend of mine, a good apostle of Aristotle, tried to make clear to his class how the spirit can be made manifest in the sense-perceptible. By a simple example Knauer—for it was he—made it clear how spirit exists in matter by saying: “Look at a wolf. He eats, we will say, during his whole life nothing but lambs, and then consists of lamb’s material. However, he does not become a lamb. It is not the nature of the food that is significant, but the fact that in the wolf is living something spiritual which builds and holds together its material form. This is the Real—something which must be recognized or else all study of the outer world is vain.

Examine as man may the outward, material world, if he does not probe to the spiritual he does not come to the source of all life. So it is with the terms “spirit of the people” or “spirit of the times.” For the spiritual discoverer, in the development of Christianity there lives the spiritual reality, not simply an abstract condition. For the spiritual discoverer the sum of humanity is not only that which can be observed in the physical world; behind this lives something spiritual. And for him there is a spirituality, not a bare, unsubstantial abstraction, in the development of Christianity. Beside the Christ is the spirit of Christianity, which is real. This spiritual reality works in a wonderful and subtle way, well illustrated by the following. A peasant once lived who divided his crop. One part he used, and the other he saved as seed, which bore a new crop. This is an illustration which leads us to a law ruling human development; and which proceeds in this way. At certain times are born great impulses which must be sown broadcast. A spiritual impulse, as that of Christianity, given at a certain time, then finds its way to the outer world, taking on this or that form; but perhaps as the outer part of a tree dries up and forms the bark, so the form becomes dry and dies away. These outer forms are bound to die out. And be the impulse ever so strong and fruitful, as surely as it penetrates into the outer world it must disappear like the seed that was used.

Now just as the peasant held something back, so must some part of the spiritual impulse remain, as if flowing along underground channels. Suddenly with primal force this reappears, bringing a fresh impetus to the development of mankind. It is then that a personality appears in whom the impulse, which has been ripening for centuries, is manifested. Such individualities always appear in direct contrast to their surroundings. They must be in great contrast because the surrounding world has become hardened. They are usually inclined to disregard their environment entirely. Seen from a spiritual standpoint, Tolstoy is such a personality; one in whom the Christian impulse is manifest.

These things happen in a forceful way, to break through the shell, and exert a far-reaching influence. Their origin appears wholly radical, and their effects illuminate the world. Such is the law which gives us such seemingly one-sided personalities as Tolstoy. On the other hand, we must expect the contrasting personalities who are not connected with the central stream but wholly absorbed within the peripheral working of the world. Such a person is Carnegie.

Carnegie can look out and over the circle, can think out the best way for humanity; but he does not see that which as spirit pulsates through human life. Tolstoy does, because he seeks so earnestly the inner certainty, the Kingdom of God, in the individual soul. He can do so because in him is personified that true stream which is below the surface bearing itself onwards and unconnected with such material things as may be inherited.

We have physical manifestations but the onlooker does not realize the spiritual within them. We have the spiritual that springs with great strength out of the innermost being of a person, but the onlooker does not understand how this can make itself felt in the world. More and more will humanity find these contrasts and, if another spiritual stream did not appear to reflect again the deep, underlying, spiritual sources making them manifest in the material world, we could not follow Anthroposophy. Anthroposophy or Spiritual Science leads us into the very depths of spiritual life. It not only traces spiritual life in those powerful impulses which do not unite with deed and fact, it also seeks for it in the concrete, and therefore understands how the spiritual flows into the material. It thus bridges the apparent chasm between the spiritual and material, finding in this way the point of view which brings contrasts into harmony.

Today we wish to learn to understand, from a spiritual point of view, two contrasting personal-ities. Spiritual Science is not only called upon to preach outward tolerance, but also to find that inner light which can penetrate with admiration into the soul of one demonstrating the great Im-pulse that emanates from the spiritual consciousness. This to-day seems improbable if not im-possible and on the whole radical, because it crowds into so small a space that which in the future will be spread far and wide, and which will then present a very different aspect. This Anthroposophy can realize. It can look also with objective eyes upon the present, and the personality of Carnegie, and appreciate him. Life is not a one-sided affair. Life is many sided, and can be appreciated in all its richness only when the great contrasts are fully understood. Bad indeed it would be if the various colours and tones could not be seen as parts of an artistic whole.

Human evolution demands the crystalization of one or the other of these opposites, and so it must be; but with this hope, that mankind may not be lost in the midst of life. There must be a central religion, or Welt-Anschauung, which must solve the many complex problems which now appear so full of contradictions. When Anthroposophy works with this aim in view it will evolve full harmony. Outward harmony can only be the reflection of the inner or soul harmony. And when Anthroposophy shall have accomplished this aim, her true place in modern culture, she will have found that which she is seeking to establish. Anthroposophy desires no theoretical proofs, no speculation; her aim is to prove and demonstrate the truth of her statements in life itself. When she will see the light which she has shed upon life reflected back to her in inner harmony in spite of all contradictions, then she will realize the establishment of her fundamental principles.

{This follows immediately after the lecture.}

TOLSTOY AND THE FUTURE

In Rudolf Steiner’s lectures on the Apocalypse of John, given at Nuremberg in June 1908, he spoke in Lecture 7 of the sixth post-Atlantean epoch, which follows our own, and took Tolstoy as an example of a man in whom the culture of the future age can already be seen.

These lectures, which are intended to be objective, are far, far removed from any party spirit. But you may compare objectively what is attained as science and philosophy in the European West with what appeared in the East, let us say in Tolstoy. One does not need to be a follower of Tolstoy, but one thing is true; in a book such as Tolstoy’s On Life you may read one page, if you understand how to read it, and compare it with whole libraries in Western Europe. And you may then say the following: In Western Europe one makes spiritual culture with the intellect; one chisels out certain details and puts them together to form something that is supposed to make the world comprehensible, and the achievements of Western Europe civilization in this respect will never be surpassed. But if you understand such a book as Tolstoy’s On Life, you will often find condensed into ten lines what in these Western European libraries it takes thirty volumes to say. Tolstoy says something with elemental force, and in a few lines of his there is the same amount of energy as is assembled in thirty such volumes. Here one must be able to judge what comes forth from the depths of the spirit, what has a spiritual foundation and what has not. Just as over-ripe cultures contain something that is drying up and withering, so do rising cultures contain within them fresh life and new energy. Tolstoy is a premature flower of such a culture, one that came far too soon to be fully developed. Hence he has all the faults of an untimely birth. His grotesque and unfounded presentations of many Western European things, all that he brings forward in the way of foolish judgment, show that great personalities have the faults of their virtues and that great cleverness has the folly of its wisdom.

Report in the “Allgemeine Zeitung München” of May 3, 1904

Goethe as a theosophist. On April 22, the well-known Goethe scholar and philosophical writer Dr. Rudolf Steiner of Berlin, formerly an official at the Goethe-Schiller Archive in Weimar, gave a long lecture in the large hall of the Wittelsbacher Garden on the subject of “Goethe as a theosophist,” which writer Ludwig Deinhard introduced with a short speech. The latter referred, among other things, to the earlier works of Dr. Rafael v. Köber and Prof. Seiling on Goethe's position on the question of immortality and on occultism. Dr. Rud. Steiner first stated that in his lecture he would like to limit himself solely to Goethe's relationship to Theosophy, without pursuing his position on occultism. He then discussed the basic idea of Theosophy, “the divine striving of man to develop”, which can be recognized as the core essence of the various religions and has found expression in Goethe's works as well as in the writings of other leading figures in world history. Goethe, in his spiritual depth a mystery to his contemporaries, knew much, very much indeed, to say about the divine, mystical, ideal human being in the depths of the human essence. He had sought and seen the divine in nature, in the beauty of art, in the laws of the macrocosm and the microcosm, in man. To illuminate Goethe's theosophical ideas, the speaker referred in particular to the lesser-known enigmatic fairy tale 'The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily'. The speaker sought to interpret this 'secret revelation' of the poet in a meaningful way. The will-o'-the-wisp, the souls trapped in the world of the senses, can only return to the land of the spirit by sacrificing the snake, the symbol of the higher self sacrificing itself for others. Only through sacrifice can the bridge to the land of the spirit, of higher knowledge, be built. In this realm, the youth, representing the human race, receives the lily, the symbol (taken from the alchemists) of a “higher spiritual development”. Furthermore, the speaker sought to trace Goethe's theosophical views in the second part of Faust as well. He discussed, among other things, the meaning of the ideas of the gradually revealing soul being, the homunculus, the descent to the mothers, the idea of karma in the life and work of Faust and his final ascent to mystical life after he goes blind to the sense world. In conclusion, the speaker offered a meaningful explanation of the “Chorus mysticus”. After the lecture, a number of those present, who had given the speaker's interesting explanations a lively applause, gathered for a discussion. Through “Karma” it was determined that the listeners had to bear saddening proof of the “inadequacy of our earthly Sansara” in their efforts to obtain their wardrobe. In the “terrible narrowness” of the queue in front of the entrance to the hall, they were able to practice “sacrificing their lower selves”. Unfortunately, several Theosophists, who were perhaps still too absorbed in Faust's “Descent to the Mothers”, were tripped up by a weighing machine in front of the cloakroom, which will hopefully be eliminated in the course of the 20th century.

[On the banks of the great river, swollen and overflowing after heavy rains, the old ferryman lay in his little hut, tired from the day's exertions, and slept.

The ferryman – the lower forces of nature – rests on the far bank – the mental plane – of the river – the astral desire plan.

Then two will-o'-the-wisps come along: people in whom only Kama-Manas lives, that is, the lower mind, which draws its knowledge from the lower material plane. The will-o'-the-wisps want to pay the ferryman with their gold, which they shake out of themselves. He has no use for that; the lower mind cannot control the lower forces of nature. The ferryman gathers up the gold knowledge in horror.

If a piece of gold had fallen into the water, the stream,

— the passion —

which this metal cannot endure,

— gold and knowledge stir up the passions —

rose in terrible waves, engulfing the ship and me. And who knows how it would have gone for you! Take your money back with you,

says the ferryman.

We cannot take back what we have shaken off,

say the will-o'-the-wisps. Quite right too; earthly wisdom cannot pick up what it has let go. The ferryman demands his reward from the will-o'-the-wisps: fruits of the earth; three cabbages, three onions, three artichokes. The will-o'-the-wisps cannot give them to him, but they promise to get them. The ferryman carefully collects the gold in his cap and sails along the river to a rocky area on the same side where the will-o'-the-wisps are, who call to him in vain once more, where the water can never reach it, and pours the dangerous gold into a huge crevice; then he returns to his hut.

In this crevice [was] the beautiful green snake,

— the higher Manas —

which was awakened from its slumber by the coin falling down.

She devours the gold with eagerness, which melts in her interior and illuminates her, causing her joy and pleasure. Then she seeks the giver of the gold, paying no attention to hardships and dangers.

Very tired, she finally came to a damp reed where our two will-o'-the-wisps were playing now and then.

She is pleased to find kinship in them. The will-o'-the-wisps also greet her warmly, but say that they are

only related by appearance.

The snake feels uncomfortable in the presence of her acquaintance; she cannot stretch up to them and fears losing her own appearance. She asks the gentlemen about the origin of the gold, which she believes came down from the sky as a shower of gold. The will-o'-the-wisps shake with laughter and scatter new gold, which the snake devours with greed and thus becomes ever more radiant, while the will-o'-the-wisps diminish and shrink, but always remain merry. The snake wants to show her gratitude and promises to serve them.

The will-o'-the-wisps ask for directions to the beautiful lily – the highest bliss – and learn to their dismay and sorrow that she lives beyond the water, where they come from. They ask the snake to call the ferryman for them so that he will take them back across. To their dismay, they learn that the ferryman is allowed to ferry anyone across, but no one back across. Into the [earthly] world we are transported by natural forces, but back to the higher world, man must transport himself.

The will-o'-the-wisps ask how this can be done. The snake gives them two options: she herself offers to ferry them across at noon. But this hour does not suit the gentlemen. The second option is offered by the giant – Death – whose body is powerless, but whose shadow – sleep, deep sleep, trance –

much, yes everything

can do. His shadow lies over the river in the evening and in the morning, and the gentlemen could use that as a bridge. The will-o'-the-wisps move away, the snake is glad to be rid of them. She returns to her rocky gorge. There she has already made a strange discovery. Through a crevice in the rocks, she had come to a place where she found things that were foreign to her. Until then, she had only encountered natural products, which she could easily distinguish by touch even in underground spaces: the pointed crystals, the

hooks and hairs of solid silver,

and she also brought many a precious stone up to the light. At the mentioned place, now, to her great astonishment, she found smooth walls and things made by human hands; beautiful columns and so on and human figures, around which she had wrapped herself and looked at them. She now wanted to examine these things, too, by means of her sight, now that she had become luminous, in order to get a complete idea of them. With her light she could not quite illuminate the cave in which she had entered by the familiar route, but she recognized the individual objects she came close to. In a niche stood the portrait of a king, made entirely of pure gold. Although depicted in superhuman size, it seemed to

the likeness of a little rather than a large man.

The golden king

asked, 'Where comest thou?' 'From the crevices,' answered the snake, 'where gold dwells.' 'What is more glorious than gold?' asked the king. 'The light,' replied the snake. 'What is more refreshing than light?' asked the king. 'Conversation,' answered the snake.

In the next niche sat a silver king - Budhi -

of long and rather slight build,

adorned with a magnificent robe,

crown, belt and scepter, adorned with precious stones. He wore the serenity of pride on his face and seemed about to speak when, on the marble wall, a vein that ran dark through it suddenly brightened and a pleasant light spread through the entire temple. In this light, the snake saw the third king, who sat there in the mighty form of a god, leaning on his club, adorned with a laurel wreath, and looking more like a rock than a human being. She wanted to look for the fourth king, who was standing at the greatest distance from her, but the wall opened up, with the illuminated vein flashing like lightning and disappearing.

A man dressed in rustic clothes entered, holding a small lamp,

whose quiet flame one gladly gazed into and which, in a wonderful way, without casting even a single shadow, illuminated the entire cathedral.

The man with the lamp is religion.

“Why do you come when we have light?” asked the golden King, the Thinker. You know that I am not allowed to illuminate the dark.

The power of religion only has an illuminating effect when it is met by another power. Religion must be met by faith, otherwise it cannot illuminate people.

“Is my kingdom coming to an end?” asked the Silver King

— Budhi, the spirit of life, the spiritual body.

“It's either that or never,” replied the old man. “When will I arise?”

— that is, gain my sovereignty — the brazen king — the spirit man, Atma —

to ask. 'Soon,' the old man replied. 'With whom shall I unite?' asked the king. 'With your elder brothers,' said the old man. 'What will become of the youngest?' asked the king. 'He will sit down'

- an expression for the laying down of the rule -

said the old man. 'I am not tired,' cried the fourth king in a hoarse, stammering voice.

The fourth king is a symbol for the four lower, perishable basic parts of man; thus:

firstly, the physical body,

secondly, the etheric body – linga sharira,

thirdly, the sentient soul body – astral body, and fourthly, the mind soul – lower manas, kama manas – that is, the mind, the power of thought, which is still and desires, and is therefore incapable of recognizing the higher, the divine, the higher Manas, the real thinker, the true human being, and even less the spiritual man, Atma. Meanwhile, the snake had crept around the temple

and now saw the fourth king near by. He was leaning against a column, and his stately figure was rather heavy than beautiful. Only the metal from which he was cast could not easily be distinguished. On closer inspection, it was a mixture of the three metals from which his brothers were formed. But at the casting, these materials did not seem to have melted together properly; golden and silver veins ran irregularly through a brazen mass, giving the image an unpleasant appearance.

Meanwhile, the golden king said to the man, “How many secrets do you know?” — “Three,” the old man replied. “Which is the most important?” asked the silver king. “The Manifest,” answered the old man. ‘Will you then reveal it to us?’ asked the brazen king. ‘I will do so as soon as I know the fourth,’ said the old man. ‘What do I care!’ murmured the composite king to himself. ‘I know the fourth,’ said the snake, approaching the old man and hissing something in his ear. ‘It is time!’ shouted the old man in a mighty voice. The temple resounded, the metal statues sounded, and in that moment the old man sank to the west and the snake to the east, each sweeping through the crevices of the rocks with great speed.

The rock that is described here is a description of the ancient mystery temples, where the disciples were initiated into the mysteries of existence. The basic parts of the human being were symbolically depicted there. There are still many such temples in India, and since the spiritual life no longer permeates people as it did in ancient times, when the intellect and reason were not yet developed, they have been abandoned and destroyed and demolished by wild hands; even as ruins, they still make a magnificent, sometimes horrifying impression. The figures that are symbolically depicted there and that present a hideous image to our eyes were once, when viewed with the eye of the mind, a means to first understand the higher life and then, after reaching maturity, to see it for oneself. We Westerners see them only as hideous idols; the Oriental sees through the outer form to the meaning of the symbols. They have not yet developed a sense of beauty for form. In ancient times, when the grotesque images were created, the external form was so unimportant to them that they used it only to express an idea, just as we now use language, written language, as a medium to communicate to our fellow human beings the things we have grasped in our minds. The crude way in which we Westerners often judge these things, the proselytizing that sought its mission in the destruction of “idols,” testifies to a complete ignorance of these things.

The snake whispered in the old man's ear that it was ready to sacrifice itself completely, and then the old man cries:

It is time!

whereupon the temple resounds. We don't need oriental wisdom to understand this “resonance”. Goethe gives us an explanation in his “Faust” prologue in heaven:

The sun resounds in the ancient way
In brotherly spheres of competitive song.

Heaven – the Devachan – is the plane where it resounds. Sound has its realm there.

Resounding for spiritual ears
The new day is already born!

The snake, the intellect that seeks enlightenment, goes east, the man with the lamp – religion – goes west.

All the passageways through which the old man walked were immediately filled with gold behind him; for his lamp had the wonderful property of transforming all stones into gold, all wood into silver, dead animals into precious stones, and crushing all metals. But to show this effect, it had to shine all alone; if another light was beside it, it only had a beautiful, bright glow, and all living things were always refreshed by it.

The old man entered his hut, which was built against the mountain, and found his wife in the greatest distress. She sat by the fire and wept, and could not be consoled. “How unhappy I am,” she exclaimed; “I did not want to let you go today!”

In answer to the husband's question, the wife tells him that during his absence two gentlemen – the will-o'-the-wisps – had been with her and behaved very intrusively.

"And just look around you at the state of the walls; just look at the old stones that I haven't seen in a hundred years: they have licked all the gold off, you wouldn't believe how nimbly, and they kept assuring me that it tastes much better than ordinary gold.

Then they became more and more insolent, caressed her, and called her queen, shook herself so that a quantity of gold pieces were scattered about, and to make matters worse, her pug dog ate some of them, and now he was lying dead by the fireside.

“I only saw it after they had gone, otherwise I would not have promised to pay off her debt to the ferryman.” “What is she indebted for?” asked the old man. “Three cabbages,” said the woman, “

The old woman is the soul, the ordinary sensual life of man. The will-o'-the-wisps – rational science – lick up the gold – historical knowledge – and scatter it again. It flatters the lower nature, but has no invigorating power; the pug that eats of it dies. Natural science denies the power of life, and without the invigorating power of the lamp – the light that religion brings – life dies through dead knowledge. In the first round, the mineral kingdom contains the form for wisdom. Three times three is nine – human sensuality. Three cabbages, three onions, three artichokes. Man has passed through the three kingdoms. The woman pays for the torrent of passions with fruits of the earth. The cabbage, the shellfish, [represents] the leaves; the onion, the essence, which consists of covers, [represents] the root; the artichoke [represents] the fruit. She [the old man's wife with the lamp] has to pay this [tribute] to the stream.

“You may do them the favor,” said the old man; “for they will serve us again on occasion.”

[The old man] extinguishes the fire, carefully collects the remaining gold pieces,

and now his lamp alone was again shining in the most beautiful splendor, the walls were covered with gold, and the pug had become the most beautiful onyx. “Take your basket,” said the old man, “and put the onyx in it; then take the three cabbages, the three artichokes, and the three onions, place them around it, and carry them to the river! About noon let the snake carry you over, and visit the beautiful lily, and give her the onyx! She will bring it to life by her touch, as she kills everything alive by her touch; she will have a faithful companion in it. Tell her not to grieve, her deliverance is near, she may regard the greatest misfortune as the greatest happiness, for the time has come.” The old woman packed her basket and set off during the day. The rising sun shone brightly over the river, which glistened in the distance; the woman walked slowly, for the basket weighed heavily on her head, and yet it was not the onyx that weighed so heavily

, but the fresh vegetables.

She did not feel the dead weight she was carrying; but when she lifted her basket up, it floated above her head. But carrying fresh vegetables or a small, live animal was extremely difficult for her. She had been walking along discontentedly for some time when she suddenly stood still with a start; for she almost stepped on the shadow of the giant that stretched across the plain to her. And now she saw the enormous giant, who had bathed in the river, rising out of the water, and she did not know how to avoid him. As soon as he saw her, he began to greet her playfully, and his shadow's hands immediately reached into the basket. With ease and skill, they took out a cabbage, an artichoke, and an onion and brought them to the giant's mouth, who then went further up the river, leaving the woman the way free.

The old woman considered whether she should turn back and fetch what was missing from her garden, but she kept going until she came to the river and waited a long time for the ferryman. Finally he came. A young, noble, beautiful man got out of the boat.

What do you bring?

the ferryman called.

