The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Dear attendees! For a number of years now, I have been privileged to give lectures here in this city in the field of spiritual science. Since the friends of our spiritual science movement have also requested such lectures here for these fateful times, I would like to present you with a reflection that takes more of an attitude of spiritual science as its starting point today; and tomorrow we will then delve deeper into questions of spiritual knowledge that move the heart and soul. It will be understandable that this introductory lecture is being held today, since everything that can move us today, especially when it is close to the heart and soul, must really be carried out after the fateful events in the midst of which we stand.

One could say that the nations of Central Europe are locked in a fortress, a large, mighty fortress. And in the east and west, the existence of this Central Europe is, so to speak, being called into question. And what a sum of courage, sacrifice and devotion have we seen in the months since the beginning of the war; and how much suffering and pain have we had to witness! How the days of suffering and pain, with their events, affect families, how fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters are connected with them!

Therefore, it must be important to us to introduce our reflections on the spiritual development and spiritual hopes of humanity with a few thoughts and feelings that are directed towards the difficult situation of our time. We hear this Central European culture vilified from all sides, reviled. We hear all sorts of things today from the east and west and from all sides about this Central European culture. We may undoubtedly, my dear attendees, see the significant deeds of our people and see them as related to the whole essence of our people's organism. I would like to say: what is happening today is happening through the arms of this organism. But it befits the very essence of the German people to consider the arms, the essence of the spirit, the essence of the soul of this organism. And what better way to do that than by remembering, at such a fateful and fateful moment, the significant and important deeds of the soul and spirit of the German people, and by drawing strength from them for our hopes and goals for the future.

And I would like to take the starting point of what we, as the essence of the German people, can envision from two outstanding geniuses of this people: Schiller and Fichte. Within the German essence, has it always been the custom, in difficult times, to draw strength from those who, as great ancestors, can provide this strength? And I would like to make this connection today, truly not to stir up emotional feelings in you, but because I believe that such a connection can be meaningful in our days, the connection to the days of the death of these two mentioned geniuses. It is possible for us – as I said, not to stir our emotions, but because I believe that this point of view is particularly close to our hearts and souls in these days – it is possible for us to look at the last days, yes, the hours of Schiller's and Fichte's death very intimately, very confidentially.

Schiller's death was described to us by his then young friend, the son of Johann Heinrich Voß, Heinrich Voß, the so-called younger Voß. And we can follow him, our Schiller in the last days of his life, as he is already dying, sustained solely by the powers of the spirit that prevail in him. Yes, with Schiller we can say that basically the body was long since doomed to die, while the strong, energetic spirit still prevailed and just dragged the body along. For, as this body was so completely decrepit, Heinrich Voß shows us, so to speak. He leads us into Schiller's death chamber, and we take part in the last hours of the great spiritual hero. We are told how Schiller, in these last hours, with his body already completely subject to death, with a yellowed face, with extinct eyes, still strong in spirit in these moments, how he had his last, his youngest child come to him in these last hours, how he looked the child long in the eye and then sent thoughts out of these eyes, one would like to say into the eyes. The younger Voss wanted to divine these thoughts, and we can say that, as he tells us, they will be correctly divined. It was as if Schiller wanted to say to the child – what he could only express in these rasping words: I should have been your father for much longer, I still have much to do for you. Then he handed the child back, turned away and looked at the wall again.

Do we not feel, my dear audience, as if the whole German nation, the soul of the whole German nation, could recognize itself in this child? Schiller, who died young, could also have said to our nation: I could have been much more to you, I have left much unsaid and undone for you. But he dies fully imbued with the inner energy of that which he felt to be the German spirit, that spirit which carried him through life, inspired him to his creations, sustained him as his body wasted away, that spirit whose world-historical mission he himself described in such moving words that we may well bring these words before our souls in these times. These words only became known long after Schiller's death, but they bear witness to how Schiller thought about the spirit of his people:

He who forms the mind, rules,
must ultimately become the ruler, because
finally at the goal of time, if the
life has any meaning at all,
must custom and reason triumph,
the brute force of form succumb
and the slowest people will catch up with all
the fast fleeting ones.
[...]
Him

– the German –

is destined for the highest,
and just as he is in the center of
Europe's peoples,
he is the core of humanity,
those are the flower and the leaf.