It is the vegetables that the will-o'-the-wisps owe you,

replied the woman. The ferryman did not want to accept it, as there was a shortage of each kind. Although the woman begged and pleaded to accept the gift, she could not go back the arduous way, but he refused,

by assuring her that it did not even depend on him. “What is due to me, I must leave together for nine hours, and I must not accept anything until I have given a third to the river [...] There is still a remedy. If you want to guarantee against the river and confess as a debtor, I will take the six pieces with me; but there is some danger in it.” “If I keep my word, I shall not be in any danger?” ‘Not the slightest.’ ‘Put your hand into the river, and promise that you will pay off the debt in twenty-four hours.’ The old woman did so, but how frightened she was when she pulled her hand out of the water, as black as coal!

The old woman is very unhappy that her beautiful hand has turned black and is even beginning to fade.

“It only seems so,” said the ferryman; “but if you do not keep your word, it may come true. The hand will gradually fade away, [...] without your losing the use of it. You will be able to do everything with it, only no one will see it.“ — ‘I would rather not be able to use it and not be recognized,’ said the old woman. However, that does not mean anything; I will keep my word to get rid of this black hand and this worry soon.”

Three times three is nine, the number of human sensuality; she has passed through all three realms. The woman pays for the torrent of passions with the fruits of the earth. She must pay the tribute to the torrent. The cabbage symbolizes the leaves, the onion the root, the artichoke the fruit. All three are shell plants.

The soul essence – the woman – loses some of the fruits and shoots that she has acquired through hard work in the garden through sleeping, dreaming and a lack of vigilance. But she has committed to paying the debt of the will-o'-the-wisps – the power of reason. Reason alone cannot produce leaves, flowers or fruits; it leaves that to the soul forces. But the lower natural forces – the ferryman – insist on their right; the stream of passions also wants to be satisfied. However, since the woman lacks the sufficient means to do so, she atones for it with her body. She does not lack the strength, but her body is very disfigured because she has dipped her hand into the stream. If a person gives in to passion, he will suffer damage. It is very indicative of man's low mentality that the woman is much more concerned about appearances – what will people say? – than about the loss of her ability to work, which, according to the ferryman, she does not actually risk.

The woman now picks up the basket again, which floats freely above her head,

and hastened after the young man, who walked gently and thoughtfully along the shore. His magnificent figure and strange attire had made a deep impression on the old woman. His chest was covered with a shiny armor through which all parts of his beautiful body moved. Around his shoulders hung a purple cloak, around his uncovered head waved brown hair in beautiful curls; his sweet face was exposed to the rays of the sun, as were his beautifully built feet. With bare soles, he walked calmly over the hot sand, and a deep pain seemed to blunt all external impressions.

The old woman tried to start a conversation with him, but he barely responded. This bored her and she recommended herself, saying that she had to hurry to cross the river via the green snake and deliver her husband's gift to the beautiful lily. When the young man hears this, he takes courage and runs after the woman.

“You are going to the beautiful lily!” he exclaimed;
“we are going the same way."

On the way, they exchange their fates. The youth describes his miserable state: his armor and purple robes have become only a useless burden and adornment for him, his crown, scepter and sword are gone, he is

naked and destitute as every other son of earth, for her [the lily's] beautiful blue eyes have such an unfortunate effect that they take away the strength of all living beings and those whom her touching hand does not kill feel transported into the state of living shadows.

He envies the pug dog, because it would gain life through her touch.

The youth represents humanity in general. It is sick with longing for life. The eternal feminine draws it on. When man strives for higher knowledge, paralysis overtakes him: without a firm moral foundation, it is dangerous to seek higher knowledge. The stormy assault results in death. Love kills life; but it kills so that true life may arise. Die and become.

He who does not die before he dies, will perish when he dies.

The lower self must die. Thus, death is the root of life.

They now come to the bridge, are amazed at the splendor of the green snake, which sparkles with jewels all over; high arched, it swings over the river. Once across, they notice that several other travelers have crossed over with them – the will-o'-the-wisps, which they cannot see, but whose presence is betrayed by their hissing with the snake, which joins them after the crossing. The woman, youth, and snake now go to the white lily, while the will-o'-the-wisps look around the queen's garden for a while until dusk falls.

The old woman approaches the royal maiden first and is so enchanted by her beauty and her lovely singing to the harp that she breaks out into enthusiastic praise. The lily speaks:

Do not grieve me with untimely praise! I feel only the more strongly my misfortune.

She says that her canary, her greatest joy and delight, was frightened by a hawk, fled to her bosom and died there. She is inconsolable, because the culprit, paralyzed by her gaze, is serving his sentence by the pond, and that cannot help her. Her bird – the prophetic power – is dead and must be buried.

“Be of good cheer, beautiful lily!” cried the woman, [...] “My age bids me tell you [...] that you shall regard the greatest misfortune as a harbinger of the greatest happiness, for the time is at hand.

Then she tells of her misfortune and asks the lily to give her the missing cabbage, onion and artichoke so that she can pay her debt and her hand will turn white again. The lily is happy to give the cabbage and onion [– roots and leaves –], but the garden, in which fresh greenery had sprung up on the grave of her favorite but which never bore fruit, does not have an artichoke – a fruit.

The woman pays little attention to the speech of the beautiful lily; she sees to her horror the hand growing blacker and blacker and fading more and more, and is about to leave when she remembers the pug, which she now gives to the lily.

The beautiful lily looked at the gentle animal with pleasure and, [...] with amazement. 'Many signs are coming together,' she said, 'that inspire some hope in me; but alas! is it not merely an illusion of our nature that when many misfortunes occur we imagine the best is near?'

What good are the many good signs to me?
The bird's death, the friend's black hand?
The pug of precious stone, does it have its match?
And didn't the lamp send it to me?
Removed from sweet human enjoyment,
I am only familiar with misery.
Ah! why is the temple not by the river!
Ah! why has the bridge not been built!'

Impatient with the long song, the woman wants to leave when she is stopped by the appearance of the snake. She approaches the beautiful lily and encourages her:

The prophecy of the bridge is fulfilled!

Much more gloriously than before, it rises above the river, shining with precious stones, says the woman. But the lily does not yet consider the prophecy fulfilled, since only pedestrians can cross the bridge; but the promise is that horses and carriages would also cross a solid bridge – whose pillars would rest in the river – that would rise out of the river.

The old woman, still gazing at her hand, is about to take her leave, when the lily begs her to take her poor canary with her.

"Ask the lamp to change him into a beautiful topaz; I will revive him with my touch, and he, with your good pug, will be my best pastime. But hurry, whatever you can, because at sunset, unbearable rot will take hold of the poor animal and tear apart the beautiful structure of his form forever.” The old woman laid the little corpse among delicate leaves in the basket and hurried away.

The snake continued the conversation:

“The temple is built,” said the Snake. “But it is not yet by the river,” said the Lily. “It still rests in the depths of the earth,” said the Snake. “I have seen and spoken to the kings.” “But when will they rise?” asked the Lily. The Snake said, “I heard the great words resound in the temple: It is time!” A pleasant serenity spread across the face of the beautiful woman. 'I have heard the happy words for the second time today; when will the day come when I hear them three times?'

Now follows the description of her retinue, the three lovely handmaidens. The pug comes to life at her touch, and even if there is only half life in him, he still likes to play with her.

The sad young man approaches, exhausted and pale, he approaches his beloved. He carries the hawk – the symbol of the diviner of the future, prophet of the mysteries – in his hand.

“It is not kind,” cried Lily, “to bring me the hated animal that [...] killed my little singer today.” “Do not scold the unfortunate bird!” replied the youth; “Rather, blame yourself and fate and allow me to keep you company in your misery.”

The young man, jealous of the pug with which the beautiful lily plays and presses to her bosom, awakens the last remnant of his courage. He makes a violent movement, the hawk flies up, but he rushes at the beauty, and the misfortune happens: he falls dead at her feet. In silent despair, the lily looks for help. The snake forms with her body

a wide circle around the corpse, grasped the end of her tail with her teeth and remained still.

The handmaidens, the first of whom brings the chair, approach again, the second lays a fire-colored veil around the head of the mistress, the third brings the harp. The lily had scarcely coaxed a few notes from the instrument when the first servant brought a mirror and held it before the lady, so that she saw her magnificent image, made even more beautiful by her mourning, in it.

Who will create us the man with the lamp,

the snake hissed. The beauty just sobbed. At that moment, the woman came running up, out of breath:

I am lost and maimed!

she exclaimed. Neither the ferryman nor the giant wanted to take her across.

Forget your troubles and help us here. Seek out the will-o'-the-wisps so that the giant's shadow can carry you and you can fetch the man with the lamp.

The lily waited with great sadness, the snake looked impatiently for help. Then,

high up in the air, she saw the hawk with its crimson feathers, whose breast caught the last rays of the sun. She shook with joy at the good omen, and she was not mistaken; for shortly afterwards, the man with the lamp was seen gliding over the lake, as if he were skating.

After he had explained his coming, he said:

“Be calm, most beautiful maiden! Whether I can help, I do not know; a single one does not help, but he who unites with many at the right hour. Let us postpone and hope. Keep your circle closed,” he said to the snake.

He himself sat down on a stone beside it, and let the light of the lamp fall on the corpse.

Bring also the dead canary.

It was laid on the corpse as well. The sun had set; the lamp, the snake, and the maiden's veil shone, each with its own light.

Sorrow and grief were softened by a sure hope.

Only the old woman, who had come with the will-o'-the-wisps, was full of apprehension for her hand. The will-o'-the-wisps chatted with the beautiful lily, and midnight came before anyone knew it.

The old man looked at the stars and then began to speak: 'We are together at a happy hour, each of us performing our duties, each doing our duty, and a general happiness will dissolve the individual pains in itself, like a general misfortune consumes individual joys.

The combined efforts of all were needed to provide relief. Each individual was absorbed in his task and spoke loudly about it, only the three maidservants had fallen asleep from exhaustion.

“Take,” said the old man to the hawk, “the mirror, and with the first ray of the sun illuminate the sleepers and wake them with the reflected light from on high!”

The snake now untied itself and slithered towards the river, the will-o'-the-wisps followed quite earnestly. The old man and his wife stretched the basket, which had its own glow that had not been noticed before, put the body of the youth inside and placed the dead canary on his chest. The basket rose up and hovered above the head of the old woman, who immediately followed the will-o'-the-wisps.

The beautiful lily took the pug on her arm and followed the old woman, the man with the lamp decided the train and the area was illuminated by these many lights in the most peculiar.

When they reached the shore, the company looked in amazement at the wonderful arch that the snake had formed across the river. The gems shone and radiated in wonderful beauty. When everyone had crossed, the snake also moved to the shore and closed the circle around the body again.

The ferryman, who had been looking out from his hut in the distance, gazed in amazement at the glowing circle and the strange lights that passed over it.

The old man bowed to the snake and said:

“What hast thou decided?” — ‘To sacrifice myself before I am sacrificed,’ replied the snake; ‘Promise me that thou wilt leave no stone unturned!’ The old man promised, and then said to the beautiful lily: ‘Touch the snake with thy left hand, and thy lover with thy right hand.’ The lily knelt down and touched the snake and the corpse. In that moment, the body seemed to come to life; it moved in the basket, even rising up and sitting. Lily wanted to embrace him, but the old man held her back, helping the youth to stand up instead and guiding him as he stepped out of the basket and the circle.

The youth stood, the canary fluttered on his shoulder, there was life in both of them again, but the spirit had not yet returned; the beautiful friend had his eyes open and did not see, at least he seemed to look at everything without participation.

When the astonishment at this event had subsided a little, the change that had taken place with the snake was noticed with amazement. The body had crumbled into a thousand and one gems when the old woman had carelessly pushed against them while she reached for her basket. The old man and his wife carefully collected the gems in their basket, carried them to a high place on the bank of the river and poured them into the stream. The old man now led the procession to the sanctuary; he walked ahead with the lamp. The youth followed half mechanically. The lily timidly trailed behind, the old woman sought to bring her hand into the light of the lamp, the will-o'-the-wisps closed the procession. The path led through the rock that opened before them. Soon they came to a large, brazen gate,

whose wings were closed with a golden lock. The old man immediately summoned the will-o'-the-wisps, who [...] busily consumed the lock and bolt with their pointed flames.

The entrance to the higher levels of consciousness must first be sought through the mind.

The ore sounded loudly when the gates quickly sprang open and the dignified images of the kings, illuminated by the incoming light, appeared in the sanctuary. Everyone bowed before the venerable rulers [...]. After a pause, the golden king asked: “Where do you come from?” “From the world,” replied the old man. “Where are you going?” asked the silver king. “Into the world,” said the old man. ‘What do you want with us?’ asked the brazen king. ‘To accompany you,’ said the old man.

The will-o'-the-wisps had approached the golden king. He fought them off and said:

Get away from me! My gold is not for your palate!

After they had lit the silver one, they crept past the brazen one to the mixed one.

“Who will rule the world?” the mixed king cried in a stammering voice. “He who stands on his feet.” answered the old man, “That is I!” said the mixed king. “It will reveal itself,” said the old man; “for the time has come.”

The beautiful lily fell around the neck of the old man and kissed him most warmly. “Holy Father,” she said, “a thousand thanks to you, for this is the third time I have heard the ominous word.” She had hardly finished speaking when she held even tighter to the old man, for the ground began to shake beneath them. The old woman and the youth also held on to each other; only the moving will-o'-the-wisps noticed nothing.

The temple first moved downwards, then passed under the stream, and during the ascent, the debris of the ferryman's small hut fell through the dome of the temple and covered the old man and the youth. The women had jumped aside.

The women screamed loudly, and the temple shook like a ship that suddenly hits the shore. The women wandered anxiously around the hut in the twilight; the door was locked, and no one heard their knocking.

To her amazement, the wood began to resound. Through the power of the closed lamp, the wood had turned to silver, and gradually expanded into a magnificent case of hammered work. Now there stood a small temple or altar in the middle of the large one.

By a staircase that went up from the inside, the noble youth now stepped up, the man with the lamp shone for him, and another seemed to support him, who came forth in a white, short robe and held a silver oar in his hand;

it was the ferryman, the former inhabitant of the transformed hut.

[By crossing the] bridge, which was necessary, the temple should apparently be, that could only happen through the interaction of all forces. Only through the sacrifice of the self was it possible to cross the stream of passions. The will-o'-the-wisps have to unlock the temple; one must have natural knowledge to penetrate the secrets.

The beautiful lily climbed the outer steps that led from the temple to the altar; but still she had to stay away from her lover. The old woman, whose hand

had almost completely disappeared, was very unhappy that with so many miracles, no miracle could save her hand.

Her husband pointed to the open gate and said: 'Behold, day is breaking; hurry and bathe thyself in the river!' – 'What advice!' she cried; 'I shall surely become quite black and disappear altogether; I have not yet paid my debt' – 'Go,' said the old man, 'and follow me! All debts are paid.' The old woman hurried away, and at that moment the light of the rising sun appeared at the crown of the dome; the old man stepped between the youth and the maiden and shouted in a loud voice: 'There are three who rule on earth: wisdom, appearance, and force'. At the first word the golden king rose, at the second the silver one, and at the third the brazen one had slowly raised himself, when the composite king suddenly sat down awkwardly.

The will-o'-the-wisps had been preoccupied with him for a long time and did not rest until they had also extracted the finest veins from his form. But that robbed him of all support and he collapsed, becoming an unformed lump.

The man with the lamp now led the beautiful youth, who was still gazing fixedly ahead, down from the altar and straight towards the brazen king. At the feet of the mighty prince lay a sword in a brazen sheath. The youth girded himself. '

— only for defense, not for attack —

“Right hand free!”

— to give blessings and peace —

the mighty king called out. They then went to the silver king, who inclined his scepter towards the youth. The youth seized it with his left hand, and the king said in a kindly voice: “Feed the sheep!” When they came to the golden king, he pressed the oak wreath on the youth's head with a fatherly, blessing gesture and said: “Recognize the highest!”

The old man, who had observed the youth closely during the proceedings, saw how, after the girding, his chest rose, his arms stretched and his feet stepped firmer;

By taking up the sceptre, his strength seemed to be softened and made even more powerful by an inexpressible charm; but when the oak wreath adorned his curls, his features came to life, his eye sparkled with inexpressible spirit, and the first word from his mouth was: “Lily.” 'Dear lily,' he cried, as he hastened up the silver steps towards her, [...] 'what more could a man, endowed with everything, desire than the innocence and quiet affection that your bosom bestows on me? Oh, my friend, he continued, turning to the old man and looking at the three sacred statues, 'glorious and secure is the kingdom of our fathers, but you have forgotten the fourth power that ruled the world even earlier, more generally, more certainly: the power of love. With these words he fell on his knees before the beautiful maiden; she had thrown aside her veil, and her cheeks were suffused with the most beautiful and most imperishable of all blushes. Then the old man said, smiling: 'Love does not reign, but it creates, and that is more.'

Unbeknownst to them, day had fully broken and the astonished eyes looked through the open gates:

a large square surrounded by columns formed the forecourt, at the end of which one could see a long and magnificent bridge that reached over the river with many arches.

This magnificent bridge was already teeming with all kinds of people on foot and in carriages. Happy in their mutual love, the king and his wife looked on the people with delight.

“Remember the snake with honor!” said the man with the lamp. ”You are its life; your peoples owe it the bridge by which these neighboring shores are first inhabited and connected. Those floating and glowing gems, the remains of her sacrificed body, are the pillars of this magnificent bridge; she built it herself and will sustain herself.” Just as one was about to ask him to explain this strange secret, four beautiful girls entered the temple gate. The harp, parasol and field chair immediately identified them as Lily's companions. But the fourth [...] was an unknown [...]. “Will you believe me more in the future, dear wife?” the man with the lamp said to the beauty. “Happy you and every creature that bathes in the river this morning!” The rejuvenated and beautified old woman [...] embraced [...] the man with the lamp, who accepted her caresses with kindness. ‘If I am too old for you,’ he said smiling, ”then you may choose another husband today; from this day on, no marriage is valid unless it is renewed.” “'Do you not know,' she replied, 'that you have grown younger too?' – 'I am glad if I appear to your young eyes as a worthy youth; I accept your hand anew and would gladly live with you into the next millennium.'"

The great giant, still recovering from his morning nap and staggering across the bridge, brought a disruption to the general happiness. As usual, he wanted to bathe in the river, drowsy as he was, and suddenly found the bridge, on which he clumsily stepped between humans and cattle. His presence was

by all wondered at, but felt by none; when, however, the sun shone in his eyes, and he raised his hands to wipe them, the shadow of his enormous fists passed behind him so powerfully and clumsily under the crowd that men and animals collapsed in large masses, were damaged, and risked being thrown into the river. The king, who saw this outrage, made an involuntary movement for his sword, but he recovered himself and looked calmly first at his scepter, then at the lamp and the oar of his companions. 'I divine your thoughts,' said the man with the lamp; 'but we and our powers are powerless against this powerless one. Be quiet! He is harming for the last time, and fortunately his shadow has turned away from us. Meanwhile, the giant had come closer and closer, had let his hands drop in amazement at what he saw with open eyes, was doing no more harm, and stepped into the forecourt, gawking. He was just walking towards the temple door when he was suddenly held to the ground in the middle of the courtyard. He stood as a colossal, mighty statue of reddish shining stone, and his shadow showed the hours, which were engraved in a circle on the ground around him, not in numbers, but in noble and significant images. The king was not a little pleased to see the shadow of the monster in a useful direction; [...] Meanwhile, the people had crowded around the giant, [...] and marveled at his transformation. From there, the crowd turned to the temple, which they seemed to have only just noticed, and pushed towards the door. At that moment, the hawk with the mirror hovered over the cathedral, caught the light of the sun and threw it over the group standing on the altar.

The hawk, the herald of the future, also teaches us to understand the laws. When these are understood, knowledge can be borne.

The king, the queen and their companions appeared in the twilight vault of the temple, illuminated by a heavenly radiance, and the people fell on their faces. When the crowd had recovered and stood up, the king and his party had descended into the altar to go to his palace through hidden halls, and the people scattered throughout the temple to satisfy their curiosity. They looked at the three upright kings with amazement and awe,

but when they came full of curiosity to the fourth, the shapeless lump was covered with a precious carpet that no one could lift. The people almost crushed each other in the temple if the will-o'-the-wisps had not attracted their attention. It was fun for them to shake off the gold they had sucked in as they moved away, which is why the people fell upon them with jokes and laughter.

The people ran eagerly back and forth for a while, pushing and pulling each other, since no more gold pieces were falling. Finally, they gradually dispersed, went their way, and to this day the bridge is teeming with travelers, and the temple is the most visited in the whole world.

There is still much to be interpreted. The snake that bites its own tail and encloses the dead youth is the Budhi principle, which must be lived and loved. The radiance of the divine - Atma - is peace, harmony, and universal consciousness. It has been achieved through the transformation of desire into love. Everything becomes young again.

The shattered hut of the lower forces is transformed by the spirit of life; now the lower forces can lead across and across. The giant - the forces of nature - have lost their destructive power; that is the conclusion that will only come after a certain period of time. The last enemy to be abolished is death. Then they [the forces of nature] only indicate the rhythmic measures of time. And the bridge over which the people can go unhindered back and forth to the temple? Is it not faith, independent faith, which has only become possible through the sacrificial death of Christ; faith that blesses, even without seeing the mysteries? But the highest is hidden from the eyes of the multitude. The king and queen descend from their throne and hide. All the glory will only become clear and evident to faith when wisdom is added to faith, only then can perfection be attained.

Let us briefly summarize what Goethe wanted to tell us with the “Fairytale”: It is the symbolic representation of the redemption of the individual as well as of the whole human race; the secret of becoming and passing away and of final bliss.

Many have ventured to interpret the “Fairytale”. People asked Goethe to provide an explanation himself. He promised to do so when a hundred explanations had been submitted. Thereupon all the explanations were collected and counted, but Goethe died before the number of a hundred was reached. Thus, a proper interpretation has been lacking until now. It was probably not yet time. The right interpretation can only be given by someone who knows the mysteries.

Many readers of Goethe's Faust will feel something very significant for every human soul and heart when they hear the poet's words resound, which depict how Faust, this representative of humanity's highest aspirations, how this Faust, after having gone through everything that can be our science of the most diverse branches can achieve, stands at a loss, struggling for a knowledge that means more than the satisfaction of the theoretical needs of the mind, that encompasses everything that is most needed by man in his darkest hours, for consolation and for uplifting of life, for strength of existence and for creativity in reality. And when we are pointed by the poet's words to a possibility of soaring beyond mere intellectual theory into the realm of the spiritual world, when we are pointed to the fact that there is something higher to be gained than theory and wisdom of the mind, it may well may well urge us, if we are interested in what is to be incorporated under the name of theosophy into modern spiritual paths, to look at what has flowed into German cultural life through Goethe from this particular angle. We may be urged to look into what actually lies behind that expression of Goethe's when, as Faust, he beholds the sign of the macrocosm before his eyes, he says that he now knows what the wise man means by the words:

The spiritual world is not closed,
Your mind is closed, your heart is dead!
Rise up, bathe, disciple, undaunted
The earthly breast in the morning dawn!

This is, in a sense, an invitation from Goethe's work itself to be viewed from the standpoint of spiritual science. Such a consideration of the work of great personalities who have had a profound effect on cultural life is very much in the realm of spiritual science, for this science can never fall into the error of other currents in claiming that everything that is truly valuable in terms of human knowledge has been created only through them. Mankind could then have little trust in a realization that would arise with the saying: “Like a shot from a pistol, it has only just been created.” Since human thinking and striving has existed, people have searched for truth. Should all those who preceded the truth researchers in question have searched in vain, only to be caught up in error?

How can we behave in a manner befitting a worthy attitude if we keep saying how we have come so gloriously far precisely with our wisdom? Theosophy does not make such demands. It seeks only to have the ancient wisdom that has always flowed into the hearts of those who have striven for truth and wisdom put into a special form and shape; this shall be given a new form that corresponds to the present life. Therefore, it is part of the task of Theosophy to inquire of the great minds of the past how their striving relates to what we are exploring today through our spiritual science.

We choose one who has achieved something so significant, Goethe, and if we place next to him someone who is unknown today and has been so for a long time, not unknown by name but by what he has wanted and commanded, Hegel, , then today's reflections may show us how, precisely, theosophical life makes it possible for us to appreciate some of the unrecognized, because theosophy is an instrument for finding and recognizing depths that would not be revealed in any other way. If we first immerse ourselves in Goethe, it is truly not difficult for us to find in his nature that basic trait of spiritual-scientific will and knowledge, which is characterized by seeing the invisible of the spiritual world in everything visible.

In everything visible we see the outer physiognomy of a spiritual, the outer expression of something supersensible, just as we see in the human countenance the expression of what lives in the spirit, in the soul. But we must not look at Goethe as some sycophants do, saying that Goethe had in his mind's eye what all mankind longs for, but was unwilling to express in clear words, unable to express it in quite definite forms of words, and that he sought to express it here in more obscure, nebulous feelings. The Swabian Vischer, the author of “Auch Einer”, has already raged about the fact that one wants to find Goethe's creed in the fact that Faust speaks to Gretchen:

Feeling is everything;
name is sound and smoke,
fogging up heavenly glow.

As true as that was in conversation with Gretchen, it is just as untrue in all other respects, for not everyone who has a sincere aspiration wants a Gretchen wisdom, although in many cases it is only striven for as a Gretchen wisdom. But in Goethe, something quite different had been alive from his youth, from his boyhood on. If we follow him back to his childhood, we do not find any kind of spiritual-scientific knowledge, but we do find the same emotional formation of the soul, the whole attitude of a theosophically thinking person. We see the seven-year-old boy unsatisfied by all kinds of emotional experiences from all the external religious forms that flow to him from his surroundings; but he can vaguely sense and feel a higher spiritual reality. He searches his father's botanical collection for all kinds of plants, selects all kinds of mineral objects and places them on a music stand, which is his altar. And already in his boyhood, in his yearning child's soul, he wants to make a sacrifice to the great God of nature, as he later calls him in clear words, who is conjured up by what happens in the world, he wants to bring him so mysteriously before his soul. He takes a small incense stick, places it on top and, by focusing the first rays of the morning sun, ignites the candle. In this way, he performs his sacrifice with a candle lit by the forces of nature itself. Even as a boy, he thinks of what is hidden and enchanted behind the physiognomy of nature. And that remained in his soul throughout his life. It sounds wonderful to us when we hear his prose hymn, which he speaks to a writer as an expression of what nature means to him, soon after his arrival in Weimar. It is the hymn “Nature”:

Nature! We are surrounded and embraced by it – unable to step out of it, and unable to get deeper into it. Uninvited and unwarned, she takes us into the cycle of her dance and carries on with us until we are tired and fall out of her arms.

Or when we think of the great words: everything is nature. She invented death in order to have much life. And so it goes on. Goethe himself later confessed that the poem was based on the idea that a spirit dwells in all natural processes, just as a spirit also underlies everything that is personal. He seeks the physiognomy of spiritual life; through this we see him driven to observe nature in its interrelationships. We cannot go into detail about him as a naturalist here, but we may point out that he goes beyond what was to become his specialized field of study in every respect. We see in him everywhere the endeavor, which can already be seen during his student years, that the individual natural object should provide him with information about the interrelationships in life. To this end, he later studied in Weimar; he attended Loder's lectures on bone structure, comparative anatomy and so on. He did not want to consider only the fragmented parts of nature; we see from this that on his Italian journey he wrote: “After all that I have seen here of plants and animals, I would like to make a journey to India, not to explore new things, but to look at the old in my own way.” His way of looking at things, however, is to see writing in everything, which mysteriously expresses the spiritual life behind it. That Goethe has this in mind becomes particularly clear to us when we see how he brings all life under one point of view, under one perspective. In Italy, he gains an initial idea of what Greek art can mean to his great mind. Before that, he had discussed many things with Herder. He educated himself through Spinoza's thinking to the idea of a divine-creative essence behind the phenomena; but he was not satisfied with this. He wanted to recognize a divine-spiritual essence in man himself. He writes to his friends from Italy, as he stands before the work of art that has given him the secret of Greek art: There is necessity, there is God. I have the feeling that the Greeks proceeded according to the same laws by which nature works, and I am on their trail.

Thus, art is the continuation of nature's creative process. The artist should immerse himself in the laws of the world and then continue nature's work; what nature allows to pass from the supersensible to the sensual at a lower level, the artist should do at a higher level. In his book on Winckelmann, he says:

When the healthy nature of man works as a whole, when he feels in the world as in a great, beautiful, dignified and valuable whole, when harmonious comfort gives him pure, free delight - then the universe, if it could feel itself, would exult as if it had reached its goal and would admire the summit of its own becoming and being.

Thus, for Goethe, the human spirit is that which already lives in the strict nature, in rocks and plants, what develops there through the animal, becomes conscious for Goethe in the innermost human being, and when man pours his spirit into forms, then he himself creates as higher nature beyond himself. But this was something he was born with, to see the spirit in everything he saw, it was natural for him, so natural that the momentous conversation between Goethe and Schiller after a lecture by Batsch in Jena could take place. Schiller remarked afterwards that there was always something bleak about looking at nature only in detail and never as a whole. Goethe replied that one could also proceed differently, one could also go from the whole to the parts and base one's actual observation on the spiritual. He then drew the symbolic picture of a plant and said of it that it was the original plant and contained all others within itself; with it, one could form and invent new plants in any way, from the lowest to the highest plants. Schiller, who at that time could not rise to such heights, soon worked his way to this view himself. But now he replied to Goethe that what he had sketched was not an experience, but an idea. Goethe did not understand this at all, but rather thought that if it was an idea, then he saw his idea with his eyes. Here two worldviews stand starkly opposed to each other. Schiller believed that he could only grasp the spiritual through abstraction; Goethe through the beholding of the idea with spiritual eyes. Goethe was clear about the fact that the spirit lives in everything, that creative spirits prevail under the sensual, and Goethe not only developed this world view in a theoretical way, but he also embedded this world view in his works, in everything he did in a poetic way. This is particularly evident when we try to grasp the depth of the second part of Faust.

At that time, this world view was by no means limited to Goethe or found only in a few people; rather, it was an intellectual atmosphere in which Germany's best minds lived at the time, and Hegel also grew out of this intellectual philosophy. Of course, for many who have only heard a little about Hegel, he is a dismissed philosopher, one of the great bearers of error of the past. When people approach great minds, they behave very strangely. There is a beautiful writing by a Russian scholar, Chwolson: Hegel, Haeckel and the Twelfth Commandment. In it, a good characterization is given in a certain way. The author is an excellent physicist; he is good at drawing the conclusions that can rightly be drawn from our present-day world view. His twelfth commandment is actually very self-evident; but it is not understood by many. It reads: “You shall never write anything about which you know nothing!” Those who are well-versed in intellectual life know that Chwolson does not understand Hegel; so he is a perfect example of his commandment. It is easy to ridicule when something is taken out of context. One must know the whole context. Hegel is a mind that was ripe, very ripe, but was only coming into its own for the first time with its own ideas. Born in Stuttgart as early as 1770, he published his first work, which for those who are superficial in spiritual matters is perhaps in many ways quite incomprehensible today, only in his old age. But this work should be deeply significant for anyone who wants to scale heights in spiritual life. It is the “Phenomenology of Spirit”. It must appear to us as if it springs from spiritual life through its outward genesis.

He shows that he was able to disregard the things of the external world in the utmost concentration. It took tremendous intensity of spiritual power to write these subtle things; the last pages were written while the cannons thundered in the Battle of Jena. There this work was completed, which was to introduce us to the spiritual world. And he always took his time; almost a decade later his “Logic” was published, and we also have an encyclopedia and a work on jurisprudence by him. The majority of his works emerged from his lectures through his students. It is difficult to give just one picture of the meaning and spirit of Hegel's teaching in a few words, but it is perhaps possible to give a broad outline. There has been much ridicule because Hegel wanted to construct the whole world, all objective being out of the spirit, out of the idea, because he first builds up nothing but concepts, nothing but a world of ideas that can only be followed through the human intellect; therefore, it is said that he did not research experience, but wanted to get everything out of the spirit, which one can only experience in this way by examining nature. This is where the greatest error in judging Hegel lies; it is quite wrong to say that Hegel wanted to spin the whole world a priori out of his head. He was quite clear that reality was spread out in space, but he also knew that behind this objective reality there are spiritual connections that man grasps in the images of ideas. What could he do about seeing the idea in things? He explored the world empirically, but he just saw more than the others. Nature also gave him the ideas beyond the gross material, just as it was with Goethe. Could Goethe and Hegel help it that the others could not find these ideas? Those who can't find them then believe that Hegel spun them out of his head. Lichtenberg, the great German humorist, once spoke of a book and a human being and said: When a book and a human head collide and it sounds hollow, it is not always the fault of the book. And when the human head and nature collide and the head remains empty because it cannot find any ideas, it is truly not nature's fault. Hegel made it his task to erect that which expands in space into the mighty structure of ideas that he calls his logic. That fabric of ideas, of which he figuratively says that it is the god that he was before the creation of nature. That was more than a figure to him. From abstract being to absolute being, one has something before oneself like a creation. He says: The diamond web of concepts and ideas is something in which the things of nature are woven. This web became a mirror image for him, from which nature apparently comes to meet him again. He follows nature through all its stages to show how it is the idea, the creative thought, that lives in everything. He considers the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms, then the human being; he shows how the human spirit gradually becomes more and more perfect until it stands out through understanding and reason to the contemplation of the spirit in the external world. It is a gigantic edifice that rises before us, even if it is flawed in detail. It is a building that anyone can construct, and at the same time it is a good training, since one concept necessarily arises from the other, and every conceptual mass must fit into what is created in ideas. At most, we only find a similar necessity where the human mind delves into the connections provided by mathematics. There will come a time when we will again ascend to this significant schooling of the spirit.

When we try to sense how spirit and nature are combined in Goethe and Hegel, do we not feel the spirit of theosophical perception? Yes, we do feel it. Only one thing will be missing for the spiritual scientist in Hegel, which he finds in Goethe in the words of “Faust”, which Goethe calls “Chorus mysticus”:

All that is transient
Is but a parable;
The inadequate
Here it becomes an event;
The indescribable
Here it is done;
The eternal feminine
Draws us on.

Let us take the first three lines. We see nature as it arises and passes away in its individual parts; everything that has to go through birth and death is a parable for the eternal, the transcendental, for everything that stands behind it. Here, Hegel is a kindred spirit to Goethe; he, the philosopher, expresses the same thing intellectually: “All that is transitory in nature is a parable of the eternal world of ideas.” Then follows something that the poet could aspire to, but that was lost to the philosopher:

The inadequate,
here it becomes an event;
the indescribable,
here it is done.

If we feel these words correctly, we notice here where Hegel's purely logical explanation of the world is lacking. We can also apply the tighter discipline in this ascent to this network of concepts and ideas that lies behind the transitory. But there is something in this web of ideas that is inadequate, but which cannot become an event through intellectual contemplation alone. Hegel means: In this logical structure I have before me the God before He has entered into His appearance. But we must feel: Yes, you have something of the God who could have appeared to you as the great plan of the world, into which everything is fitted. But this web of ideas lacks life, and Hegel felt that.

The philosopher, the mere logician, cannot penetrate to the supersensible life. Here his mind, which was set up mainly for logic, could not penetrate. All idea is inadequate when it comes to letting the content flow out. From the realm of shadows, reality radiates when life comes to the structure of ideas. This life can only be found if man does not just stop at what is presented to his intellect, but must take the path to the stages of higher knowledge. Man must begin to let the spirit live in himself. For this, one needs a kind of knowledge that does not live only in sharply contoured concepts, but in what we have often mentioned here: in the realm of images and imagination, which represent a kind of knowledge that strives beyond all conceptualization. Behind all ideas lies a world of creative principles that is richer than all ideas. This is the inadequacy that can never enter into the idea, that must and can be experienced if one goes beyond the idea to the image that the poet has, or to the supersensible reality, to the spiritual. That is why the poet Goethe was able to approach what was missing for Hegel.

In the second part of Faust, Goethe comes as close as possible to what we today call a theosophical world view. He strives for nothing less than to include in the content of the highest spiritual human culture that which connects human beings to the great spiritual realm, which they sensed as children, sought as adults, and expressed in the fairy tale of the green snake and the beautiful lily. He really wants to place these secrets before his soul, secrets about the spiritual and sensual-physical aspects of the human being. He also seeks to do the same in the second part of Faust, but we must approach it with different eyes than those usually used by scholars. We must take something on board that will strike some of today's interpreters of Faust as something quite crazy; but we will find confirmed what Goethe says to Eckermann: “I have worked in such a way that those who only want something for their own external curiosity will get their money's worth, but for esotericists I have included many a secret.

First, Faust is led through the small world. After he has gone through sensual happiness and sensual misery, we see how he is to be accepted into a circle of ideas where the greatest secrets of the nature of the world are to become clear to him. He is introduced to the great world. Faust wishes to unite with the Greek Helen, who has long since died. She is to unite with Faust as a physical woman. For Faust and Goethe, Helena means something quite different than for most people. For them, she is the representative of the people and creativity that Goethe admired in the Greeks, of whom he said that they had come to the bottom of the secret of all natural creativity and hinted at it in their works of art.

But only if we are well prepared can we experience the mystery that the eternal, the immortal in man can come to us in a new embodiment; nothing less than the riddle of embodiment confronts us here. Faust strives for Helena – he touches her, but at first there is an explosion because he is not yet inwardly purified, and he must first grasp the secrets of the incarnation, which are shown to Faust step by step. For Goethe, the human being also consists of the physical human being, who represents the outer physicality of the human being, that which he has in common with all the surrounding minerals. Then there is also a second link in Goethe's view: the soul, the astral body, the carrier of desires and so on. For Goethe too, the spirit is supreme, for it is the true eternal essence that hurries from embodiment to embodiment, undergoing incarnation after incarnation. And Faust is to experience how spirit, soul and body come together to form this sensual world. He must first recognize where the eternal is when it is not physically embodied on earth. The eternal is in a purely spiritual realm. Therefore Faust must be led down into the spiritual realm, into that kingdom where the “Mothers” are, the primeval mothers of all spiritual beings. Mephistopheles stands by Faust's side with the key to the kingdom of the Mothers, which he hands over to Faust. That is what Mephistopheles can do; he can describe the outer realm, but he cannot enter into it. He is the representative of the purely intellectual human being; he even describes the realm as nothingness. Therefore, he is the representative of realism, of monism. One should reach the threshold of spiritual life; the strictest science has the key, but it only opens the door. Those who have only sensual experience still clearly speak the words of Mephisto that there is nothing in the spiritual realm. But Faust replies what should be replied even today:

In your nothingness I hope to find the All.

And Faust descends into the realm of the mothers and brings up the living eternal spirit of Helen, that which moves from embodiment to embodiment. Whoever follows and understands the description of the “realm of the mothers” will recognize the knower in Goethe in every word.

Sink then! I could also say: Rise!

In this realm, this is the same — our concepts of space are no longer sufficient. The Mothers sit on a glowing tripod. This is the symbolic suggestion for what is actually eternal in man, which is divided into: Manas, Budhi, Atma or spirit self, life spirit and spirit man. This symbol of the tripod, surrounded by the eternally creative mothers, expresses enough in such a meaningful place. The spirit that Faust brings must be enveloped in the astral and physical sheaths, and that is what happens. Goethe presents what stands between the spirit and the physical body in the middle of it, the astral world, in Homunculus. That which has nothing to do with anything in the physical world, which is created separately from the spirit of Helena, but which is later to connect with it, that is the astral in man, that which dwells in the physical body in man. Goethe does everything to point out that in Homunculus we have the astral in man. If the astral could be separated from the physical, then it would have to be clairvoyant – it would have to see clairvoyantly into the astral world. It is no longer clairvoyant in the physical body. And Goethe presents the homunculus as clairvoyant. As soon as he appears, he sees what Faust dreams; he sees the whole world of ideas of Faust. And if we go further – are we not clearly told:

He does not lack spiritual qualities,
but he is all too lacking in the tangible and practical.

– after all, he lacks the physical. Homunculus is a soul that wants to embody itself. In every word that is spoken, one can recognize Goethe's opinion in the indicated direction. But Goethe's words must also be understood in the right sense.

It will! The masses are stirring more clearly
The conviction of the true, the true.

We find this even in commentaries on Faust: in Wagner, the conviction of the true is stirring. But what is meant is that the astral nature begets in a way that is above human procreation. It is a conviction—like Übermensch. It is difficult for people to understand Goethe where he is esoteric. Even during his lifetime, he had to hear people always pointing out what he had poured into it from the abundance of his youthful nature and his poetic feeling, for which one does not need much to understand it. He dealt with such people nicely. A note was found in his estate:

They praise Faust
And what else
In my works
In their favor.
The old Mick and Mack
Is very pleased;
The pack of ragamuffins thinks
It's no longer them!

They also believe the spiritual researcher. Goethe points out in everything that he wants to characterize in Homunculus this second link of the human being, that this soul, before it can take up the spirit, must unite with all that is in the lower kingdoms of nature. We see how the astral passes through all the kingdoms of nature up to the human being. With Faust, Mephisto and Homunculus, he therefore leads us to the classical Walpurgis Night. This is an important chapter that tells us what Homunculus actually wants. There are the creative forces in nature, and Homunculus wants to learn the secret of how to structure the physical shell around himself as an astral being, how to start from the mineral kingdom in the lowest realm and put shell after shell around himself — up to the human realm you have time. In the transition from the mineral to the vegetable, Goethe finds the beautiful expression: “It grunelt so” (it grunts). It is then shown how he progresses further up to where he is ready to create a physical shell from the elements. That is when Eros appears, love. When a person wants to step out of the spiritual into the sensual, then, according to the great secrets, spirit, soul and body must combine. When the three unite, then the human being can appear before us in a sensual and spiritual way. Helena is docile, the eternal spirit has come up from the realm of the mothers. Homunculus has surrounded himself with sensual matter, united with the spirit, and Helena stands before us. The poet could not have portrayed the embodiment any differently. In the third act, the secret of becoming is presented.

The inadequate, here it becomes an event,

he says in summary, what he wants to express after this examination. There, where we ascend the higher path of knowledge to higher forms, there the spirit shows itself as creating, alive, there it is placed before our soul in a living form. And we see what the spirit must also have if it is not to be a mere specter of eternal ideas – it must have will. He suggests that it must not only have thoughts and concepts. The indescribable, that must be done, that is the will. He confronts us as a capacity for knowledge, where we feel the innermost source of the highest knowledge flowing in us. When we turn away from all sensual and physical things. Man can reach this level, and Faust has reached it. Goethe shows us this symbolically by making Faust go blind at the highest level, so that he cannot see the physical.

But within, a bright light shines.

We find ourselves in the deeds of the spiritual world:

The indescribable, here it is done,

that which cannot be described with words from the world of the senses. We see how the living, logical, willing spirit can flow into us. And this fertilizes what is considered feminine in the highest sense, the soul. Thus we understand what Goethe means by the last words of “Faust” when we know that the soul is always represented as something feminine that needs to be fertilized and that draws us towards everything that becomes action. This is what Goethe wants to show us.