He has been chosen by the world spirit, during
the battle of the ages
to work on the eternal construction of human education,
to preserve what time brings,
Therefore, he has so far appropriated what is foreign
and preserved it within himself.
Everything that was valuable in other times
and peoples, that arose, developed and faded with the times, he has preserved;
he has not lost the treasures of
centuries;
Not to shine in the moment and
play a role, but to win the great
process of time. Every people
has its day in history, but
the day of the Germans is the harvest of
all time.

And today, in these fateful days, we may well remember the spirit that Schiller believed must be the harvest of all time, the harvest of the cultural development of mankind.

And if we turn our attention from Schiller, the great poet, to his friend, the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte, we see no less of the German spirit in the soul of a human being when we look at Fichte's last hours on earth. Schiller was often able to tie in what he had to say to his people in a work, which will be discussed shortly, with Fichte's strong, forceful philosophy. Yes, Fichte's philosophy is energetic and powerful. It is as if, from the whole scope, the universality of the genius of the philosopher Fichte, he wanted to extract everything that this German mind has of load-bearing capacity, to draw out everything that can affirm the strongest will in the strongest thought. And so, as Fichte spoke the beautiful word: “What kind of philosophy you have depends on what kind of person you are,” it can be said that we see this word proven in truth in Fichte in particular; because he felt connected to the German spirit, which was so dear to him, Fichte felt at the same time connected with the rule and weaving of the whole world spirit, felt in every word he spoke, carried by the spirit that permeates and flows through the world. But this philosopher did not live only in the abstract spirit. When Germany was going through the difficult times at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Fichte, the philosopher, often considered whether he should not take part as a warrior in the fateful events of the time. But then he found that he could do more for his nation through his intellectual work. So it happened that at first only his wife took part in the military hospital service in Berlin. But she brought illness into his house by contagion. She recovered, but he himself, the philosopher, was carried off by the military hospital fever.

And now we see how Fichte, who presented the diamond-bright, crystal-clear thoughts of the most German philosophy to humanity, lay on his sickbed in the last days of his life, waiting for news of Blücher's crossing of the Rhine and everything that the people in the west had to undertake. We see how he, who had decided not to be physically among the fighting because he wanted to serve his people and humanity with his mind, we see how he took part in the warlike events of his time in his feverish dreams in his last hours. And we experience the wonderful interplay of a worldview with life even in illness and even in the death rattle when we see how Fichte allowed everything that he wanted to give to the German people through his powerful philosophy to flow into his feverish dreams. We see how he feels in his dreams in the midst of the struggling, and how he feels at the same time as resting securely with his soul in the spiritual world. The dying philosopher Fichte, without fear and full of hope for his people, said when they wanted to give him medicine: “I do not need medicine, because I know I will recover.” Shortly before, he had been given the news of Blücher's crossing of the Rhine. Thus, in the life of the man who is fully immersed in German intellectual life, this intellectual life and the immediate life of the surroundings interact. For this German intellectual life is not an idealistic, dreamy one, but one that always enters into all the individual achievements of its German people. And today, we can justifiably claim that everything achieved in the face of blood and death, pain and suffering, is sustained by the power that permeates our intellectual experience.

And so we see this Fichte, imbued with the best power of the German spirit! Today, we can only sketch out some of the characteristics of what lived in Fichte's mind. In one of Germany's darkest hours, when Germany had been brought to its knees by the western conqueror, Fichte spoke his “Speeches to the German Nation”. Certainly not everything that Fichte spoke at the time can be agreed with today, word for word. But the spirit that inspired him must also be ours. Just as Fichte assumed at the time that the German language is a primal language that developed like an organism from the starting point of German history in Europe, while the Romance languages of the West and South suffered a break in their development, while they originally started from something Germanic, but adopted something foreign that they put over the folk essence in the Romance essence.