I have only been able to give a few rough strokes. What has been said about Hegel will show you that Hegel was on the path of theosophy. He went as far as he could. With tremendous energy, he researched nature, sought and found the connections. Goethe, the poet, went even further. In his poetic images, he sought to expand the rigid contours of conceptual images, that which is to become wisdom and science in life, by capturing the living spirit. Thus, through his Faust, Goethe truly affirmed that it was a deep truth to him, which he emphasized at the starting point of his scientific writings, that we see the external things of the physical world because our senses are created for external sensual things. The external image presents itself as our eyes are:

If the eye were not solar,
It could never behold the sun;
If not in us the God-own power,
How could we divine delight!

Just as the physical sun is seen through the physical eye, so is the spirit the creator of the spiritual eye in man, and is seen through the spiritual eye in its effectiveness. These words are the result of his world view. This is how he understands the spirit that permeates the world, and this is how he has struggled in his strength to a realization that only a few find. He says to one of his friends at the very end of his life: “The most important thing I have written is not for the great world, but for a few who can seek the same on spiritual paths.

What he has achieved for a few must become common property for many. It must not remain a theoretical world-view but must take hold of mind and will. And so, precisely those who approach Goethe's and Hegel's world-views from a spiritual-scientific point of view must come to the conviction of how much Theosophy can be found in both of them. This conviction is summarized in the words of the wise man:

The spiritual world is not closed,
Your mind is closed, your heart is dead!
Rise up, bathe, disciple, undaunted
The earthly breast at dawn!

Dear attendees!

If today we are to speak about the value and significance of truth for the development of the human soul, then the old question may well arise for some: What is truth anyway? Can one speak in any way in general about what truth actually is? And if one cannot answer this question, how can one then possibly determine anything about the value and significance of truth for the human soul? Nevertheless, it is by no means the case that one cannot distinguish between approaching the truth and moving away from the truth. What Lessing really meant to express in his famous saying about truth is truly valid: If God were to extend to me his right and his left hand and in his right hand held the pure, full truth; but in his left hand held the eternal striving for truth, then I would say: Father, give me what you have in your left hand, the eternal striving for truth; for the pure, full truth is, after all, only for you.

It is true that man can only have an eternal striving for the pure, full truth; but it would be a mistake if, because of this, one were to fall back into the misunderstanding that one cannot distinguish between that which corresponds more and that which corresponds less to the ideal of truth.

Let us visualize, not so much through theoretical discussion as through an example, how there is indeed a tangible difference, so to speak, between what can be called truth and what can be said to have removed man from the truth. It is not at all true in general that everyone can have their own point of view regarding the truth, that one cannot distinguish whether what someone claims from their point of view comes closer to the truth or moves further away from it. In this context, we may recall the saying of a recently deceased American multi-millionaire, who, among other things, in addition to his occupation, which was certainly more lucrative in terms of his millions, was concerned with arriving at the truth about certain things through thought. In his aphorisms, he made a remarkable statement about the value of human beings: no person in the world is irreplaceable; indeed, one cannot even speak of a special value of the individual. If I – so he said – now lay down my work, numerous others will be found to take it up where I left it. If I withdraw from what I have been doing, I will easily be replaced, and when I die – so roughly he said – the railways will run just as before, the dividends will be earned just as before. In short, nothing special in the world will have changed with the departure of a person. And then he adds – and this is important –: It is the same with every human being.

Let us compare this so-called truth, which the multi-millionaire has expressed from his point of view, about the value and significance of man in the world, with a similar saying by the witty German art historian Herman Grimm, who said this at the time. When Treitschke died, Grimm said about his work and significance: When a man like Treitschke has passed away, only then do we realize what he actually meant to all those who had contact with him. Treitschke was one of those people – as Grimm says – who, when they stop working, cannot find a successor for their work. He makes one realize that individuals are irreplaceable in their value and significance.

They are different, these two statements about the value and significance of a person: one from the American millionaire, the other from the spirited German art historian Herman Grimm. I would like to add: Grimm did not add what the American millionaire added: That is how it is with every human being! Two points of view, one could say, if one wanted to judge lightly, to the effect that the truth can take on a special form for each person. Two points of view, one could say, about the value and significance of the human being.

Now, which is the truer? If you examine the two statements a little, you will notice a huge difference between the two. You just have to examine them according to certain characteristics that are not usually examined today. How does the millionaire take his point of view? Merely in terms of his own personality. He considers what would become of the work he has done up to a certain point in time; he judges entirely from himself and comes to the conclusion that the work he is giving up could be taken up by someone else at any moment, and therefore it must be the same for everyone. A very personal point of view confronts us here, which looks only at itself in order to arrive at the truth about the value and significance of the human being. And Herman Grimm, he does not judge anything about himself in this case, but about another personality. He judges in such a way that he completely disregards himself and is, so to speak, overwhelmed by something that is outside of him as a being. And that is precisely how he comes to judge the case, not making a general judgment from this individual case, but simply accepting the case as it is. We need only consider the difference in the two points of view to see what is characteristic in each case. In the one case, the value and significance of the human being is judged quite subjectively, quite personally, quite from one's own ego; in the other case, the ego is not involved at all. And if we really consider both statements, who could fail to feel that the one who judges impersonally, who disregards himself, allows himself to be overwhelmed, as it were, by the objective, has more to say about the value and significance of a human being than the one who judges quite subjectively, quite personally! This must be the natural feeling of everyone. Such a comparison shows that we must never say: point of view is just a point of view; but that there is a way of approaching the truth, of actually arriving at it in certain respects, if we try to fathom the truth by taking an impersonal approach. Or do we not feel that in certain respects, as Herman Grimm says, each person is irreplaceable? Not only great people are irreplaceable. Can the point of view of the American millionaire apply when one considers how irreplaceable a mother is for many a child, for example? Can one say that something can step into this gap to replace her? Oh, one will feel it as soon as one takes the point of view that there is a coming closer to the truth, even if there can only be an eternal striving for the pure, full truth.

So it is precisely with those things that have such value for the human soul that it is important to examine them sometimes in a very intimate and profound way. And with what we have gained from the simple example of personal and impersonal judgment, we have already gained a great deal precisely for the characterization of truth.

In the lecture on the mission of anger, we started from the assumption that what is actually the nature of the human soul, what we can call its soul nature in contrast to the human body, consists of three parts: the sentient soul, which is, so to speak, the lowest of the human soul members, the mind or emotional soul, which forms the second link of the human being within, and the consciousness soul, which is the third link. And we have already characterized that this sentient soul is the link in the human being within which we find desire, instincts, passions and so on. We have, after all, examined a part of this sentient soul ourselves by pointing to the element of anger and its effect on the sentient soul, and we have seen how the I is present in this sentient soul in a dull way, as it is still overwhelmed by the passions, drives, instincts, and so on.

If we ascend to the next higher level of the human soul, to the soul of mind or feeling, then the I becomes clearer and more luminous, and the I becomes a power in the human being that can perceive and understand itself. How does the soul of mind or feeling actually free itself from the sentient soul? The human being stands in relation to the external world. This external world makes its impressions on the human being; it gives him the rich world of color and light, of sounds, of warmth and cold, in short, everything we perceive through our senses. When we bring our soul into relationship with the outer world through its organs, then, in our sentient soul, joy and delight, suffering and pain, and so on, arise in relation to what we perceive outside in the world of color, in the world permeated by sound, in the world of taste and smell, and so on, through our perceptions. Everything that is connected to our perceptions in our sentient soul, our desires and instincts, makes up the lowest of the soul's members, so to speak, and in this lives, still unaware of itself, the human I, this center of the human being. But in this lowest limb of the soul also live the affects, the passions, the drives and desires. Man lets himself be easily carried away by them; his ego is not yet master over anger, annoyance, vexation; it lets itself be carried away by lust and suffering, by drives and desires, is submerged in them, is not the conductor, the actor in relation to these drives and desires. We can say that the I lives down there, brooding in the surging sea of the sentient soul; but what we call the mind or feeling soul cannot be distinguished from this surging sea of the sentient soul, that which we call the mind or feeling soul, unless the human being delves so deeply into himself that he connects in his inner life with what he has experienced in the outer world. We receive direct impressions from this outer world. We carry these away from our interaction with the outer world. Then we are alone with ourselves. There we weigh one joy against another, there we brood over our pain, we try to get over it or to delve even deeper into it. There we expand within ourselves what we have received from outside impressions. What the soul builds up within itself could not be worked through by it if the I did not do something with what has been received, if the I did not work in this soul. Stimuli from outside can come without the ego; man only has to face the outside world, the world has an effect on him. Like in a mirror, the outer world gives rise to pleasure and suffering, desires and instincts and so on in the sentient soul; but it is only when we turn away from this outer world and collect ourselves, when we process our instincts and desires, when we form a whole in our imaginations, that we say: We work our way through the ego from the sentient soul to the mind soul, then we internalize ourselves within our self, then we process what we have received from the outside. And this inner work is the content of the mind or emotional soul. And only then, when we are able to relate what we have built up to the outside world, when we have formed a realm of inner experiences through our inner life, when we have developed a sum of pleasure and joy in our soul that we call ' beautiful', for example, and then apply all this to the outer world; when we come to recognize something in the outer world as good, beautiful, true through the concepts we have formed, then we say we attain knowledge of the outer world. There we work our way up to grasping the outer world, up to the knowing, cognizing human being: there we develop the consciousness soul. This is initially the highest level of the human soul. Thus the sentient soul leads us from the outside in, we live in ourselves through the mind or emotional soul, and we find the way again to grasp the world through knowledge and understanding through our consciousness soul.

Within the sentient soul, we have encountered the element of anger, and in that anger we have found one of the preparers for the development of the I and the soul. A person who is not yet mature enough to form an opinion about what is true, just, and good will, by falling into righteous anger at the sight of some lie, some injustice, some evil, take a stand on this external world. Anger will, so to speak, indicate to him: This is not in accordance with you, [this is a discordance, an obstacle] and in his inner being awakens that which is called the ego, which opposes the outside world. Where we are inflamed with anger at something we cannot admit, there is the awakening of the ego. [And [the anger] develops this in the transition and ascent into the intellectual and emotional soul through constant internalization out of the developmental soul.] So if anger is something that a person must overcome in order to develop, we can almost say of anger: It has its value in that it can be overcome; if anger has only attained its full significance for a person when the has been transformed into love and gentleness, we can say that the most important thing for the mind or soul is that it presents itself to us as the element that, in the best sense, brings the two sides of the ego mentioned yesterday to development. If the human ego is to develop in an appropriate way, it must happen in such a way that, on the one hand, it becomes fuller and fuller. Only by developing a rich life of ideas and thoughts, a rich life of feelings, emotions and will within himself [and thereby strengthening his ego forces within himself], only in this way will he be able to embrace much of the world on the one hand – and on the other hand, the ego will be able to become a strong starting point for working outwards. The more his individuality develops, the more — we may say — a person is worth in the world as a human being. But we have already pointed out that this I is a two-edged sword, that on the other hand this I, by only aspiring to become richer and fuller in itself, can close itself within itself; that precisely by wanting to live only in itself, it closes the door to the outside world and thereby becomes impoverished. If, on the one hand, a person is to become as independent and strong as possible, then he must avoid impoverishing himself by closing himself off from the outside world by also cultivating the second aspect of the self, selflessness, the merging with the outside world.

Where is the element in human development that, by its very nature, does justice to these two sides of the I? There is nothing else that does justice to both sides of the I as much as truth does. Truth is something that, if it is to appear to us in its highest form, we can only find in the innermost part of our I. Only that which we have recognized as such through our I itself can be considered truth for us. Thus, the truth for the ego must be found in the innermost part of the human ego. We can say: Through the self, the truth for the human being is found. When the human being understands this character of truth, then he will say: It is precisely through the work for the truth that the ego becomes stronger in its selfhood in its inner strength; for truth is only achieved when the ego has to make an effort, because truth can only be found in the depths of the ego.

Hence the peculiarity of truth: we need nothing more than the work of our own ego if the truth is to have any value for us. Admittedly, in the case of present-day man, there are hardly any truths other than the simplest ones that take on such a form for him that the ego can really decide through itself. These are the simplest arithmetical truths. Once we have decided for ourselves that three times three is nine and not ten, then this decision, made in the innermost sanctuary of our ego, is enough to know that this is true. And even if millions of people were to say that three times three is ten, we would still decide for three times three is nine. This is valid for mathematical truths because they are clear and, so to speak, present themselves to us directly in their simplicity. Therefore, when we overcome this simplicity through the passions that assert themselves in the sentient soul, by the I working its way up into the rational soul, it must overcome the other affects in the same way as it overcomes anger. For only by casting out the instincts, desires, drives and passions that are in the soul can what a person experiences in the soul become truth. Where people disagree about the truth, where not everyone finds the same truths in their soul, it is precisely the urges, the desires, the passions that prevent them, so to speak, from truly seeing the circumstances of the truth transparently and brightly and clearly. The passions cannot have a say in simple mathematical truths. If, for example, passions were to arise regarding the transparency of mathematical truths, then many a housewife would certainly desire that if she takes three times three marks to market, it would make ten marks; for the passions speak in favor of this, but the simplicity and transparency of the mathematical truths do not allow the passions and desires to arise. In this case – in any matter at all, where we have managed to silence the passions and desires, we also clearly see the circumstances of the truth. In all the things in which we have not yet succeeded in silencing the passions and desires, we are not yet capable of deciding on the truth in earnest. But when we have succeeded in deciding on a truth, then the ego is in its inmost being the judge of the truth. Thus, the ego must feel itself in its power when it decides on the truth, when it acquires truth.

And again: once we have acquired the truth about something, we may say: this truth, although acquired in the most personal way, is the most impersonal of all; for we can find the same truth in all souls. When we have found a truth, it will take on the same form in millions of people who have also found it. Thus we will be able to communicate with the whole world about the truth. Thus truth is the most personal and thus it is the most impersonal. It leads most deeply into us, because there it must be decided, and it leads out again, because it applies independently of our arbitrariness. Truth is therefore the element in the life of the soul that has the most important mission in relation to this life of the soul. On the one hand, it educates the self to independence – for the self is the judge of truth – and on the other hand, it educates the self to selflessness, in that truth brings together this self with everything in our environment where truth is to be spoken at all. The two sides of the double-edged sword are best educated by the truth, and so the ego becomes strong to be led up from the surging activity of the sentient soul, where it still broods dull; so it becomes strong enough to be led up into the soul of mind or emotion, and at the same time it is prepared to be led up into the consciousness soul, where it comes out again to grasp the environment, to grasp the world selflessly. Thus we have characterized truth as the most important and essential element in the development of the I, in the work of the I on the three soul-members, the sentient soul, the mind or emotional soul, and the consciousness soul. This is why truth is such a powerful educator of the ego, because it works on both sides. We just have to take it seriously. Only those who truly strive for the truth in their own selves, and only strive for the truth, who allow only the truth to determine their inner world of ideas, may hope that this truth will fulfill this implied mission for them. A great English poet rightly says of truth, hinting at its brittleness, hinting at the high demands it makes of us: “To him who prefers anything to truth, this goddess does not surrender.” Those who place their Christianity above truth will soon realize that they are placing their particular denomination above Christianity. But those who place their particular denomination above Christianity will soon realize that they are placing their sect above their denomination. And those who place their sect above their denomination will soon realize that they are placing their personal whims above even the teachings of their sect. So says the poet Coleridge. Truth reveals itself only to him who is in turn ready to surrender himself entirely to it. But now we meet this truth within ourselves in a twofold form. The I asserts its two sides, which we have characterized, quite well in relation to this truth. If we want to characterize these two sides of the I, then we must present to our soul the way in which truth presents itself to the I from the world.

We look into the world. World phenomena present themselves to our senses, that is, to our sentient soul. Those who want to form concepts, ideas, and images about the world but do not want to believe that this world is built from concepts, ideas, and images may as well admit that it is possible to scoop water out of a glass that contains no water. However nonsensical it would be to claim this, it is nevertheless true that we can draw from a world in which there are no ideas or concepts and create in our minds what we then have in our souls: ideas and concepts of the world. A world that was not built according to ideas, that was not steeped in wisdom, could never evoke a reflection in the human soul that represents concepts and ideas of this world as an inner experience. For what would our concepts and ideas be, through which the laws of the world are to be experienced in us, what would all science be, if the world were not built according to ideas? All science would be fantasy, reverie; for science is a sum of ideas and concepts. If there were no ideas and concepts, in other words, if there were no wisdom in the world, if the world were not interwoven and permeated by wisdom, then our wisdom would be folly; for it would be pure fantasy, pure error. We would imagine something in our soul as a picture of the world that is constructed quite arbitrarily. It only makes sense to create an image of the world with the help of concepts and ideas if one assumes that these concepts and ideas are present in the world and that the things themselves that present themselves to our senses arise and grow out of the wisdom of the world, out of the wisdom that flows and streams through the world. So we say to ourselves: Behind this world, which we perceive through our senses, which we feel and desire through our sentient soul, behind this world is wisdom. And we seek to approach this wisdom by working our way up in our soul to that which our mind-soul inwardly reveals as truth. Wisdom is there in the world; wisdom works its way out in our own soul as we ascend to the mind and consciousness soul. But when we relate to this wisdom in the world, we have to say: Oh, this wisdom is built into the world, incorporated into it. We human beings stand, so to speak, as belated observers in relation to this world and explore the wisdom that is implanted in it. [A large part of our striving in the acquisition of knowledge consists of appropriating what pulses and lives through the world as wisdom.] If we allow the wisdom that flows through the world to shine in us as truth, then we are truly the ones who come afterwards. And if we look at the development of humanity, [it shows us how, with all his doings and inventions, man falls short of the wisdom already achieved by the environment with its wisdom]. So we can say: A closer look at human development soon shows us how man, so to speak, stands behind the wisdom of the world with his truth. One can see this by taking a look at the historical development of humanity. In the school books, one can read how people gradually came to produce what we call paper from certain substances. Through human wisdom, people have learned to produce paper. Just as man makes paper out of certain substances, so the paper of the wasp's nest is made – for the wasp's nest consists of paper. The wasp's nest shows the art of making paper, which has been present in nature as wisdom for countless centuries and which man, in his historical development, has found afterwards. In this way, man is truly a thinker of what has been thought outside. A large part of our striving in the acquisition of knowledge consists in reflecting on the wisdom of the world, in appropriating within ourselves what pulses and lives through the world as wisdom. By relating to the world in such a way that we allow its wisdom to shine in us, we feel, precisely in the innermost essence of our I, that we are strengthening ourselves, that we are relating to the world with the substance that is outside as spiritual substance. We grow stronger as the wisdom of the world shines in our I as truth. This truth, which reflects the wisdom of the world, corresponds perfectly to one side of our ego, namely the side that we can call the selfless side. After all, everything we think about the world is there without our ego, it has been there long before we could think it. In grasping the wisdom of the world, we experience something that is outside of our ego. We pour our I out into the world, so to speak: we are completely world, we are completely given to the world, completely selfless, by reviving the wisdom of the world in ourselves. In this way we make ourselves selfless by completely giving ourselves, objectively giving ourselves, to the wisdom of the world, which, as the light of truth, is to shine in ourselves. That is one side of the truth.

The other side of the truth comes to us when we consider human labor. When we consider all the human ideas that we realize in the smallest and largest of things, whether it is an everyday idea or the idea of an inventor who invents a machine, for example, we have the resounding, productive, creative work of man in mind. First we have the idea, then we have what is the external expression of this idea or the consequence of the idea. We see what arises in us, what has not yet been thought in the world, springing from our I. We see our innermost being emerge in our everyday activities, in the activities that we can describe as the realization of the great ideas of the inventors. First there is the thought, we do not reflect on the thought, the sensory phenomenon is not there first, the thought is there first, in which the sensory phenomenon comes to us through our own action, we are the forethinkers and we are the ones who, after our forethought, enter the world creatively ; there we feel our I growing stronger on the other side; there we feel how the essence of our I has flowed out, feel that which we can call our selfhood; through which we become capable of seeing realized that which the I first experiences outside in the surrounding of our existence. There we feel that side of the I where we do not merge into something that exists without the I, but on the contrary, there we feel our inner activity, our selfhood. [Our I is in our deeds, our works, just as it has also worked first in our thoughts.] As a forward thinker, the I is truly cultivating its selfhood; as a backward thinker, the I is truly cultivating its selflessness. And in these two components of the entire inner life, the truth within our work and striving in the world confronts us as reflected truth and as thought-out truth.

Now we ask ourselves: Is there a mediation between these two sides? Just as life approaches the human being, so do the two sides of his ego approach each other, but still keeping the components of truth apart. Truth is indeed the great educator of both sides, but the way the ego appropriates this truth introduces a division. Is there anything where the two sides of truth confront us in the world? [But if there are such truths that existed before, before the ego, and the ego grasps them independently of the external world, then realizes them in the world, that is a truth that we can recognize as one of selfhood and at the same time of selflessness.] If there are such truths that, on the one hand, can be conceived before all sensual reality and yet are realized, not in machines and daily activities; but if we enact the truth independently of the external world and then see it realized in this external world; if the truth that presents itself to us as pre-thought can at the same time show itself to be formed entirely according to the pattern of the postulated truth: Such a truth would be one that particularly cultivates both sides of the self. Do such truths exist? It is precisely such truths that Theosophy or spiritual science seeks to provide for modern humanity.

Let us try to make this clear with an example. It has already been stated that it is the task of Theosophy to present the proposition: that which is soul-spiritual arises only out of that which is soul-spiritual, just as Redi, in another field, first presented the proposition: that which is alive arises only out of that which is alive. We have seen that this proposition follows from what we call the realization of the repeated lives of man on earth. The way in which spiritual research reveals that the innermost core of man's being re-embodies itself is not brought about by logical conclusions, but is an immediate realization of the clairvoyant consciousness. Just as a person with physical eyes sees color and light, so a person who has developed the inner, hidden powers of the human soul perceives the essence of the human being, which we can call the immortal, that lives in the human being and presents itself to the clairvoyant consciousness, that comes from previous embodiments and that goes to future embodiments. So, through supersensible knowledge, we have the concept of the re-embodiment of the human essence. So the spiritual researcher comes and says: Through my research I have established that the human being undergoes re-embodiments; he describes the re-embodiment, he conceptualizes it in the same way that modern natural science conceptualizes the sensory perception and intellectual acquisitions. With these concepts he presents himself to people. Such knowledge cannot be found through outer perception; it must be found through supersensible vision, through the development of those organs that we call the spiritual eyes and ears. But when it is found, it can be conceptualized, thought of, and given forms that we call the forms of truth. So, we have a truth before us that expresses itself in a way that is not possible through outer perception. We have a preconceived idea in contrast to external perception. Just as the thought, as the idea of the machine lives in the mind of the inventor, without him seeing it externally, so the thought of re-embodiment lives as a result of research in the spiritual world, it lives in the mind of the spiritual researcher, but then the message goes out into the world, then we can we can look at the outside world and say: We see how [for example, a child] from the first day of a human being [gradually] develops from the vague, blurred facial features into distinct forms, [into a fixed physiognomy], which slumbers in a dark background of existence. There we see the definite forms developing. And we say to ourselves: According to what the spiritual researcher tells us, we can easily understand this. What has been brought over from previous embodiments is the core of the human being, [who lives anew in the child and comes from a previous life], who works out what was indeterminate into definite forms. We look at the whole development and say: When we look at life and test life, then this life itself in its appearances shows us the truth of what the spiritual researcher says; and only bias can cloud a person's view to such an extent that he would not find the truth in the external sensory appearance of what the spiritual researcher brings down as a preconceived idea from the higher worlds. Thus the spiritual researcher brings his truths down from the higher worlds, and holds them up to external perception. What confronts us in the external world offers us the evidence for the truths from the higher worlds, in that we then understand the external world. We penetrate beneath things with what we bring to them as truths. Thus what has been thought out agrees with the outer world, as the inventor's idea agrees with the finished machine. Thus what is otherwise separate is united in the truths that Theosophy presents. There we have, as it were, nothing behind us. The theosophical truth is not found like the idea of an inventor — created out of nothing in a certain sense —, it is found through observation in the spiritual world. But it can be applied to the external sensual world. This theosophical truth is both a pre-thought and a post-thought. Therefore, it affects the human soul in a completely different way than all the other truths that we encounter. (By absorbing this truth, man unleashes his ego.

By immersing himself in the wisdom of the world, man loses his self, and his I becomes one that, so to speak, flows out more and more; it becomes impoverished of inner strength. By thinking ahead in his daily activities, by demanding that what has been thought ahead be translated into external reality, he wants to imprint his ego on the external world, he wants to see more and more in his surroundings what his self wills; he wants to imprint his self on his surroundings. In this way, he is completely absorbed in his selfhood, and has created an interest in making this I, quite apart from the environment, as strong as possible. We can see two possibilities for the education of the I. One is that the I becomes a completely reflective one, where it is completely devoted to the outer world, where it is more and more devoted to the outer world, where it does not grow stronger in its power. The other is where the self is not merely filled with ideas from the outside world, but should be filled by the will. In the first case, the self can become desolate in the will. We can experience that such people, who absorb objective truth in the most conscientious way, are weak in will. On the other hand, we can observe that those people who only want to impress their will on their environment become closed off from what is going on in the outside world, from what should awaken their interest in the wisdom-filled content of the world. Thus we see, so to speak, the thinking I developed in those people who develop in the first way, and the willing I in those who develop in the second way. But we can achieve harmonious interaction between the thinking I and the willing I by allowing spiritual-scientific truths to take effect in us. Then the two beneficent powers in the I will awaken. On the one hand, the I will let all the content of the world into itself, out of which it is born, and will enrich itself inwardly through what is poured out into the whole world as its spiritual content. On the other hand, it will gather itself together within itself in order to become strong within itself. Thus the ego will not be impoverished in either direction, but will become strong and healthy in both. And this is the health-giving quality of theosophical truth: on the one hand, it is as fully realized as the reflective truth, and on the other hand, it has the same effect as the reflective truth. Therefore, it is healing because on the one hand it pours into us all the beauty of the world and on the other hand makes our ego so flourishing and fruitful because it enables what grows in the ego to find its reflection in the outer phenomena. Through the theosophical truth, we develop our ego so much because it is the truth that is both premeditated and reflected. That is the healthy aspect of the theosophical truth. While we would see in a person who is only a reflective person, who only wants to comprehend the wisdom of the world, that he can, under certain circumstances, paralyze himself more and more in terms of willpower and that his inner weakness , that he becomes inwardly ill from lack of such power, we would see on the other hand that he who only wants to realize his will becomes inwardly impoverished because he has no connection with the world. On the other hand, we see harmony prevailing in all respects in the theosophist. The thought becomes more concentrated as it is seized by the confidence of realization. In short, by permeating itself with the theosophical truth, the ego becomes a point of passage for wisdom. There the will is enlightened and on the other side becomes the true center by having the premeditated truth with the postmeditated truth in relation to the world. Humanity will gradually recognize that the will, which can appear so dry and so sober to the one who merely wants it implemented in external reality, warms up to living feelings because it meets with the wisdom of the world; and again, that this wisdom, which can seem so dry to us when we merely reflect on the world, can seem individual to us when it meets with the living will in the ego. Wisdom and will must meet in the ego. This is the healthy, life-affirming truth that we not only produce mind-soul - or emotional soul - but mind-permeated mind-soul and mind-permeated emotional soul in the higher soul members, in the mind-soul, through the nature of the I, these two sides of approaching the truth.

Above all, in more recent times, no one has felt this so deeply as the person we have spoken about here many times before, who was as close to spiritual science as possible, who created the greatest poetic works, as Goethe. And a work by the later, older Goethe should serve as an illustration to what has been said today. Oh, Goethe knew clearly and distinctly that the way in which man confronts the truth depends on how he has developed in his own self. That truth is merely something objectively compelling was never Goethe's thought. That truth enlightens man all the more the more receptive he is, that was his fundamental conviction, which is little understood today. People come and say: Oh, we have long since gone beyond a certain way of grasping the truth. Science has led us to the point where we cannot help doubting that there is something spiritual in a living being. [Science has thoroughly driven out of us the belief that something spiritual is to be sought behind every material thing. It has driven out our belief in something like an etheric body or a life force, because science is close to showing how living substance can be composed of external chemical components. Don't you hear everywhere that we are told: We cannot recognize such fantasies as those presented by Theosophy, because our ideal is to produce protein, that is, something living, from dead matter in the laboratory. May a counter-question be asked here? After all the development of man, can what he expects about the composition of a living being decide anything? Can that decide anything for his beliefs about the spirit of the world? If you want to think about it, you can find external proof that nothing is decided about the belief in the spirit through something like the expectation that protein could one day be produced chemically in a laboratory. The one does not force the other at all, this can be proved historically. Ask what else people have believed in the past, for example, in earlier centuries, in the Middle Ages, they not only believed that they would succeed in synthesizing protein from carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and so on, they believed something quite different. Imagine the sentences in Goethe's Faust, where Wagner stands before the preparation of the homunculus; the ability to do this was a belief that existed in the Middle Ages. People believed that they could create something that was a small human being from external substances through the various processes they performed in the laboratory. However, this belief that they could create a human being from external substances did not cause these people to deny the spirit. Therefore, the denial of the spirit today does not arise from the compulsion of objective facts, but from the inability [to grasp the spirit] to rise within one's own soul to the kind of thinking that sees the conditions for professing the spirit. One must also consider such things, then one will understand what it meant that only the one who can work in the substance of the soul as the external naturalist works in the external substance can grasp the life of the soul.

And Goethe was one who could see deeply into the ideas we have presented today. Above all, he was aware of the contrast between reflective and pre-reflective truth. And he beautifully expressed this contrast in a wonderful little poem, his “Pandora”.

This “Pandora” was written in 1807; a lot of nonsense has been written about it. People said: This is a Goethean late work, in which Goethe presents all kinds of concepts in symbols. In a Goethe edition, by a much-praised German scholar, you can read the words: Well, what does that tell us, other than that we can form a concept of ourselves, that man represents what he thinks of himself? Goethe would have thanked himself for presenting to the world what he had “formed of himself.” Goethe himself may have once expressed himself in a manner that was not polite but clear about people's judgment of his late works.

Anyone who takes [Pandora] in hand [and lets it sink in], attentively and without prejudice, will recognize one of them. Oh, there are not many works in which the content is evaluated in such a wonderful way, in keeping with the style. It is the one in this work that can be called the light artistic hand. Read “Pandora” and, if you imbue it with your sense of style, you will admire the ease with which everything is shaped to suit the person and situation in question, whether in the verse structure or in the diction. One person speaks in this verse form, the other in a different, more lightly flowing style. Everything is easy in this “Pandora”. It is precisely in this that the greatness of Goethe having to leave this work a fragment is revealed. Even with a Goethe, such a powerful artistic accomplishment as that evident in “Pandora” is only possible for moments. Even for Goethe it was only sufficient for the beginning of Pandora; but then he lost his way, for he was too small to continue the work in the greatness that inspired him as an artist when he created the beginning. But that should not deter us from recognizing the greatness that is present in Pandora.

Goethe was very clear about people who say: Yes, what Goethe wrote in his youth, one can go along with, it is all full of poetic originality; but what Goethe allegorized in his old age, no reasonable person can understand. This was already the case during Goethe's lifetime – not with regard to Faust, but to his other works of later years – Goethe himself by no means held the first part of “Faust”, which is so admired, in the highest esteem. He knew what he had put into it in order to develop ever higher and higher; he knew within himself how much his later works stood above his earlier ones. And so he says something impolite, but clearly:

They praise Faust
And what else
In my works roars
In their favor.
The old Mick and Mack
Is very pleased;
The pack of rags and bones thinks
It would no longer be!

This judgment is justified in the face of the philistine critics of Goethe, who make Goethe into what they themselves are – at least something good comes of it! In recent times, our audience has been inundated with such interpreters of Goethe. [Let us take a closer look at the work in terms of our topic today:] “Pandora” contains on a large scale the problem of the reflective and the forward-thinking human being – [Epimetheus belongs to the former, Prometheus to the latter]. Zeus wanted to take away the existence of evolving humanity. Under Zeus's rule, humanity would have been doomed. Prometheus confronts Zeus. According to the legend, he brings man fire, language and writing. He is thus the one who gives people the opportunity to emerge from the state in which they used to be, where the ego brooded dull down in the sentient soul. Man was to develop his I more and more. It is a correct observation that everything to do with fire, for example, is somehow connected with human forethought. Travelers described how, in areas where they had made a fire, the monkeys, for example, came and warmed themselves, but it never occurred to the monkeys to stoke the fire themselves; that is, these animals of the highest species are not able to envision the future. These higher animals, which are closest to humans, certainly felt the pleasant warmth of the fire; they may also have felt some kind of thought in a dull form, but they still did not think the thought through to the point of maintaining the fire by adding wood, much less to think of further practical applications. It is precisely because man has mastered the element of fire that he has been enabled to make his ego the starting point of thinking ahead, [and thereby gradually to lead his ego to a higher level in ever-increasing measure].

Thus, in his “Pandora”, Goethe presents us with the two brothers, Epimetheus and Prometheus. There stands the one brother: Epimetheus. His name already indicates that he is the contemplative; he is devoted to that which is imprinted on the world as wisdom, those thoughts that can shine as truth in the human soul. He is not prepared to think ahead; in his soul he dreams the truth dream of the world, which is an afterthought conceived behind the wisdom of the world as truth. Such is Epimetheus. Prometheus, on the other hand, is devoted to the other one-sidedness; he wants nothing to do with the reflection of wisdom. He only wants to know about that which arises in the soul of man himself, in order to realize it.

The true celebration of the real man is the deed

— that is Prometheus' saying. [He is a man of action, and this is how he appears before us as a forward thinker.] Thus we see the two opposites: Epimetheus, the thinker, and Prometheus, the forward thinker. Goethe expresses this in his “Pandora” already in the scenery. On the one side, we have Prometheus' dwelling. We see that everything that has been built there has been created by human labor. Although it is rough, we see that it does not bear the character of nature anywhere, does not depict anything outside in nature; we do not see a copy of a natural beauty, it is rough and crude, but as a human work it stands before us. In contrast, what is on the side of Epimetheus as his residence, comes to us as a scene that is composed of the beautiful creations of nature, of parts of nature, and continues into a wonderful landscape. We see in it the reflection on nature and the act of settling in such a way that one lives according to what is exemplified outside. Epimetheus and Prometheus appear to us as complete opposites in their striving for truth.

In the Greek saga, we are told that Zeus wanted to take revenge for the act of Prometheus. [Through Hephaistos, Zeus had an image of a woman made in an artful, artistically beautiful way] – Pandora – [which he brought to life]. She was to bring people gifts from the world of Zeus. [After her descent to earth, Prometheus rejects the divine being, but Epimetheus takes her in and makes the beautiful goddess his wife.] The saga tells how Pandora, the woman created by the gods, opens the box [that Zeus gave her] and how the goods that actually make people miserable fly out. Only one good remains in it: hope. Thus we see that in the saga, Pandora also has something to do with that which belongs to the human race of the past. From the future, thinking humanity has only hope from Pandora. What else it has, what people can use to get by, has been handed down from the past.

This Pandora also appears in Goethe as the wife of Epimetheus. But we see very clearly that Goethe takes what is an external action and elevates it into a spiritual world. We see the reflective soul of Epimetheus and see it connected with Pandora, that is to say, in this soul of Epimetheus lives that which is spread out in the world as wisdom, which is reflected upon as in a dream. The characterization of Epimetheus, who dreams wisdom, which is nothing other than Pandora herself when personified, is wonderful. He feels unsatisfied and weak, and then, in the further course of the drama, Goethe has Prometheus, the brother, confront Epimetheus. There Epimetheus raves about the [beloved, but also vanished, divine] Pandora, about the all-gifted Pandora. Goethe shows us that through this figure, worldly wisdom is illuminated to him, but worldly wisdom as it is grasped by man in reflection. What is this reflected truth like? It is abstract, uncreative, unproductive. Imagine that we could combine in our soul all knowledge about the entire world; but this knowledge would be unproductive if it were only reflected. Just as the wife of Epimetheus, just as Pandora, is endowed with the wisdom of the world but is unproductive. Prometheus, who has no sense for this Pandora, confronts Epimetheus; while Epimetheus raves about Pandora's magnificent hair, about how beautifully her foot moves – Prometheus says: Oh, I know how it is made. [I know how Pandora was made by Hephaestus, the blacksmith, and how she was brought to life by Zeus. He thinks only of the origin of the goddess, not of the beauty of what has come into being, what has been created, and so Pandora, who is otherwise unproductive, gives him the impetus for productivity. And this is what can come out of it as a reaction in him.] In Pandora's case, it is something mechanically put together, something that cannot be put into practice; something against which he asserts his saying:

The true man's true celebration is the deed!

Now Goethe shows how Elpore and Epimeleia, Hope and Foresight, have sprung from the marriage between Epimetheus and Pandora. [In her departure, Pandora took one of her daughters, Elpore, with her to the gods and left Epimeleia, chosen by Epimetheus, with her father.] These two daughters show different sides of Epimetheus's nature, [especially the latter in particular]. Hope, [Elpore], is what reflection alone can defend in relation to the future. The one who is a forward-thinking person sees what he has thought come into being in reality; the one who is a reflective person can say: I expect this or that to happen in the future; because what should happen does not come from himself. On the other hand, there is Epimeleia, the other daughter, who protects the past.

Prometheus also has a scion, Phileros; the one who descends from this I-human Prometheus is the actual caretaker of human I-ness. But already in the son we see the full one-sidedness of mere self-seeking. He no longer wants to create. He no longer wants to create. He cannot endure in a useful, different, thinking activity. This does not endure, because one-sided striving for the self is not complemented by wisdom. In Prometheus, this striving for the self is still present in such a way that it permeates the whole being of Prometheus. In the son, it manifests itself in such a way that it shows its harmful side at the same time. The son is not only the creator, but also the enjoyer of what is there. In this way, he causes conflict. In his blind rage, he even wounds the one who protects what exists, [his beloved] Epimeleia, the daughter of Epimetheus, in a fight.

Thus the powers of the human soul, the reflective and the thinking powers, confront each other in this Goethean drama. [And so these powers fight each other. But nothing is achieved by this; for the soul powers only increase and strengthen each other through harmonious interaction. Only in this way can truth fulfill its mission in the human being.

Goethe shows us how, ultimately, it is through the interaction of the two currents that true human salvation comes about. And Goethe also shows us how what he has depicted here is, for him, a mature result of development. Goethe looked back to the time when he had only developed the Promethean nature in himself one-sidedly. In 1774, the Goethe who was certainly already endowed with all the makings of Goethe, but still immaturely youthful, expressed this one-sided Promethean truth as his conviction in his 'Prometheus' at that time, and it flows towards us there. And if today we find a certain self-satisfaction in pointing to this youthful “Prometheus” as if it gave us the whole of Goethe, then we have to say: this is only a one-sided expression of Goethe himself. Goethe did not stop at thinking ahead; he added the thinking of his mature knowledge, his reflection. No, not only the premeditation, not only that which rejects all wisdom, not only the pre-thinking that rejects all reflection, but the confluence of both alone can establish the mission of truth.

That Goethe in his youth stood on a one-sided point of view, we can still gather from something else. He does not remember the words in the first part of “Faust” where Faust sets out to translate the Bible. There we see how Faust approaches the Bible and wants to replace the correct word “In the beginning was the word” with another: “In the beginning was the deed.” This is what he wants to contribute to the Bible more as a youthful person; that was not Goethe's final opinion. People should stop seeing the whole of Goethe in this. In his youth, Goethe probably cultivated this Promethean point of view, but later he clearly showed how he had progressed beyond it, how he later knew that in addition to the aforementioned deed, in order to develop people healthily, the word, that is to say the reflection of the wisdom imprinted by the world's spirits, must occur. Therefore, in his “Pandora”, Goethe adds from his totality, broadening his youthful point of view:

From heaven,
Senkert's word and deed blessedly descend,
a gift descends, undreamt of before.

That is, he means, unimagined by himself in the past, when he still believed that he had to correct the Gospel of John at this point, to replace the passage “In the beginning was the word” with “In the beginning was the deed”. For Goethe, the deed becomes the word, which expresses the character of what was previously conceived. The word becomes the other, the illuminating wisdom of the world. This is why Goethe says in “Pandora”:

What you below feel is our wish;
What you can give, we know.
You Titans make great beginnings; but
To lead to the eternal good, the eternal beautiful
Is the work of the gods; let it be.

Thus Goethe complements his youthful Prometheus point of view in the right, harmonious way with the point of view of Epimetheus, showing us what attitude and loyalty to true philosophy should be. In this way, Goethe's example shows us the mission of truth within our own human hearts.

Today you have recognized the truth as an educator of the human being. You have seen that truth is something most personal and at the same time something impersonal; something that makes the human being an I-human being, and something that in turn brings the I together with all other beings. You have seen that the ego is so strong on its two sides that it still expresses its selfless character in the Epimetheus-like element of truth and its selfish character in the Prometheus-like element on the other side; and you have seen that it is possible to bring about harmony between the two in spiritual-scientific truth, which encompasses the two, leading the will up to wisdom, leading wisdom down and allowing it to be seen as light, to illuminate the will itself.

Thus we see that truth, although it yields to the strong human ego at an intermediate stage, nevertheless fulfills the great mission in its perfection of shaping the ego ever higher and higher. Truth has this mission, to be the greatest educator of the human ego, at the same time leading to strong inwardness in thinking ahead and to strong selflessness in reflecting.

Thus, truth is the power that has the strongest mission, that leads the ego from level to level, making the soul more and more perfect. And we see this from the point of view that Goethe himself took towards truth, not ignoring any earlier stage, adding the necessary Epimetheus element to the Prometheus element. And Goethe is a true model of a person striving for truth precisely where we eavesdrop on him so intimately, where we readily admit: precisely because we see that he has become more and more mature, we can emulate him; he is great because he shows us the hopeful paths in the pursuit of truth. And then we feel this striving in us in such a way that it fills us with healthy strength, making us stronger and more unselfish. We feel that, in contrast to this, the sentence falls silent that wants to say that truth depends solely on the point of view.

But then again we turn to Goethe and let another mood come over us. In all seriousness of striving for truth, we must never abandon that other healing element that tells us: When you believe you have reached some level of truth, have recognized something, it is also able to tell you on the other side: You must also have already decided; you must tell yourself about no truth that it could be completely infallible, you must strive to let it appear before your soul in an even more truthful form, even with regard to that which you have already recognized as truth. When we feel earnest and dignity in our striving for truth, we also feel a serious, dignified humor, which on the other hand so beautifully corrects what pride could instill in us as a sense of truth. We then also feel the other thing that Goethe always said when he was in danger of holding on to the one truth too tightly: Oh, the thought that has been considered could only be an illusion, the thought that has been considered could be something that does not prove feasible. Yes, let us also feel that as a corrective to our arrogance of truth, as a strain on our seriousness, our dignity in the pursuit of truth! Let us feel the Goethe word

Quite and truly
I am a poor wretch.
My dreams are not true,
And my thoughts go awry.

If we can feel this, then we will be able to cope with our lofty ideal of truth.