If Fichte infers something from the character of this original language, which developed out of the essence of the German and grew like an organic force, then today this may be contestable from a linguistic point of view. But what inspired Fichte, what constitutes the fundamental character of his philosophy of will and thought, is that Fichte reflected on what is most original in man, what is connected in man with all the sources of life in the soul. Fichte sees flourishing and truly authentic destiny hopes only where the soul is able to bring forth from itself what lies in its depths. Fichte saw an emblem of the fact that the German spirit aspires to this in the German language. But even if we can no longer go into the details of Fichte's point of view today, we must still look at how what he then expressed in accordance with his time was formed in Fichte.

What did Fichte strive for in his philosophy? We need only recall what spiritual science actually wants to be. It wants to be a knowledge that does not passively surrender itself merely to the phenomena of the external world, that does not merely allow itself to be passively stimulated with reference to the mind that is bound to the brain, but spiritual science wants to be, if we want to use the expression in all humility, a brave science. It wants to be a science that comes about through the development of the higher human being in man, as Schiller said, the actual spiritual human being, through the development of that which is connected in man's own being with the great spiritual being of the world, which lives in man in such a way that when man recognizes it, he at the same time knows himself to be living and weaving in the divine-spiritual world being itself. But this is what Fichte was constantly seeking. And so he feels connected to the most spiritual part of the world through the knowledge that he sought to acquire from the human soul. Or how could one express the spiritual certainty that man can attain more forcefully than when Fichte uses the words:

There is no doubt about it, it is the most certain thing there is, indeed, the basis of all other certainties, the only absolutely valid objective, that there is a moral world order, that every rational individual is assigned his specific place in this order and counted on for his work.

Thus Fichte's most German philosophy brought about the realization that it was the most certain thing for Fichte to know that he was a single soul in the entire spiritual world, that there is such a world order into which the individual is woven.

Fichte merely renewed in a manner appropriate to modern times that which has always prevailed in the German spirit: the striving for knowledge that arises from the powers of the human soul, which cannot end with death. And when we hear such words as those just quoted from Fichte, we are reminded of the words of the great German mystic Angelus Silesius: “It is not I who live and die in me, but God Himself who lives and dies in me.”

This striving for knowledge not only gives the soul a sense of security in the world spirit, but at the same time certainty with regard to its immortality. For how could one, in the soul experiencing and knowing God in the soul, not be aware of this immortality? For if the God in the human soul dies, then death is precisely a new resurrection. The German spirit constantly strove for such knowledge, which conquers death, for knowledge of the soul, so that this soul recognizes itself not only through the instruments of its body, but through purely spiritual instruments, so that it faces its bodily experience, its own body, in a body-free state, in brave science, as it were, just as one faces external objects in the body. But from such knowledge there arose such a wonderful saying as that of Jakob Boehme, in which is summarized, as it were, all that the German spirit has to say about the great riddles of life in their connection with the destiny of the human soul: “He who does not die before he dies, will perish when he dies.”

But that means nothing other than Jakob Böhme wants to suggest that a knowledge of the nature of the soul can be gained in life, of the soul as it will be once it has passed through the gate of death and looks back at its body. Because the one who does not acquire such knowledge before he dies will, in Jakob Böhme's view, perish when he dies.

And so spiritual science today not only seeks knowledge of the spiritual, which is, so to speak, an increase of ordinary knowledge in the body, but spiritual science seeks knowledge in the soul, insofar as this soul, between birth and death, ing can forces that it will also have after death, when it will look back on the body and the bodily life, where the body and bodily life will again be not subject but object, as in everyday life. And if today a spiritual scientist wants to use, so to speak, what German spirit can bring us today to make a comparison for something that Fichte wanted to say in his time, then he could take this comparison for a particular case from this spiritual science. I will develop this particular case before you.

Fichte, when he was thinking about what he wanted to say to his people, about how they could realize their hopes and find their goals in these fateful times, pointed to a completely new education that goes to the source of the stirrings of life in the soul, to the higher human being in the human being. Fichte knew at the time that what he wanted to present to his nation with this education – we can no longer think in this way today, but we can look to Fichte's intentions, perceptions and feelings – was probably clear to Fichte's soul as the salutary for the future, but when he compared it with what had been regarded as the essence of education up to his time, it could appear to him as something completely new that must wriggle out of the old, so that this new has no longer any similarity with the old. Then the more recent spiritual researcher could say, precisely on the basis of spiritual science, which Fichte did not yet have: “Now, I compare this new, this completely new education with the soul that has wrestled itself free from the body at death and now looks back on it.