On a beautiful September day this year, I went on a trip to Zurich. Since the day was free, I decided to go to Maria-Einsiedeln, which was an important place of pilgrimage in the early Middle Ages and enjoys a wondrous location. There was also a so-called pilgrimage on this day, and since fine, sunny weather was in prospect, one could expect an extraordinarily lively atmosphere in Maria-Einsiedeln, as is well known.

I also wanted to make a pilgrimage, for which there was an opportunity here, so I took a carriage to the Devil's Bridge, which goes up and down hills, and after a while I found myself there in front of a house that had recently been built in place of an old, historically significant house. a plaque identifying it as the birthplace of the famous physician and naturalist Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus Paracelsus von Hohenheim, who was born here in 1493 and died in 1541, at the age of forty-eight. If you linger there a little, you really feel the magic of nature, as you can only encounter it in the Alps. All the plants and animals there inspire you with a sense of intimacy, a language of the most intimate familiarity with the untouched essence of nature. And in the midst of such strong impressions of the interweaving with an outwardly charming nature, the image of the young Paracelsus arose in me, who had spent the first nine years of his life in this impressive environment. In him, we have a receptive personality who, even in his childhood years, was open to learning about nature. This boy had an individuality that seemed to prepare him to eavesdrop on many of nature's secrets in such a unique place, even if it was only at first by guesswork. We can imagine how the boy longingly awaited his absent father, a respected and busy doctor, with his questions, how he often accompanied his father on short trips, and how many a word about patients, their care, and the surrounding nature was exchanged in questions and meaningful explanations. When the boy turned nine, the family moved to Villach in Carinthia, where he was able to continue his interaction with nature and his father to an even greater extent.

Now follow me in your mind to a house in the eastern part of Salzburg, where a plaque announces that Theophrastus Bombastus Paracelsus von Hohenheim died here on September 23, 1541. The legend associated with his death may come to mind, according to which the doctors, who were extremely hostile towards him, hired someone to throw him off the nearby hill. Between the years mentioned, a highly peculiar life is enclosed, and this remarkable personality at the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries appears in the development of mankind as the dawn of a certain epoch, which can still show the spiritual sky of all that is beautiful and grandiose. Basically, everything that can be heard from the soul of Paracelsus is a testimony to the fact that he maintained a continuous and intimate connection with nature and understood the world around him. He maintained these strong relationships during his extensive travels throughout the world, in the areas of his homeland, throughout Germany, France, Spain, Portugal, Holland, Denmark, Sweden, Russia, Turkey, everywhere quickly understanding and at home with what presented itself to him in the most diverse forms as the secret of existence. Thus, he gathered a rich treasure trove of knowledge and wisdom on his travels, and how he explored the world in his own way becomes even clearer to us when we imagine how he lived out the impressions he had brought with him from there and from his youth at the University of Basel, especially when we consider how university studies were conducted at the time, and how it was with scientific research and medical knowledge in particular. The old writings of Galen and Avicenna were used as a basis everywhere, and the learned men of the universities of that time delivered a kind of commentary on these ancient writers in Latin.

Paracelsus said to them: You speak about books, you are far removed from all that nature speaks to us in powerful revelations when we only open the gates of our soul to her, and he left this official teaching center of that time. Some called him a tramp then and still call him one today, but he was only a tramp on the outside, and only because he believed that if you wanted to learn the secrets of the world, you had to go to the spiritual beings that lived in that very world. He wanted to use his clairvoyant powers of the soul to learn how nature lives in its creation, to eavesdrop on the secrets of the world in all the countries he traveled through. Not from books, but from the great book of nature, he wanted to turn the individual pages of the same, as he said, while traveling from place to place. Paracelsus believed that behind the sensual lies the spiritual and that what is outwardly perceptible is only a manifestation of the spiritual. The great, all-embracing spiritual has different sensual forms in plants, animals and humans in different countries and climates, although the spiritual is unified. He sought the spiritual in its diversity, like a hidden aroma or a concealed light. It was also clear to him that the external form of the current life, including that of the types of humanity and the individual peoples, in their healthy and diseased states, also belong to these diversities. He imagined disease to be something mysterious, but with a different character in Germany, Hungary, Italy, and so on. He wanted to get to know what came to his mind when he was directly confronted with nature, in order to establish a salutary science of medicine. When we see Paracelsus placed in the multiform world, we recognize how he found special powers in the great book of nature and in his soul, and what he said, according to his studies and experiences, takes on an almost personal character. He developed a very unique state of mind as a result of his special relationship with nature. Without this leading to arrogance, he said that he felt forces speaking in and through him, which he felt as if not his own arbitrariness and logic, but as if nature were speaking directly in and through him. Only someone who is capable of grasping such a relationship, in which Paracelsus felt completely natural and at ease, will be able to understand how he could not relate to his colleagues and their books differently than actually occurred, since it did not appear to him that they were striving for genuine knowledge, when he said: “He who wants to learn and practice true pharmacology should not go to the old authors, not to Galen and Avicenna, not to Bologna, Paris and so on, not to those, not there, but follow me; for mine is the monarchy!” He was so grounded in himself, and his motto was: “No one should be a servant to another; he can remain alone for himself.” Thus, we see Paracelsus as an honest, defiant personality among his contemporaries, as a person in whom a clairvoyant power had emerged, who knew how nature lived in its creation, how it expressed itself in the healthy and diseased state of man.

But just as uncomfortable as he felt as a student, so he also felt as a professor and city physician in Basel. Although he was famous for his travels and his skills, and although he was able to help where all others failed, he was more or less considered by his colleagues to be a tramp who had roamed with dubious people, and although he should have behaved differently as a teacher in office and dignity, he had remained the same even in his university life. So he didn't get along with his colleagues either; even when we follow him on his travels, how he performs famous cures on the poor, on princes and respected people, and is cheated of his fee by them, as well as at the highest levels. He became famous, among other things, for healing a person whom we can regard as a forerunner of the age of printing, namely Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam, who, as a credible scholar, expressed a judgment full of respect and reverence for Paracelsus. In Basel, a strange and momentous event took place: Paracelsus cured a canon of Lichtenfels of a severe and painful illness, and had stipulated a fee of one hundred talers for the cure. The sufferer took the remedies prescribed by Paracelsus three times, and then recovered. However, he did not want to pay the sum for such a simple service, as he saw it. Paracelsus then became quite angry and sent loose notes around the whole city. The city council, however, told him that if, after such insults to the highly esteemed canon, he had not left the city within half an hour, he would be put in prison. Paracelsus therefore fled from the city under the cover of darkness.

As he so often clashed with his environment, so it happened with his colleagues, since he cured according to other aspects. Besides, they took it very badly that he shared the connections that were self-evident to him, which he had overheard as secrets of nature and now applied to the healing and care of the sick, quite unashamedly, that he and connected, did not believe that he should express them better in the Latin language with its sharp, abstract contours, but instead used the living German language with its great flexibility and fine nuances. His colleagues did not understand how his knowledge, which was inaccessible to them, was interwoven with innumerable imponderables, how he was able to present this in German, contrary to the custom of learned schools, to his listeners, and thereby dare to reduce the dignity of the university according to their outdated view. During his wanderings, they tried to blacken his name everywhere. The scholars challenged him to Latin disputations, which he accepted, but in which, in the event of technical differences, he shouted at them in German, thus providing a vivid picture of the relationship between him and his contemporaries. It is understandable that almost everyone treated such a man in the most hostile way, and also that his life could only be short in such a grueling struggle. With his comprehensive and penetrating knowledge, he was unable to adapt to the externalized habits of his colleagues in his field and to wear the old-fashioned robe in which they appeared at the university at that time, so that they said of him: “Our colleague Paracelsus was seen walking around in the robe of a cart driver.” Those who felt they were no match for him in terms of knowledge and ability, and whom he openly despised because of their scientific masquerade, can be understood to have felt a deep hatred for him, and this is the source of the legend that formed at the end of his life: that he was deliberately annoyed to death or even thrown off the mountain near Salzburg. Thus we see his portrait, traversed by the deep traces of mental labor and the furrows of suffering that his opponents had caused.

In order to get closer to the spiritual life of this man, we have to try to answer the question of how Paracelsus actually imagined the surrounding nature, which he needed for his medical science, and human nature in his individual way; how peculiar his spiritual conception was. He initially established the following points of view: One must be able to comprehend the whole great world, the macrocosm, in its manifestation and understand how man, as microcosm, is situated in it as a particular detail, how air relates to the lungs, light to the eye, how the same works outside and inside in man. Everything that has effect outside we also find in man with its laws. Therefore, we have to look for what can make a person healthy or sick in the macrocosm, especially as a member of the Earth planet as a large organism in which the human being represents a link. He then said: Although the human being can be integrated into the chain of natural phenomena, he is still a self-contained being. The forces of the whole of nature are concentrated in man, but cannot easily lead him to cut himself off from the external forces and beings of nature. This is because, said Paracelsus, man has within him a living architect, an “archaeus”, who literally tears him away from the whole of nature and gives him his own unique configuration.

Paracelsus wanted to explore what a person absorbs from external influences in order to then process them within themselves, and he took such elementary insights to the highest expression. This is the most important thing to him, but not much is said about it. When man eats bread and fruit, for example, he said, the “archaeus” transforms it in man into flesh, into the various substances of the organs, as an inner alchemist, and depending on how this happens, the external substances become healthy, useful bodily substances or poison. He then examined this transformation, the unconscious art of this being, and viewed a certain type of disease from this perspective.

He established the third law: what has been integrated in this way is organized from many groups of individual organs and is independent. The human being is a whole small world, a microcosm in the image of the macrocosm.

He therefore came to the conclusion that out there in the cosmic conditions of the large planetary bodies there is something that corresponds to the microcosm of the human being. For example, the way the sun and moon relate to each other is how the heart relates to the brain internally; so you have to study both in their uniqueness and mutual interrelations and transfer them to the human being in their effectiveness, and likewise transform Saturn and Jupiter in their movements, sizes and light conditions to the liver and spleen of the human being, as their microcosmic image.

Thus, he constructed an internal heaven from the organs of the human being as an image of the external starry sky. He thought of the dynamically differentiated energies in the human being in this way, considering nothing to be separate, but everything in lively interaction. It is interesting to see how he defended what appeared to him to be the effect of an inner heavenly system, not as a rough interaction of the food we take in, but in rough language: “Oh, they don't understand anything, those who believe that the food we take in interior according to their chemical constitution, so to speak, only in continuation of their external chemical forces; because that would be about the same as regarding the plant as an effect of the dung, compared to the living configuration of the organs active in the human being. Thus, we see how the interacting organs appear to him like the dynamics of a complicated clockwork, and Paracelsus says: Man can therefore be “offended”, depending on the inner alchemist prepares the spiritual or unspiritual, with normal or anomalous interaction of the organs, even without external causes!

Fourthly, Paracelsus says as a basic principle: the soul falls ill through its own passions and emotional upheavals, with the organism also affected as an after-effect.

Finally, as a fifth point of view: the completeness of the science of medicine is given to him by the fact that the person in his illness must be seen as someone who suffers from his fate - karma - from something that towers above him spiritually, that intervenes in the spiritual microcosm from the spiritual macrocosm, so that the former is completely under the influence of the latter.

Thus, Paracelsus combined a wide-ranging knowledge with the greatest trust in the spiritual and mental powers of the human being, but also with the broadest trust in the spiritual forces of the great world that underlies the organization of the human being. He therefore said, through the mind we find God behind the natural event, through faith we find Christ and through imagination we find the Holy Spirit. He had a deep soul, his heart was imbued with the most intimate piety. We see the most essential part of his clairvoyant vision in his piety, from which everything that accompanied his deeds as a doctor emerged. It is therefore understandable that he described love and hope as his two most important remedies, and the nature of his medical treatment emerged for him without fail from this, when he did everything in full love and devotion that was possible according to his five points of view, and in the knowledge of these connections, he hoped that his remedy would have the healing effect that he had intuitively seen. He lived completely with the disease and the conditions of his patients in general. He looked clairvoyantly according to his five aspects, what had worked from the outside into the person, what the “inner alchemist” had done on it. What then penetrated from the great spirit of the whole of nature to the sick person, was not reflected back to him in abstract terms, but in such a way that it flowed down from the sick person to him again and concentrated in him to that which he had to prescribe as a remedy. Therefore, we can understand how Paracelsus was deeply convinced that his medical work was a continuous production as an artist. He guided the substances beyond nature to become effective remedies by forming and combining them for this purpose. Higher nature in nature was his art, his intention and his alchemy; he created art products in relation to nature. In Paracelsus, something reminds us of Goethe's saying:

When the healthy nature of man functions as a whole, when he feels himself to be a part of a great, beautiful, dignified and valuable whole in the world, when harmonious comfort grants him pure, free delight – then the universe, if it could feel itself, would exult as if it had reached its goal and would admire the summit of its own becoming and being.

There is no more precise way to describe this clairvoyant man than through these words!

And if we turn our gaze from Paracelsus to Goethe over the centuries, then, despite all the differences, Goethe's spirit has much in common with that of Paracelsus. We see that, as a young boy, Goethe placed himself in nature when, at the age of seven, he took a music stand, decorated it with all kinds of minerals from his father's collection, with plants and shells, crowned the whole thing with a small incense cone, and then waited for the sun to rise. He collected the rays in a burning glass, ignited the incense stick with it, and thus offered a sacrifice to the great, almighty God in front of his altar. If we consider the motives for which the young Goethe acted in this way, then we feel how he, like Paracelsus, felt most intimately connected with nature. Paracelsus said of himself, as a rough-and-ready country boy, that he was sent out of the house in all weathers, and that he did not grow up in soft beds on figs and wheat bread, but on sour milk and coarse oat bread.

In Goethe, we find a rarely disturbed harmony, always soon regained, also in his view of nature, which is evident in many ways in his work as a scientific researcher on his trip to Italy, where he, like Paracelsus, traveled the country observing keenly and wrote home about coltsfoot, for example, which, among other things, particularly caught his eye as it developed in different ways after changing the climate and sun, location, soil type and so on. He sees the emergence of diversity from unity, as he particularly wanted to demonstrate with the primal plant, from which he developed the diversity of plant natural phenomena. He also wrote that he would like to travel further to India, not to discover something new, but to follow nature in its ever-changing diversity.

In this way, something in Goethe was awakened that can be found in many ways in the figure of Paracelsus. And when Goethe embodied his main character in Faust, many traits are interwoven into this that evoke the thought that, when conceiving of “Faust”, Goethe was under the influence of the character of Paracelsus, despite the great difference between “Faust” and the historical Paracelsus, who died before the end of the forties of his life, but until then carried an inner harmonious seclusion as a treasure in his soul, which he had gained from his intimate intercourse with nature. It was only a short lifetime of this in itself rarely happy spirit, which his research results and his professional activity connected with the eternal reasons of nature.

Faust begins where Paracelsus ends, but with great doubt in all his extensive knowledge, Faust strives in the years of his life that Paracelsus no longer reached.

Goethe had developed Faust to the point where he had reached the stage of soul development that Paracelsus had when he penetrated into the essence of nature, when Faust breaks out into the words:

Exalted Spirit, thou gavest me, gavest me everything
I asked for. Thou didst not turn
Thy countenance to me in fire in vain.
Gavest me the glorious kingdom of nature
and the power to feel and enjoy it. Thou dost
allow only cold, wondering visitors,
granting me to look into her deep breast,
as into the bosom of a friend.
You drove the line of the living
before me, and taught me my brothers
in the silent bush, in air and water.

Thus he was related to the life and workings of nature, but nevertheless Faust's research was different from that of Paracelsus; for Goethe shows us that Faust's insights are not always gained in direct contact with nature, as they are with Paracelsus, but remain confined to the realm of the soul forces.

Therefore, in Mephistopheles, without such a confrontation with the phenomena of nature, Goethe brought a confrontation of the soul, so that the soul was not seen in nature, but only in the soul.

And yet, we can see a strong relationship between Faust and Paracelsus when the latter put the Bible aside for a long time and turned away from it, just as Paracelsus did from the learned works of Galen and Avicenna. Both trusted their own powers to find their own way. Thus we feel that Goethe often sees Paracelsus in the background and, to a certain extent, sees him through Faust. For example, in the scene where Faust goes out into the spring landscape with Wagner and recounts:

My father was a dark man of honor
Who, in his own way, thought long and hard
about nature and its sacred circles
with whimsical effort;
who, in the company of adepts,
locked himself in the black kitchen
and, according to endless recipes,
brewed up the adverse.
Then a red lion, a bold suitor,
was married in the lukewarm bath of the lily,
and then both tormented with open flames
from one bridal chamber into another.

One could almost see Paracelsus talking to his father. Or when we read how Faust struggles to “translate the New Testament into his beloved German”, into the language that flows from his soul, just as Paracelsus does not want to express the wisdom of nature that he has deciphered in the foreign Latin, but only in German. But nowhere in Faust does the struggle with the surrounding nature in the direction of its knowledge appear as it does in Paracelsus, but in the first part with moral, in the second part with spiritual, spiritual powers - Homunculus.

What Faust wanted to achieve was something natural for Paracelsus, who thought and acted completely selflessly. Only at the end, after a selfish life, when he had become blind in old age, did Faust achieve selflessness, when “a bright light shines within”, when he became a mystic, when he gained insight into the innermost being, which Paracelsus had discovered throughout his life as an elementary feeling spirit from external nature. Paracelsus was the dawn at the turn of the fifteenth to the sixteenth century, clearly visible to all. In Faust, we can only seek it within, as a soul-acting power.

Why was Goethe able to describe Faust as he did? Because something special occurred in the development of humanity between the life of Paracelsus and the conception of Faust, which powerfully shifted the earlier conditions and steered them into new channels. What Copernicus and Kepler discovered, Paracelsus no longer experienced. He was only the dawn of a science that had then entered the morning dawn from the sensual into the supersensual. Paracelsus penetrated through the phenomenal side of nature to the spirit, but through Copernicus and the men working in his spirit, humanity has been led into the age of intellectuality, of thinking, which does not want to penetrate the veil to explain the world of the senses in the sense of earlier times, but seeks satisfaction in the knowledge of the soul. It was therefore inevitable that a spiritual approach would be chosen as the basis for the work of Goethe's Faust, just as Copernicus, Kepler, Giordano Bruno and Galileo worked in the same way. As a mystic, Paracelsus appropriated the same knowledge that Faust acquired through direct observation of nature. Goethe's Faust shows how modern man depends on the inner life of the soul. In the same way, spiritual science searches in the depths of the soul for that which can lead from the transitory to the infinite eternal.

After Paracelsus, a new era dawned, which said that if we turn to the non-sensuous, we will gain a correct understanding of our world system. And so Goethe presented his Faust as a representative of this view who had risen to a higher level. Spiritual science is advancing along this path, which leads from the realm of the soul into the secrets of nature. Just as Giordano Bruno broke through the blue firmament of the eighth sphere, so spiritual science is now breaking through the boundaries of birth and death by revealing the soul as an infinite being that reaches beyond space and time. Goethe thus seems like someone who shows us the beginning of the right path by presenting us with an image in Faust, to which the memory of Paracelsus leads us, in order to be able to understand him even more.

Thus, individual human beings are placed in the context of the further development of the world, and so today, too, man must again break new ground so that he can find the harmonization of his soul forces in his insights, beyond Paracelsus and Faust. Based on such relationships, one feels more and more deeply the inner affinity between Paracelsus and Goethe, especially in the latter's words:

When the healthy nature of man functions as a whole, when he feels himself to be a part of a great, beautiful, dignified and valuable whole in the world, when harmonious comfort grants him pure, free delight – then the universe, if it could feel itself, would exult as if it had reached its goal and would admire the summit of its own becoming and being.

In man as in a microcosm, Goethe, like Paracelsus, seeks and sees the entire workings of the great world, the macrocosm.

On the way back from the birthplace of Paracelsus in Maria-Einsiedeln, one is thoroughly shaken by the journey over the valley and hills, and in this way, one becomes quite aware of the gnarled character of Paracelsus, in addition to which, the memory of Goethe also resurfaced on approaching the pilgrimage church. Symbolically, the spirit of the great seemed to manifest itself to me in the outwardly small-looking church of Maria-Einsiedeln, as soon as one really lets the interior take effect on oneself and appreciates the tasteful interior in its kind accordingly. Goethe once stood in this atmospheric room, in this small yet great church, which, like a microcosm in the macrocosm, also presented the human being as an image of the great world to the contemplative observer. I sensed this in his words and could imagine how Goethe, in this place where Paracelsus often stood, felt the basic sensation of the correspondence between macrocosm and microcosm in man becoming clearly expressed within himself. The path from Paracelsus to Goethe shows us this: the two boundary points of this path, the evening star and the rising sun of the new age, point to a profound similarity between the souls of the two men as a living protest against an external, unspiritual, non-spiritual understanding of things, which Goethe says in Faust, and which, significantly, Mephisto says:

Who wants to recognize and describe something alive,
First seeks to drive out the spirit,
Then he has the parts in his hand,
Unfortunately, only the spiritual bond is missing.
Encheiresin naturae is what chemistry calls it,
Mocks itself and does not know how.

This also belongs to the character of Paracelsus as a living protest against overlooking the whole when considering the parts. Instead of the final words, Goethe had written in the earlier version of “Faust”:

He makes himself an ass and does not know how.

Paracelsus and Goethe both condemned such a view of nature; both were inspired by the opposite tendency, which, in line with Mephisto's words, could be translated as:

Who wants to get to the bottom of something living
should seek to fathom the spirit in the depths!
And when he has the parts in his hand,
he sees the spirit's light
as the only salvation in the spiritual bond
that holds together what otherwise does not recognize itself
and the secrets of the universe.