And the spiritual researcher today could describe how the soul looks back on the body and the life of the body after death. There is a passage in Fichte's “Addresses to the German Nation” that is particularly significant in this regard. It is a passage that one might easily overlook, but it is good to bring it to mind today. Fichte himself sought a symbol for the relationship between his new education and the old one. And he says: “What I am putting forward as a new educational plan appears different from everything that has been thought to be right, so that it will not be easy for anyone to understand me.” And when Fichte seeks a symbol for the relationship between this new education and the old one, he uses the following image:

Time appears to me as an empty shadow that stands over its corpses, from which an army of diseases has just driven it, and laments and cannot tear its gaze away from the once-so-beloved shell and desperately tries all means to get back into the dwelling of the plague. The invigorating breezes of the other world, into which the departed has entered, have already taken her in and are surrounding her with warm, loving whispers; the secret voices of the sisters are already greeting her and welcoming her; she is already stirring and expanding within all directions, in order to develop the more glorious form to which she is to awaken, but she still has no feeling for these airs or hearing for these voices, or if she had, she is absorbed in pain over her loss, with which she believes she has lost herself at the same time.

We see from this, my dear attendees, that Fichte himself uses the image that we use today from a spiritual scientific consciousness. Fichte uses it from what he feels as the depth of the German spirit weaving within him and what he wanted to present to his people at the time. How deeply this awareness of the interweaving of the soul with the All-Spirit is linked to German spiritual life, when we see that what is being sought today and achieved in spiritual science is working its way out of the great philosopher of the German people like an energetic presentiment.

And if we go back from him to Schiller, we can see how the search for the most spiritual part of the soul runs through one of his most intimate, most beautiful, most magnificent prose works, one of those prose works in which man perceives what he sees with his eyes and hears with his ears, not only in terms of external sensuality, but experiences the spiritual in it through the deepening of the soul within himself, and this is so full of life in him that he experiences it pictorially artistically or, as one would say today, spiritually scientifically as reality. There the human being is free, there the human being gives birth to his higher self.

Schiller's highest aspiration is to seek the higher human being within himself. And here, ladies and gentlemen, we can see how basically everything that the German mind has achieved at its highest levels is connected with its universal striving towards spirituality, towards the intimate coexistence of the soul with the spirit. With Schiller, with Fichte, with Goethe, the same striving is everywhere to be found. And for these minds, the most characteristic thing is that being German coincides with being human in the right sense, in the striving for the highest human ideal. And with a mind like Goethe's, in particular, we see this once again, and the most beautiful expression of this is his “Faust”.

It is precisely in these minds that we see how being German is something different from being Italian, French, British or Russian. Here we have to use the word: you can be Italian, you can be French, British or Russian, but you become German. You are constantly becoming German. Then one is best of all Germans, when Germanness floats before one like a higher ideal, or one could say like a living spiritual goal in the distance, which one has to approach more and more. Therefore, the word that Lagarde spoke in more recent times: “Being German lies not in the blood, but in the mind.” — is extremely true precisely for these minds.

Therefore, it is difficult to make those who live around this Germanness understand it, and on whom this Germanness of Central Europe has to send its rays of influence. And from Fichte's mouth we hear an important and significant word about being German, and again in the “Speeches to the German Nation”:

[...] whoever believes in spirituality and freedom of this spirituality, and wants the eternal development of this spirituality through freedom, that wherever it is born and in whatever language it speaks, it is of our kind, it belongs to us and will join us.

This is the universal position of the greatest Germans with regard to what they felt as Germanness, as Germanity. This is how Germany's great philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte spoke in his “Speeches to the German Nation”, which he, as he said in one of the first speeches, wanted to hold by Germans per se to the German per se.

I said: Everything that asserted itself as the striving for spirituality, as the essence of Germanness, is concentrated, as it were, in what Goethe was to his people. And now we might ask ourselves: Has anyone in the world tried to form a correct idea of this essence and this striving of the German people? There were times when one could hear one or another European nation praising the German essence and emphasizing it in one way or another. But in many cases one has to say: the experiences of today in particular show us how little reason, how little inner truth there was in what was felt about the German character in the world. Indeed, there are people like the French philosopher Bergson – one does not know whether he will still call himself Bergson now that St. Petersburg is no longer called St. Petersburg but Petrograd – this French philosopher Bergson, he found that the he had to give to philosophy in our time, basically borrowed it entirely from the philosophy of German idealism. In German idealism, it appears comprehensive and universal, but in Bergson's work, it appears meager and threadbare. But he, who should know the German character, pointed out in a chauvinistic speech he gave last Christmas how the Germans had forgotten everything they had achieved in the way of spirituality. How the Germans once had something like spirituality, but now they only show themselves to be purely mechanistic. One need only point to what the Germans are now producing: mechanistic cannons, rifles, machines, everything has been transformed into mechanism.

One must be truly amazed at the logic that is going around the world today. After all, is it logical to speak as Bergson does? Even if one admits that the Germans once had Goethe, Schiller, Fichte, what, one might ask, did Bergson expect with his French logic? Did he expect that when the Central European peoples were threatened from all sides, threatened by a superior force two and a half times as strong, that they would then confront their enemies reciting Goethe and Schiller or declaiming Fichte's philosophy? Because they do not do this, the philosopher Bergson finds that the Germans have become a mechanistic people because they face their enemies with guns and cannons. Well, and from this French philosopher to that Monsieur Richepin, it is a straight line between what all the ranting and raving about the German people, the German essence can be heard. All the nuances of the ranting can be found. Richepin could not avoid saying that the Germans are wild, crazy, dirty beasts that must be strangled like wild pigs, all of them. There is a scale from the philosopher Bergson to such vilifications of the German people, which today vibrates throughout Europe. But then we may well ask ourselves: Has one always thought so about the German essence? About that German essence, which under today's conditions can naturally show nothing but its armies, but that German essence, which certainly only has to defend itself with its armies, but which has its foundation only in spirit and soul. It is interesting to contrast what is pulsating through the world today with this German essence in terms of its world position and its mission in the world. And here it is certainly no pleasant task to praise oneself, as it were, for that to which one is attached. So let us choose a different path, the path of looking around to see whether this German essence has always appeared “barbaric” to those who call it “barbaric” today, to those who have tried to understand it.

There is a thinker, a great thinker of the nineteenth century, an American thinker who spoke and wrote in English, Emerson. Since we do not want to judge German character ourselves, let us hear what a non-German, speaking English, Emerson in America, has to say about the nature of the German and his mission. Emerson ties in with Goethe, who is for him the representative of the German character, Goethe, in whom is summarized that which must also appear to us as the essential in Fichte and Schiller.

One phenomenon in particular, which Goethe shares with his entire nation, makes him stand out in the eyes of both the French and English public: that everything in his work is based solely on inner truth. In England and America, people respect talent, but they are only satisfied when it works for or against a party of its conviction. In France, people are delighted to see brilliant ideas going wherever they want. In all these countries, however, talented men write as far as their gifts reach. If what they present stimulates the discerning reader and contains nothing that offends against good manners, it is considered sufficient. So many columns, so many pleasantly and usefully spent hours. The German mind possesses neither the French vivacity nor the Englishman's understanding, honed to practicality, nor, finally, the American adventurousness. But what it does possess is a certain probity that never stops at the outward appearance of things, but always comes back to the main question: “Where is this going?” The German public demands of a writer that he stand above things and simply express himself about them. There is intellectual activity, well and good: what is it in favor of? What is the man's opinion? Where does he get [–where] all these thoughts?

The English [...] see only the individual, they do not know how to grasp humanity as a whole according to higher laws.

The Germans think for Europe.

The English do not appreciate the depth of the German genius.