Report in the “General-Anzeiger der Münchner Neuesten Nachrichten” of December 17, 1905

C. Th. “Brotherhood and the struggle for existence”. Dr. Rudolf Steiner, the well-known speaker of the Theosophical Society, gave a lecture on December 15 [= 16] in the Prince's Hall of Café Luitpold, in which he discussed the above topic from a theosophical point of view. The Theosophical Society regards it as one of its tasks to work for the brotherhood of mankind, for the ideal of universal love. So the speaker was led to choose the above topic. In a lengthy exposition, he sought to show how, according to the theosophical view, the development towards a separate existence in the struggle for existence must be followed by the gradual overcoming of egoism through devotion to other beings in the higher consciousness of the spiritual connection of all beings in the divine being, from which everything has emerged. We have grown out of the whole, we must grow back into the whole. According to the theosophical ideal, the brotherhood of man must also be an inner one. We must recognize the soul of others and seek to give ourselves spiritually to our neighbor. In this way, people who are already at one in the highest thoughts of reason and intellect must be led upwards to harmony. Egoism has led people to toil, love will lead them to salvation. - The lecture, which was received with approval, was followed by a lengthy question and answer session.

then the wonderful words in it:

“She has thought and continues to think; but not as a
human being, but as nature.”

That is to say, Goethe is clear about one thing: spinning a mechanical web of concepts about nature does not provide an understanding of nature. Only such a deeper search in the existence of nature creates knowledge of nature, through which the human soul finds in the depths of this natural existence that which is related to what it can seek out in the depths of its own being when it penetrates into them.

We may now ask: Is such striving, as it can be characterized by Kant, can be characterized by the ideal figure of Goethe's Faust, - is this striving a solitary, a merely individual one, or does it have anything to do with the overall striving of the German national spirit, the German national soul? Even if we consider Kant, the abstract philosopher, who hardly ventured a few miles beyond Königsberg and spent his whole life in abstract thought, we clearly see, especially in the way he worked his way from his earlier world view to his later one, how he, despite his reclusiveness, developed out of everything all that in the German national spirit aspired after certainty, and how, owing to this national spirit, he did not come to a narrowing of the human soul to the sphere of mere human thinking, but was led up to the horizon on which the whole range of ideas and ideals appeared to him, which give man impulses in the course of his human development.

One might say that what was later expressed by the most German of German philosophers, Fichte, already lives in Kant; what has become so dear to the German worldview, especially from the eighteenth century onward, already lives in Kant. This German world view came to value having a view of the world that does not need to be disconcerted by what presents itself to the senses, for the absolute validity of that which is man's duty, love, divine devotion, moral world. overlooks the world and looks at the way in which he is placed in the world, he sees himself surrounded by the field of vision of sensual impressions and what he can divine behind them; but he also sees himself placed in such a way that he world without this second aspect of the world; he sees himself so placed that behind him, in his soul, the divine ideals are at work, which become his duty and deed, and these ideals do not bear the coarse sensual character that the world of external movement and external revelation has. One might say that when the German mind looks at the stiffness and smoothness of natural existence, to speak symbolically, at the mechanical movement in the unfolding of natural processes, it feels the need to recognize: How can we become immersed in that which is so indifferent in nature, that which appears in ideals as a demand, as a duty, as a moral life? How can we become immersed in that which appears as the highest value of life, as a moral ideal? How does the reality of moral ideals relate to the reality of external nature? This is a question that cannot be answered lightly, but which can also be found in tremendous depth, heart-wrenching. And so it was felt in the best German minds at the time when Kant's world view was forming. Sensuality had to be presented in such a way that it was no obstacle to the moral world flowing into the world through human beings. Morality could not be a reality that presents itself indifferently, and against which moral ideas must rebound. When moral ideas from the spiritual world are put into action through human beings, they must not be repelled by the rigid materialistic barrier of the sensory world. This must be taken as a profound insight, then one understands why Kant wants to dethrone ordinary knowledge so that a real source can be thought for the moral idea. Then one understands Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who coined the paradoxical , but which arose from deep German striving: “All sensuality, everything we can see and feel outside and think about the external world, is only the sensualized material of our duty.” The true world is the world of the ruling spirit, which lives itself out as man perceives it in ideas and ideals, and these are the true reality, they are what pulses through the world as a current, what only needs something to which it can apply itself, to illustrate it. Sensuality has no independent existence for Fichte, but is the sensitized material for human fulfillment of duty.

From a philosophy that seeks to validate everything spiritual, that must be sought from a natural disposition towards idealism, such words emerged; and one may find such words one-sided, but that does not matter when such words are made into dogma. But to take them as symptoms of a striving that lives in a people, that is the significant thing; and to recognize that such minds, which create in the sense of such a word, precisely because of the idealistic character of the German national soul, elevate Germanness to the arena of thought. In order to give thought its vitality, human knowledge and striving must go beyond what Cartesius could merely find. And Goethe's Faust, this image of the highest human endeavor, this image that one must first struggle to understand by allowing many German cultural elements to take effect, from what did it emerge? — It is truly not invented, did not come about in such a way that a single person created it out of themselves; rather, it emerged from the legends, from the poetry of the people themselves. Faust lived in the people, and Goethe was still familiar with the “puppet show of Dr. Faust”; and in the simple folk character, he already saw the traits that he only elevated to the arena of thoughts. Nothing is more vivid than Goethe's “Faust” to show how something supreme can emerge from what lives most deeply, most elementarily, most intimately in the simple folk being. One would like to say: not Goethe and Goethe's nature alone created Faust, but that Goethe brought Faust forth like a germ that lay within the German national organism, and gave it its essence, embodied it in such a way that this embodiment corresponds at the same time to the highest striving of the German spirit for the arena of thought. Not the striving of isolated personalities out of their own nature, but precisely when it confronts us in its greatness from the whole nation, it is the result of German idealism.

And how does thought work within this German idealism? One comes to an understanding of how it works precisely by comparing this German idealistic striving of thought with what is also a striving of thought, let us say, for example, in Descartes. In Descartes, thought confines man within the narrowest limits; it works as a mere thought and remains as such confined to the world in which man lives directly with his senses and his mind. Within German idealism, the personality does not merely encounter the thought as it enters the soul, but the thought becomes a mirror image of that which is alive outside the soul, that which vibrates and permeates the universe, that which is spiritual outside of man, that which is above and below the spirit of man, of which nature is the outer revelation and the life of the soul is the inner revelation. Thus, thought becomes an image of the spirit itself; and by rising to the level of thought, the German wants to rise through thought to the living spirit, wants to penetrate into that world that lives behind the veil of nature in such a way that by penetrating this veil, man not only visualizes something, but penetrates with his own life into a life that is related to him. And again, since man is not satisfied with what he can experience in his soul, he seeks to penetrate into what lies behind thinking, feeling and willing, for which these three are outer shells, for which even the thought is only an inner revelation, in which man lives and works, in which he knows himself as in a living being that creates the scene of thoughts within him. And so we can see how, especially in those times when the German mind, seemingly so detached from external reality, from external experience, strove for a world view, this German mind felt itself entirely dominant and weaving within the arena of thought. And there is first of all Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who regards external nature only as an external stimulus to that which he actually wants to seek, to whom, as already mentioned, the whole of the external sense world has become only the sensitized material of our duty; who wants to live only in that which can penetrate from the depths of the world in a mental way and can be directly realized before the human soul. That is the essence of his world view, that only what emerges in a contemplative way from the deepest depths of the soul and announces itself as emerging from the deepest depths of the world is valid for him.

For his successor Schelling, the urge for nature, the Faustian urge, becomes so vivid within him that he considers the knowledge of nature, which only wants to express itself in concepts about nature, as nothing. Only when the human soul comes to regard all of nature as the physiognomy of man, only when nature is regarded in such a way that nature is the physiognomy of the spirit that rules it, only then does one live in true knowledge of nature; but then, by penetrating through the bark, one feels creative in nature. And again, a paradoxical but appropriate word for the essence of Germanness comes from Schelling: To recognize nature is actually to create nature! Admittedly, this is at first a one-sided saying; but a saying that represents a one-sidedness need not remain so; rather, if it is rightly recognized, this creative knowledge of nature will lead the spirit to reflect inwardly, to awaken slumbering powers within itself, which penetrate to the spiritual sources of nature. The source, the germ of that which can be true spiritual science, we can find it precisely within this world picture of German idealism!

In the third of the German idealistic philosophers, in Hegel, who is difficult to understand and who is so far removed from many, this lively character of the scene of the thoughts within German idealism appears in the same way. In our own time, when the abstract is so much decried and mere thought is so little loved, this world-view strikes us as strange. And yet Hegel feels himself closely connected with the Goethean direction of nature towards the spirit. The content of his world-view – what is it if not mere thinking, a progression from one thought to another? With his world-view we are presented with a thought organism; necessity is created for us, so that we stand face to face with a mere thought organism, which we can only create by thinking it, as we would with any other organism through our senses. But behind this presentation of a thought organism there is a consciousness, a certain attitude. This attitude consists in stripping away all sense perceptions, all perceptions of the senses, for a few moments of world-gazing, stripping away everything that one wants and feels as an individual, and surrendering to what as if the thought itself were taking one step after another, — that man then immerses himself in a world that is a thinking world, but no longer his thinking world, so that he no longer says to this world: I think, therefore I am! but: “The spirit of the world thinks in me, and I give myself to the spirit of the world as a theater, so that in what I offer as soul to the all-encompassing spirit of the world, this spirit can develop its thoughts from stage to stage and show me how it bases its thoughts on world-becoming. And the deepest religious impulse is connected with the striving to experience in the soul only what that soul can experience when it surrenders all its own being to the thinking that thinks itself within it. One must also see this Hegelian philosophy, this so idealistic excerpt from the German essence, in such a way that one does not take it as a dogmatics, on which one can swear or not, but as something that, like a symptom of German striving in a certain time, can stand before us. In Hegel's philosophy, the world spirit appears as a mere thinker; but while it is true that much more than mere thinking was needed to shape the world, it is nevertheless true that the path that once led to it, to seek logic, is one which produces in man the attitude towards the living that reigns behind existence and which leads man to the scene not of abstract, intellectual thought, but of living thought, which in the experience of thought has experience of the world.

The three idealists, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, sought to elevate the human spirit to the realm of thought in three different directions: Fichte tried to shine a light into the depths of the human ego and did not say, like Descartes, “I think, therefore I am!” For Fichte, if he had only been able to arrive at Descartes' thought, would have said: “There I find within me a rigid existence, an existence to which I must look. But that is not an ego. I am only an ego if I can secure my own existence myself at any time. Not through the act of thought, not through mere thinking can I arrive at my ego, but through an act of action. That is a continuous creative process. It does not depend on looking at its being; it leaves its previous being; but by having the power to create itself again in the next moment, out of the act of doing, it is constantly being reborn. Fichte does not grasp the thought in its abstract form, but in its immediate life on the scene of the thought itself, where he creates vividly and lives creatively. And Schelling, he tries to recognize nature, and with genuinely German feeling he lives into the secrets of nature, even if, of course, his statements, if you want to take them as dogma, can be presented as fantastic. But he immerses himself in natural processes with his deepest emotions, so that he does not feel merely as a passive observer of nature, as a being that merely looks at nature, but as a being that submerges itself in the plant and creates with the plant in order to understand plant creation. He seeks to rise from created nature to creative nature. He seeks to become as intimate with creative nature as with a human being with whom he is friends. This is an archetypally German trait in the Schellingian nature. Goethe sought to approach nature in a similar way from his point of view, as his Faust expresses it, as to the “bosom of a friend”. There Goethe, to describe how far removed every abstract observer is from a contemplation of nature, there he calls what he, as an external naturalist, is to the earth, his friendship with the earth. So human, so directly alive does the German spirit feel itself in Goethe to the spirit that reigns in nature in the striving to be scientific, in that he wants to raise science itself to the arena of thoughts. And Hegelian logic – abstract, cold, sober thought in Hegel – what becomes of it? When one considers how mere logic often appears to man, and compares this with what prevails in Hegel's idealistic world-view, then one gets the right impression of the world-importance of this Hegelian idealism. In Hegel's work, what appears to be the furthest thing from mysticism, the clear, crystal-clear, one might say, crystal-cold thought itself, is felt and experienced in such a way that although the thought , but that what the soul experiences in terms of thought is direct mystical experience; for what Hegel experiences in terms of thought is a becoming one with the divine world spirit, which itself permeates and lives through the world. Thus, in Hegel, the greatest clarity and conceptual sobriety become the warmest and most vibrant mysticism. This magic is brought about by the way in which the German mind rises from its direct and living idealism to the realm of thought. In doing so, it proves that what matters is not the individual expressions that are arrived at, but the soul foundations from which the human soul seeks a worldview. Hegel is said to be a dry logician. In answer to this it may be said: He who calls Hegel's logic by that name is himself dry and cold. He who is able to approach this logic in the right way can feel how it pulsates out of German idealism; he can feel in the apparently abstract thoughts, which in Hegel's system are so spun out of one another, the most living warmth of soul that is necessary to strip away all individuality and to connect with the divine, so that in Hegel logic and mysticism can no longer be distinguished; that although nothing is nebulous in it, a mystical trait prevails in all its details.

Even in our time, the German mind, even the opponents of German idealism, has endeavored time and again to fathom the fundamental idealism of this German nature in its significance as a riddle. And the best German minds, even those who are opponents of Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, if we turn our gaze to them, we still find that the development of Germany consists in absorbing more and more of the basic impulses of this idealism.

How these fundamental impulses can lead to a living experience of the spiritual worlds has often been discussed and will be discussed more often. Attention should only be drawn to how – one might say – German idealism, after it had reached one of its high points in the German world view, then continued to have an effect on German intellectual life as a different impulse. There was a period in this German intellectual life, and it was lived out in minds of the very, very first order until the middle of the 19th century, until the last third of the 19th century, when the view was that such creative work as is expressed, for example, in Goethe's Faust, where thought really takes hold of the imagination directly and can unfold dramatic creativity, was only possible within poetry; but the development of humanity shows that, for example, in the sphere of natural science, the same process of thinking can be observed that is expressed in Goethe's Faust. example, in Goethe's Faust, where thought takes hold of the imagination directly and can unfold dramatic creation, is only possible within poetry; but the development of humanity shows that, for example, music has a different area; that music is, as it were, the field that does not seek to grasp the highest in man by the detour of a work of fiction such as Faust, but that music is the field in which sensuality must be grasped directly. For example, the contrast between the legend of Don Juan and that of Faust has been cited, with a certain amount of justification after the experiences that could be had within the development of humanity, how mistaken it is to legend on the same level as the Faust legend; it has been asserted that what this other legend, which shows man completely absorbed in sensual experience, can be correspondingly portrayed only within music that directly evokes and seizes sensuality. — The way in which the German does not rise to the scene of thought in the abstract, but in a lively way, has also brought the refutation of this view. In Richard Wagner, we have in modern times the spirit that has triumphed over the merely external, emotional element in music, that has sought to deepen the setting of the thoughts so that the thought itself could take hold of the element that was thought to live only in music. To spiritualize music from the standpoint of the spirit, to show that, was also only possible for German idealism. One can say: Richard Wagner showed that in the most demure element for thought there is nothing that could resist or be opposed to the strength of life that dominates the German spirit. If, through his philosophy and his contemplation of nature, the German has tried to present nature to his soul in such a way that the seemingly mechanical, the seemingly external and rigid loses its mechanical aspect and what would otherwise appear in a formal way comes to life and moves as soulfully and vividly as the human soul itself , on the other hand, the element that flows in the immediate sensual sequence of tones has been allowed to seek its connection, its marriage, with that which leads the human soul to the highest heights and depths in the realm of thoughts, in Wagner's music, which has thus effected an elevation of an artistic-sensual element into a directly spiritual atmosphere.

This aspect of German idealism, which leads to a result that can be characterized as the soul standing on the scene of thought – I wanted to characterize this aspect today with a few strokes. This trait of German idealism, this living comprehension of the otherwise dead thought, is one side, but a remarkable side, of the nature of the German people, and will appear as a remarkable phenomenon to anyone who, I might say, is able to place themselves within the German people in a way that revitalizes thought within themselves. Indeed, the German cannot arrive at the fundamental trait of his people's character other than by penetrating ever deeper into the self-knowledge of the human being. And this the German may, as it seems to me, feel so rightly in our immediate present, where this German essence really has to defend itself in a fight imposed on it, where this German essence must become aware of itself by having to wage a fight, which it feels is due to it from the task that appears to it as a sacred one, entrusted to it by the world forces and world powers themselves. And although today, in a different way than in the times of which we have mainly spoken, the German must fight for his world standing, his world importance, it must still come to life before our soul, for which the German today enters into a world-historical struggle. A future history will have to establish more and more the deeper connection between the German soul, struggling through the course of the world, and the bloody events of the times, which, however, bring us bliss out of pain and suffering. I wanted nothing with today's reflection but to show that the German has no need to speak out of hatred or outrage when he wants to compare his nature with that of other nations. We do not need to point out the nature of the German soul in order to exalt ourselves, but in order to recognize our duties as they have been handed down to us by world history, we may point this out. And we do not need, as unfortunately happens today in the camp of our enemies, to invent all sorts of things that can serve to belittle the opponent, but we can point out the positive that works in the German national substance. We can let the facts speak, and they can tell us that the German does not want to, but must, according to his abilities, which are inspired by the world spirit, his nature, his abilities – without any arrogance – in comparison to the nature of other peoples.

From this point of view, we do not need to fall into what so unfortunately many of our opponents fall into. We look over to the West. We certainly do not need to do as the French do, who, in wanting to characterize German nature in its barbarism, as they think, in its baseness, want to exalt themselves; truly, the French needed, as they believe, a new sophistry to do so. And minds that spoke highly of the German character just before the war, even at famous teaching institutions, can now, as we can see, find the opportunity to advocate the view that, given the nature of his world view, the German cannot help but conquer and , as Boutroux says, to assimilate what is around him; for the German does not want to ascend to the sources of existence in a modest way, as Boutroux thinks, but claims that he is connected to these sources, that he carries the deity within himself and must therefore also carry all other nations within himself. This German world view is certainly profound; but it is not conceived immodestly.

Nor perhaps does the German need what is sought today from the British side when German character is to be characterized. The British, in emphasizing the peculiarities of their own national character, have never taken much interest in penetrating the German national character. When the forties in Germany were passing through a period of development, it seemed to me that the German mind was so fully occupied with the sphere of ideas that the way Hegel's disciples thought was felt by Schelling , who was still alive, and by his students, was felt to be too abstract, too logical, and that on Schelling's side, efforts were made to gain a greater liveliness for the thoughts themselves on the stage of thoughts. Whereas in Hegel one sensed that he allowed one thought to emerge from another through logical rigor, Schelling wanted people to sense the thoughts as active, living things that do not need to be proven in logic, just as what happens from person to person in living interaction cannot be encompassed in logic. He wanted to grasp it in something that is more than logic, wanted to grasp it in a living way, and that is how a great dispute arose on the scene, which the German tries to illuminate with the light he wants to ignite from his living knowledge. The English observed this dispute that arose. A London newspaper wrote what seemed to them a clever article about this dispute, in which it was said: These Germans are actually abstruse visionaries. Many are concerned with the question of who is right: Schelling or Hegel. The truth is only that Hegel is obscure and Schelling even more obscure; and the one who finds this is the one who will most easily come to terms with things—a piece of wisdom that roughly corresponds to the point of view of studying the world not when it is illuminated by the sun but at night, when all cats are black or gray. But anyone who today surveys the British judgment on the necessity of what is happening within the German character will perhaps be reminded of such “deeply understanding” words, especially when these words are used primarily to conceal what is actually taking effect and what one does not want to admit even to oneself. The present-day British really need a new mask to characterize their relationship to the Germans, and the foreign philosophers need a new sophistry to disparage Germany – a new sophistry that they have found since the outbreak of the war.

And the Italians? They also need something to reassure them about their own actions at the present time. Without arrogance, the German may say: it will uplift him within the difficult world situation when he thinks of the duty the world spirit has assigned to him, as he gains self-knowledge and this becomes knowledge of the German essence. What he should do will flow to him as realization from the realization of the German essence. When D'Annunzio spoke his resounding words before the Italian war broke out, he truly did not delve as deeply into Italian national character as he could have. But it is not for us Germans, who have gladly immersed ourselves in what the Roman spirit has created, to believe that d'Annunzio's hollow words really come from the deepest essence of Italian culture; but that they come from the motives that d'Annunzio needs to justify himself. The others needed sophistry, masks, to remove the causes of the war from their own soil, so to speak. The Italian needed something else, a justification that we have already seen emerging in recent years, a strange justification: he needed a new saint, a saint appointed from within the ranks of the profane, “holy egoism”. We see it recurring again and again, and it is to this that we see the representatives of Italian character repeatedly appeal. A new saint was needed to justify what had been done.

Perhaps it will lead the objective, unbiased observer of the German character to a position within today's historical events; because German character does not arise from such sophistry, such masks, nor from the “appointment of a new saint”, but from human nature, from what this human nature allows to be expressed, from what the national spirit of the German people has revealed to the best minds of this people have revealed to this people, but also what these spirits hoped for the people, because that is also a peculiarity of this German nature, which can be described by saying that the German always sought to direct his soul's gaze to what was aroused in him from the scene of thoughts, and from this he also wanted to recognize what hope he could harbor for what his people could achieve.