It is true that one would be cautious if one had to coin such words oneself, but they were first uttered by an English American in English. Then he continues, looking at what the German mind has to give to world development:

For this reason, the terms of distinction used in higher conversation are all of German origin. While the English and French, who are praised for their acumen and erudition, approach their studies and points of view with a certain superficiality, and their personal character is not too deeply connected with what they have taken up and with the way they express themselves, is not too deeply connected, Goethe, the head and content of the German nation, speaks not because he has talent, but the truth concentrates its rays in his soul and shines out from it. He is wise in the highest degree, though his wisdom may often be obscured by his talent. However excellent what he says is, he has something even better in mind. [...] He has that awe-inspiring independence that arises from dealing with the truth.

Now, one could say that these are old stories. Emerson has been dead for a long time, and the Germans have changed according to those who judge them now in their lack of reflection caused by the passage of time. Perhaps we may look at something else that was said not decades ago, not a few months before the outbreak of the war, not by a German, not in Germany, but by an Englishman in Manchester. These words have also been translated into German and published under the title “Germany in the Nineteenth Century”.

In the preface, we are told that the lectures were given to provide journalists and other people with a little insight into the German character. You can judge for yourselves how well this has been received from what you now read in English newspapers about the German character and how it is viewed in England. But at that time the following was said, and not in German, but in English and in Manchester, in the British Isles themselves:

The highly favored elite among Descartes' and Newton's countrymen

- that is, the English [and French] —

the spirit of science was unquestionably known; but the passionate urge for knowledge was taught to modern Europe, if at all, mainly by thousands of German researchers.

Imagination, feeling, will asserted their right to be heard beside or above reason, and under their transforming pressure the universe became deeper, wider, and more wonderful.

It is strange what these Englishmen in Manchester know about the German character.

The irrational was recognized as a source of illumination; wisdom was sought from the child and the flower; science, philosophy and poetry drew near each other. With us in England this revival of the imagination created a noble poetry, but left the sciences and philosophy almost untouched. One of the keys to understanding the whole period

- please note that an Englishman is saying this –

is the fact that, while in England and France the poetic, philosophical and scientific movements flowed mostly in separate channels, in Germany they touched or merged completely. Wordsworth sang and Bentham calculated; but Hegel caught the genius of poetry in the net of his logic; and the thought that discovers and explains, and the imagination that creates, worked together in fruitful harmony in the genius of Goethe.

In Faust, at the end of his eventful life, we see a portrayal of present-day Germany, a Germany of restless, bold will and action, and we can understand all the better why the [great] cosmopolitan, in whose eyes state and nationality were subordinate and sometimes harmful ideals, nevertheless claims his unassailable place as the highest poet of the German Empire alongside Bismarck, his creator.

Yes, my dear attendees, one can only say: Yes, why do your fellow countrymen now call the people of Schiller and Goethe a “barbarian people”? This question will be asked by history about the development of these peoples for a long, long time, since they could know better. For I did not begin this consideration in order to answer the question: Why do they call the people of Fichte and Schiller a “barbarian people”?, but rather to show that this question will be asked for a long, long time [in the histories of Germany's enemies], and they, these other peoples, will have to answer it.

In these lectures, which these Englishmen gave to Englishmen, there is something that a German would truly not say in Germany; but it is not meant to be said here, only quoted: “No German words are more deeply imbued with the juice of national ethics than those that describe these things: true, thorough, faithful.”

Now, why then call the German people a “barbarian people”? And about the German Reich, the following was said in the same lectures:

On the whole, there is no question that the establishment of the German Reich has been beneficial to world peace. This explanation will seem strange to those who know nothing but the events of the present and for whom history is nothing more than an ever-changing, dazzling cinematograph. But history should be something more. It is fitting for it to let the light of the past shine on the confusion of the present, and in that higher light, things that seem hurtful will take on a natural appearance. For when we look to the past, we find that our ancestors

- he is, of course, referring to his English ancestors -

that our ancestors regarded France with far greater fear than the wildest noisemakers fear Germany today. And the fear of our ancestors had good reason. [...]

To sum up, the founding of the German Empire was a gain for Europe, and therefore also for Great Britain. For the events of the years 1866-1871 put an end once and for all to the possibility of waging predatory wars against the previously unprotected center of Europe, and thus removed a temptation to war that had so often often tempted into the wrong channels, they enabled the German people to develop their hitherto stunted political abilities, and they helped to establish on a firm basis a new European system that has preserved the peace for forty years. This blessing resulted from the fact that German unity achieved in one fell swoop what Great Britain, despite all its expenditure of blood and money, had never been able to achieve, namely to secure the balance of power in such a decisive way that a major war became the most dangerous of all ventures.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, if that is the case, why do they call the people of Central Europe a “barbarian people”? There is a strange preamble to the lectures from which I have quoted. You will have heard the name of Lord Haldane mentioned in an unpleasant way in the early weeks of the war. But it was this same Lord Haldane – who also spoke of the fact that the English, out of an overabundance of morality, could do nothing but join the other enemies of Germany to attack the Germans – well, this same Lord Haldane wrote a preface to the lectures, from which I would like to share a sample with you. In this preface, the Lord, who now claims that England could not help but punish Germany, says:

The source of the stream of its

- that is, Germany's -

intellectual and political life lies in the Reformation. But at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, a current unique in world history began to flow in a way that has been as continuous as it has been characteristic since that time. Since the days of ancient [Greece], the world has not seen such a spectacle of the closest fusion of the life of the statesman with that of the thinker. The spirit of Germany to-day is to a high degree concretely practical.

Yes, it is almost shameful to hear such a thing said. But I am not saying it, I am merely quoting it. Then Lord Haldane says:

Only the influence of true knowledge can dispel the clouds of mistrust and free us from the need to prepare for attacks that none of us really has in mind.

And a woman who spent eight years in Germany, an Englishwoman who visited hospitals and lecture halls and studied schools and everything she could get her hands on in Germany for eight years, she differs from the other Englishwomen in terms of her knowledge in that she really got to know the Germans and their institutions. She published a book called “Eight Years in Germany” by Miss Wylie. This book appeared very recently, just a few weeks before the outbreak of war. Miss Wylie has described some of the things she has learned about the German character here in Germany. I will share just a few words from her book with you, and you will see how the question that is the subject of our discussion today must be put.

Forty years ago, Germany was fighting for its existence. And it is still fighting for it today. It is completely wrong to believe that Germany is already at its peak. It is fighting a quiet but determined fight against powerful rivals whose power and experience was gained generations ago. [...]

On every border and across the water

- that is, over the Channel –

its opponents are sitting, both commercially and politically, and are waiting anxiously for the moment when Germany slackens up just a little, so that they can pounce on her and overwhelm her. Germany knows this [too] only too well.

We see that the German character was not entirely unknown to other nations. Therefore, we must consider the question of today's consideration as the question that will be asked of these nations by later history.

But at the same time, there is a complete lack of understanding of what is most deeply rooted in the German character, of what is most spiritual about it! Herman Grimm, the great art historian, was the one who uttered a wonderful word. He, this Herman Grimm – one can almost feel him as Goethe's governor in the second half of the nineteenth century – he, who was completely immersed in the German essence and was spiritually and emotionally connected to it, he spoke a very significant word about Goethe's biography, which the Englishman Lewes wrote. Lewes tried to weaken the old prejudices of the English with regard to Goethe. Because up until Lewes, every Englishman believed that the Germans revered a man, Goethe, who was actually a completely immoral fellow, despite having produced some beautiful things. With regard to Goethe's ethical nature, Mr. Lewes has achieved something. But Herman Grimm is right: when you read Lewes' biography, which is entitled “Goethe: His Life and Work”, you get the feeling that Lewes is writing about a person who was born in Frankfurt in 1749, a person to whom Goethe's life story is attributed, to whom Goethe's works are ascribed, and who died in March 1832. But what the German has in his Goethe is not even hinted at in Mr. Lewes' biography.

That is precisely what is so deeply ingrained in the German soul: universality, the desire to merge into that flowing spirituality and to transform the stream of spirituality into one's own being. That is what the peoples around Germany lack, and what they have basically still taken in very little to this day. And so one can say: What Herman Grimm once said with reference to the people of the East is true and right. There, he said, there was a Russian who had also written a biography, the biography of Beethoven. Nothing of what Beethoven really is lives in the biography.