And today, when we need to develop love, a great deal of love, for what the ancestors of the German character have established within the German national soul and national strength, in order to place ourselves in today's historical events through this love, today, when we need faith in the strength of the present, today when we need confident hope for the success of that which the German character must achieve in the future. Today, we can look at what Germans have always loved, believed, and hoped for in the context of their past, present, and future. And so let us end with the words of a man who is indeed unknown today in the widest circles, but who in lonely thought wanted to fathom the popular and the intellectual of Goethe's Faust in those years of German life in which Germany had not yet produced the German state in its modern form. In those years, which preceded the deeds of the German power, in the sixties, a lonely thinker was concerned with the idea: in imagination, in the life of the soul, in idealism, the German wanted to rise to the highest that can only somehow be sensed by him. He had to develop a strength that must lie in his nature and that gives us hope that this strength will be fruitful, victorious in action. A simple German Faust observer, an observer of poetry that truly shows that German nature holds future forces, is quoted with his words. By pointing to words that Goethe himself, intuitively placing himself in the German future, spoke as a 65-year-old old man, he ties his own words to them and says:

"The earnest style, the high art of the ancients,
the primeval secret of eternal forms,
It is familiar with men and with gods,
It will leaf through rocks as through books.
For what Homer created and the Scipios
will never live in the scholarly hothouse!
They wanted to transplant us into the hothouse;
But the German oak grew to the whole!
A storm of growth has overtaken her,
She has taken the glass from the hothouse with her.
Now grow, O oak, grow to the delight of the world.
I can already see new solar auras flying.
And when my gray eyelashes close,
A mild light will still pour forth,
From whose reflection of those stars
The late grandchildren will learn to see,
To report in prophetically higher visions
Of God and humanity higher things.»

And the Faust viewer from the sixties continues:

"Let us add the wish that the Master's word, which looks down on us from better stars with a mild light, may come true in its people, who are seeking their way to clarity in darkness, confusion and urge, but with God's will, with indestructible strength, and that in those higher accounts of God and humanity, which the poet of Faust expects of the coming centuries, German deed too may no longer be a symbolic shadow, but in beautiful, life-affirming reality, may one day find its place and its glorification alongside German thought and German feeling!

We believe that such hopes, expressed by the best of Germans from the deepest German national sentiment, may be fulfilled in our own day, out of the blood and the creative energy of our courageous and active people. We believe that in these difficult days the German can develop to his strength, over which the atmosphere of hatred spreads, still another: that he can vividly grasp to strengthen his strength the love for what has been handed down in spirit and strength, in the life and work of his fathers as a sacred legacy, because he can be convinced that he, by permeating himself with this love for the past, he will find the strength to believe; because in this faith and this love he may find the hope for those fruits that must blossom for the German people out of blood and suffering, but also out of the blessed deed of the present, which the German performs not out of bellicosity but out of devotion to a necessity imposed on him by history. Thus, in the present difficult times, what may support, uplift and guide the German through the difficult struggle in which he finds himself is integrated into German life, German work, German feeling and sentiment: love for the German past, faith in the German present, confident hope for the German future.

It has been several decades since a certain scientific method of comparing different religions was developed. Those who devote themselves to this comparison are struck by how much agreement, even similarity, there is between the different religions. The most diverse evidence is cited to show that a certain core of belief underlies them all, from the Indian to the Germanic, the Near Eastern to the Greek, and that it can even be found in the uncivilized peoples of Africa and North America. The childlike predispositions of the various peoples have worked in the same way and have wanted to give enlightenment about the soul, the world, and God in the same way; for everywhere man is subject to the same powerlessness in the face of impending fate. The so-called Enlightenment assumes that people have attributed divine beings and forces to natural phenomena; it starts from the point of view that all religious beliefs are childish fantasies and that, finally, nations have now entered the age of reason, when people finally know how to understand these things.

But a thorough investigation teaches us otherwise. By comparing the Indian and Germanic intellectual spheres, we realize that before a thorough research, that doctrine of fantasy figures does not hold up. The deeper one penetrates, the more that hypothesis of enlightenment collapses, and two things prove that it is nothing: Firstly, we discover a deep meaning in the childlike ideas of recognized wild peoples. The more impartially we look at them, the deeper such folk religions appear to us; images and animals are the content of ideas that have an infinitely deep meaning.

Secondly, the people do not create poetry in the way that the gentlemen at the green table of scholarship imagine it. The people do not personify natural phenomena. Thus, the saga of Indra, which tells of how he set out with seven priestly sages to reclaim a number of cows that had escaped him to culture, was interpreted as if the god Indra personified the dawn and the seven cows personified darkness. Likewise, Buddha was seen as the sun god and it was said that his life was a personification of the sun – in short, the people personify natural phenomena.

Such a poetic folk poetry does not exist. Only those who are strangers to the people can arrive at such a view. Those who penetrate deeper will become more and more familiar with what spiritual research teaches in the Secret Doctrine.

The childlike religious ideas proceed from pure higher spiritual ideas and from the fact that a common, similar view underlies the various myths. This teaching is called the secret teaching of humanity. It has always been supported by the great spiritual leaders of humanity. Religions come not from the poetic folk poetry, but from the great initiates.

The original wisdom is the same, only it is structured according to the abilities and talents of the different peoples; thus we find a different form for the Greek peninsula, another for American, Indian, Germanic peoples. The different images are adapted to the different ways of life and talents of the individuals.

The profound spiritual basis reveals to us that a secret primordial revelation underlies all these religions. To many, this truth seems incredible, but only because of unfamiliarity with the facts, which appear to be imperfect because the great leaders can only give them such an expression as will be understood.

The very general secret doctrine of the fundamental primal generation is interesting in the history of the development of nations.

Although it is a sin against the holy spirit of modern monism to regard man as a two-part entity, and one risks being called a dualist, despite the unified origin , which of course underlies what we call “human”, the two-part nature of his being can be justifiably demonstrated, just as the existence of water can be demonstrated from hydrogen and oxygen. The two substances are present in it despite the unity of the whole. In the same way, it can be shown that the higher and lower selves of the human being have a common source. How a person's nature expresses itself, how he lives, strives and works, is revealed in a duality, just as water is revealed in the duality of hydrogen and oxygen. We therefore distinguish:

Firstly, the lower nature, which is more physical, more of the lower nature of matter.

Secondly, the higher nature, which is more spiritual, more of the higher nature of the spirit.

Development consists in ennobling the lower nature. No one has presented this better than Schiller in his “Aesthetic Letters,” where he says: Man is subject to the necessities of nature on the one hand, he is their slave as long as he clings to them, but he is also a slave to ironclad necessity of reason. Only he awakens to freedom who ennobles the lower nature through the higher nature. It is not the man who denies his lower nature who stands high, but he who ennobles it so that he can abandon himself to it.

The Secret Doctrine teaches that man overcomes his sensual nature through the spiritual and transforms his being in such a way that he receives a new impression of spirituality. The mystics often say: Man is a small world, and what surrounds him is the great world. He contains in miniature everything that the great world has around him. Schiller writes to Goethe in the first letter:

They take all of nature together to get light on the individual; in the totality of its manifestations, they seek the explanation for the individual. Goethe wanted man to be recognized as a microcosm in relation to the macrocosm, the great world. Paracelsus expressed it in the beautiful image: When we observe the individual phenomena of nature outside, they appear like letters, man as the word composed of them. Everything that is scattered outside in the great is in the small man.

In the sense of the secret teaching, the struggle that is fought within man and finally receives his purification is an image of the great struggle in nature outside. Just as in man the lower nature of the physical-visible is opposed to the spiritual nature of the invisible, so the Secret Doctrine opposes the nature of the visible universe - stones, plants, animals - as the second, the forces of nature, which are hidden in the individual things.

The divine part of man also corresponds to a divine part here. The Secret Doctrine also distinguishes here between the visible and the invisible, the physical and the spiritual. The man before you seems to be what is outwardly expressed in his plastic form, but through deeper causes, in the outburst of his passions, the forces of his lower nature are revealed. Likewise, nature, like man in his body, finds physical expression in physical forms, in which forces are hidden just as they are in the lower nature of man. The lightning flashes in the cloud. The Secret Doctrine not only shows this comparison as fundamental, but also that the divine entities in nature are related to what rules and lives in man as his spirit. The same thing that ennobles the lower nature of man has overcome the lower nature in nature. Minerals, plants and animals are the plastic expression of the nature of God in descending order, while the invisible spirits in nature signify, for the Secret Doctrine, the ascent into the higher nature. They are more advanced entities than man. Animals, plants and minerals are further advanced on the descending path.

A picture of this development is given by coal. It is stone, a mineral. Millions of years ago it was part of living beings, plants. Great forests have perished and become these stone masses. What was once a living being has become a fossil. This is admitted by science.

In the sea basin, limestone formations are piled up in many different ways, created by animals that secreted lime shells. Here we find vast masses of limestone, prepared by living things. The dead is nothing other than a product of life.

The question arises: how does the living emerge from the dead?

In truth, not only does the living emerge from the dead, but all that is dead emerges from the living. Even rock crystal is a differentiation from the primal living.

If we follow the line of descent downwards from animals to fish, we finally find cartilaginous fish that have not yet developed any bones. In the same way, the physical human being has ancestors that had cartilage instead of bone, who are not yet at the stage where the petrification process has begun. Just as human bone turns to stone, so granite masses have also emerged from what was originally soft living matter.

Where does everything come from? From an original living organization, and this from original spirituality. — We find the overcoming of the lower by the higher everywhere, even outside. The lower has detached itself by the higher detaching itself.

But then there must be a great unity: as between the spiritual and the physical in man, so also a great unity between the great spirituality and the lower nature outside.

This unity is expressed by the various creeds. Just as it is clear that those who have today thrown off the lower nature were once struggling and striving beings, so the initiates are simply more advanced than their brothers; they have overcome the struggle and therefore know more.

At the bottom of all creeds we find the premise of the struggle of the higher nature against the lower and the conviction that there are initiates who are the leaders of humanity. — How has the Secret Doctrine been expressed among the Germanic peoples? There too we find the interpretation that the people have been poetizing, symbolizing the forces of nature.

We find a basis for the theosophical world view in a work by Ludwig Laistner: “Riddles of the Sphinx” on myth research. As is so often the case, the theosophist can learn the most from the non-theosophist, so we may start from his basic principles here. Let us start from a simple folk tale, the legend of the Midday Woman. She lives in the most diverse areas and has the following content: If you go to the field early in the morning to work and fail to go home at the appropriate hour, during the lunch break between twelve and one o'clock, the midday woman appears and asks him questions that are difficult to answer, about weaving, flax cultivation and the like, related to his work. During the whole of the lunch hour, questions are asked of him, all of which he must answer. If he misses even one, she comes with the sickle and cuts his throat. In some areas, it is said that you can get rid of her by reciting the Lord's Prayer, but it is not that simple, it has to be recited backwards, not from the beginning, but from the end. There is another spinning room saying related to this legend: “You ask like the midday woman.” Laistner interprets it as follows: This legend has its origin in the state that is brought about in a person when he stays outside in the field and falls asleep. Then the environment has such an effect that the dream always takes on this form in a similar way. Laistner traces all these legends back to the riddle of the Sphinx. It is the same torment of questioning that is found in this. In between lies a whole world of myths and legends. It has nothing to do with folk poetry, but can be explained by what the dream does to the sleeper. The dream is the main symbol. You catch a frog in your dream, wake up and find the corner of the bedspread in your hand. Legends and myths simply have their origin in the dream fantasy. From there, Laistner would have had only one step to the theosophical view, according to which there is not only the ordinary everyday state of consciousness, but another state of consciousness that, like the dream images, gives the outer things a different meaning: the tip of the bedspread is transformed into the image of a frog. The dream, a means of occult development, gives symbols of a higher spiritual world. Then, in contrast to this ordinary dream state, a higher state of consciousness arises in which the human being becomes aware of sensory perceptions. What shines into the dawning consciousness from the higher state of consciousness is the dream. This state is also present in a dull form in mediums in a trance: daytime consciousness is extinguished and a dusky consciousness has set in.

Everything in the world has developed, including man's consciousness today. Just as his organs have changed, so has he changed in terms of consciousness. He used to have no daytime consciousness, but a dim clairvoyant consciousness. Just as the body has organs whose significance fades, so the state that the person who misses the lunch break falls into is an echo of the old clairvoyant consciousness. It works in such a way that the untrained person sees everything the wrong way round; things appear as if in a mirror image. So, for example, you have to read 365 563. In this higher spiritual world, the astral world, man sees his desire. Everything in this plan attacks him in a retrograde direction, in the opposite order. The people therefore say quite correctly: If you want to escape the midday woman, you have to say the Lord's Prayer backwards, namely do something that does not correspond to the laws of this world.

These legends and myths deal with a different state of consciousness. It is only in this light that they can be explained to our medieval ancestors. Our ancestors had a clairvoyant consciousness, and the legends are echoes of it. This is the secret of the Germanic myths in particular. If you look behind the scenes of nature, you will see how the myths are expressed.

The dragon fight of the Siegfried saga is nothing other than the fight of higher wisdom against lower wisdom. The ancient Germans were a nation of warriors, their god was a warrior god, and their fight was a fight against dragons.

The astral picture, perceived clairvoyantly, can also be found in the Baldur saga: the primal struggle of the older brothers, the gods, against the lower ones, which has its echo in the forces of nature. The people see this and express it clairvoyantly as the real overcoming of Baldur by the blind Hödur.

It is said that Baldur represents the sun god, who was overcome by the winter god. But the saga means the struggle between beings of light and beings of darkness. The old Teuton remembers the primeval times, when he saw the darkness illuminated by spiritual light, when he saw the darkness illuminated by astral light - Hödur means astral blindness. — The clairvoyant consciousness has experienced the saga of Baldur. The Secret Doctrine, which tells us that there were initiates, also presents Wotan as an initiate. He was not a divine being, but a man who had raised himself up. The story that he hung on the gallows for nine days, wriggled through gorges and crevices like a snake to Gunnlöd, in order to receive the drink of initiation from the Valkyrie's cup, is consistent with the ancient cross initiation, with Egyptian mysticism. For three days and nights, Wotan is with Gunnlöd as a snake, which refers to the initiates. The higher soul, through which the ascent to higher levels is accomplished, is designated by the feminine.

The saga of Siegfried is also a picture of initiation. Siegfried acquires invulnerability, that is, he becomes insensitive to physical impressions, and thus becomes a companion of the Valkyrie. The initiates become invisible through the magic hood, that is, invisible as initiates, otherwise they remain visible (physically).

What then is initiation? Every nation has developed its secret teaching in a way that corresponds to its customs and traditions. The Germans were warriors, and a hero was called one who had fallen on the battlefield; he began the journey to Valhalla. The Valkyrie met him, that is, his own higher soul meets him when he passes through the gates of death.

“He who does not die before dying, when he dies, perishes.” That is, he who does not learn about that world beforehand, dies with death. Initiation is the forefeeling of what awaits the soul when it passes through the gates of death. The blessed warrior is united with the Valkyrie when he enters Valhalla: Siegfried with Brünhild. The leaders of the people clothed the initiation in this form. Even in this part of the saga, the Secret Doctrine finds expression in language that the people can understand.

The divine world, which has suppressed its nature, we find again in the giants.

The Secret Doctrine also tells how the migration of the peoples took place. Between Europe and America lay the Atlantic continent. Even the “Kosmos,” a magazine that swims in the Haeckelian direction, presents this as a hypothesis in the tenth issue. It only recognizes the existence of plants and animals, but that does not prevent the presence of humans, because science always lags behind.

From then on, people turned eastwards. Those who moved as far as Central and Eastern Asia form the basis of ancient Indian Asia, those who remained behind form the basis of the Celts and Germans. The Celts have progressed furthest in the transformation from the old dull clairvoyant consciousness to the present sensual consciousness. The Germans remained with the astral consciousness of the Atlanteans long after the Asians had developed to the day consciousness.

In the epoch before the Vedas, the teaching arose that was based more on ordinary day-consciousness. But man can never lose the connection with the spiritual, and so the longing arose there to find the way to the old clairvoyance by artificial means. That artificial clairvoyance arose there, which the wise strove for through inner development - yoga. Thus in India we have artificial clairvoyance with complete consciousness during the day, while among the Teutons the old consciousness of clairvoyance is still preserved. Among the Teutons, myths and legends form a dim expression of the secret doctrine as compared with that obtained by the initiates of modern times through artificial clairvoyance. For the people who no longer have clairvoyance, the divine worlds must be depicted. That is where the idol images come from, artificially prepared replicas by man. Among the ancient Germans, the old myths still lived in the people, in the old, retained symbolism, while in ancient India, the secret doctrine is artificially expressed by those who aspire to it. What we obtain from India is therefore more of an intellectual form, but the same secret doctrine that is expressed much more directly in the old Germanic myths.

The idols of the Indians and the theosophical doctrine: The renewal of the more theosophical doctrine of artificial clairvoyance in India goes completely parallel with what still lives in the old legends in Germania. Therefore, we do not need any Indian terminology in Europe, we only need to understand and revive what is original in Europe. We can get to the bottom of a great European secret doctrine and will get there.

The course of the secret teaching is determined by something else. The course of the future is prophetically expressed in the old Germanic secret teaching. The reference to Christianity is expressed in a powerful way. The research into legends, which is connected with the secret teaching, finds a coherent truth in the legend and in Christianity. Krimhild betrays her husband by attaching the cross. What does this deep trait indicate? It indicates the prophetic reference to the cross of Christ. Siegfried, the initiate, is invulnerable all over his body; only one spot is not invulnerable for the great initiate, the spot where Christ bears the cross. With the spread of Christianity, this spot has also become invulnerable.

In India we have a secret teaching that expresses itself rationally and symbolically, in Europe the old Germanic myth remained in the astral expression until Jesus Christ. Through Christianity, the myth has been replaced.

The task of Theosophy is to work in the sense of this spiritual development of humanity, to establish the deep connection between the ancient Germans and modern times. We cannot simply propagate the culture of the Orient; we must take into account the Germanic and Christian original culture. We must not seek the basis of the secret doctrine in Sanskrit dogmas, but we must seek the core of truth in those forms of religion that are appropriate to the European folk substance, seek what exists as an emanation of the secret doctrine in the Germanic world of legends.

That was the artist's intention when he gave a new culture by transforming the Germanic saga, that was Richard Wagner's intention when he reworked the old German sagas.

Theosophy also seeks the traces of the ancient secret teachings that live at the heart of the Germanic saga. Those who follow these traces will gradually find their way into Theosophy. However, we must not think in the same way as those who have “come so gloriously far”. For every nation has done its part in its own way. And in this sense, we in the Brotherhood must place unity and the harmony of the basic teaching above the differences in our views and presentations. If we seek the truth in every opinion and place brotherly love above the selfishness of our opinions, then we are acting in the true sense of the theosophical view of life.

Report in the “Münchner Neueste Nachrichten”, April 1906

Theosophical lectures. The theosophical speaker Dr. Rudolf Steiner gave two well-received lectures in the Prinzensaal of Café Luitpold on “Germanic and Indian Secret Doctrine” and on “Inner Development”. In the first lecture, the speaker tried to argue that the origin of legends and myths cannot be traced back to the personification of natural phenomena by the poetic fantasy of the people, as Ludwig Laistner had already suggested in “Riddle of the Sphinx” another explanation for the origin of certain myths, but that the strangely profound meaning of myths and legends point to regarding them as the symbolic expression of primal truths, which are intuitively recognized by primitive peoples themselves in images and symbols, and are also presented by the great teachers of humanity, who are initiated into the “primal secret teachings,” in images adapted to the understanding and character of the peoples of Asia, America, Africa and Europe. Thus, for example, we find the struggle of the higher nature with the lower, the spiritual battle of development, the primal fight, which takes place in the macrocosm as well as in the microcosm, and which the gods, that is, the beings who were the first to fight for spiritual development, fought in primeval times, is illustrated in the myths of the fight of the gods and heroes with the dragon. In the cycle of Teutonic myths we also find the fight against the dragon and the fight against the giants, the powers of the lower nature. For the warlike Germanic peoples, who regarded bravery as the highest virtue, the doctrine of the higher and lower self also found expression in the fact that the warrior who fell on the battlefield, elevated by his heroic death, moves up to Valhalla to meet his own higher soul, the Valkyrie, who comes to meet him. The speaker then expressed the view that the Theosophical Society in Europe had the primary task of working for an understanding of the great truths and beauties of the Germanic world of legends, as well as for a deeper understanding of the symbols of Christianity, since the forms of the Orient cannot be transferred to Europe without further ado. It must shine into the depths of the beautiful and true of the Germanic world of legends, which the great master Wagner artistically resurrected, and utilize it for her spiritualized conception of the world and life, as well as the primal truth of the Christianity brought to the Germanic world, which was destined to replace the old myths.

In the second lecture, the speaker dealt, as already noted, with the topic of “inner development”. According to the theosophical view, in order to attain knowledge of the higher divine self, it is necessary for a person to first learn to regard all things as an expression of the eternal primal being living in them, and to affirm the good in everything, unbiassed by preconceived judgments, and to strive for the good as an ideal. In order to find the spiritual, eternal in one's own being, the striving person must therefore practice the necessary isolation to achieve stillness and silence of soul, the lonely life in one's own soul, without the outside world, instead of losing and dispersing oneself in the outside world. Furthermore, one must practice acting on one's own initiative instead of always being driven from the outside, in one's own thinking while controlling the thoughts that impose themselves and are suggested by the outside world, in composure, indifference to joy and sorrow, pleasure and displeasure, in the courage to be independent, in the courage to relying strictly on oneself, leaning on nothing, alone in life, then in the concentration of thought (meditation) by abstracting from sensory impressions, for which, as is well known, the regulation of breathing is also considered beneficial in the practice of yoga in India. In this way, mystics gradually seek to create the freedom of mental calm, the “calm of the soul”, which should lead the soul completely into itself, allowing a new inner world to arise in freedom of thought.