Just compare the selfless, devoted way in which the German mind, always wanting to become, wants to delve into what is spread throughout the world, how it, disregarding its own character traits, knows how to find its way into those of others. How the German spirit has united Shakespeare's spirit with its own. When something like this is experienced in a nation, then a Herman Grimm is justified in saying this with reference to Mr. Lewes' alleged biography of Goethe. And when one sees how little heart and mind were actually present in those who have often called themselves the leaders of other nations, one understands a lot. One understands a lot when one really delves into what one can experience together with the German spirit. One can say: There really is something in this German spirit of that Faustian mood, which on the one hand has hidden life's great riddle in: “All that is transitory is only a parable,” but on the other hand says: “Whoever strives can be redeemed.” And in the German spirit lives something that must lead beyond all pessimism, something that establishes a true foundation for future security and future hope. But how little this has basically entered into the hearts and souls of those who, with some sincerity, seek in other nations what can liberate the spirit and bring harmony to the liberated human soul.

I would like to characterize for you how one of the most important Russians, Alexander Herzen, established a kind of spiritual entente with the Englishman Stuart Mill; how one of the best Russian minds, Herzen, immersed himself in the philosophy of the Englishman Stuart Mill, in that basically entirely materialistic world view, that he found, looking across Europe, that basically this culture of Europe can give no consolation, no hope for the future of humanity. It is the characteristic words of this Russian that really illuminate in a flash what has been confronting each other in Europe for a long time, and what now had to be expressed in these terrible flames of war. Herzen says of Stuart Mill:

[He was not exaggerating when he spoke of the narrowing of the mind, of energy, of the polished nature of personalities, of the constant flattening of life, of the constant exclusion of general human interests from life, of the reduction of the same to the interests of the commercial office and of bourgeois prosperity. Mill speaks openly about the fact that in this way England will become China – and we add: and not only England.

And we add: Not only England! For Stuart Mill believes that with England, the whole of Europe must become China. We only get the answer to the question: How could such an opinion arise even in the heart of an aspiring person? We get the answer when we see how he passes by that striving of which Goethe says in his Faust: “Whosoever strives, we can redeem him.” He also passes by what Fichte, Goethe and Schiller can mean for the whole of modern development. Those who speak thus do not know the German spirit, that German spirit of which we shall say in our fateful days: in it lives the power which, though not, as the Russian thinks, to the scaffold and the stake, yet to pressure and death, to infinite pain and suffering, goes to defend what the German soul and its mission in the world is.

However, if Emerson sees in Goethe the very representative of the German spirit, and one of the present-day intellectuals of Russia finds the following words about Goethe, Mereschkowski, who even claims to revere Goethe - one should not be deceived, one should not be deceived in his “Leading Spirits,” which have now been translated into German, for anyone who truly recognizes Goethe cannot utter such words about Goethe, the representative of modern intellectual life, as the Russian Mereschkowski has done. He says:

When Goethe speaks of the French Revolution, he suddenly bends to the earth, as a giant might be crushed by an evil spell and shrink to the size of a dwarf; from a Hellenic demigod he becomes a German bourgeois and – if the shadow of the Olympian will have mercy on me – a German philistine, a “Herr von Goethe”, a privy councillor of the Duke of Weimar and a respectable son of the respectable Frankfurt shopkeeper.

Let us assume that Goethe would appear to Mereschkowski in certain situations in his life; but anyone who recognizes Goethe and what he is to humanity would not say such a thing. For it does not merely depend on whether one considers something to be right, but whether one has enough spirituality to say it or not. There is something in these words that the world has yet to learn from the German spirit.

But when we now see how what is German spiritual life is to be trampled underfoot from the east, how this German spiritual life, in alliance with the western peoples, is to be trampled underfoot from the east, then we may ask: What about the understanding and the possibility of understanding on the part of what is there in the east, with regard to the German essence?

Now, esteemed attendees, once again it is not a German speaking, once again I do not want to speak myself, but I let a member of the Russian people speak for himself, the philosopher Solowjow, who is basically not just a philosopher, but a seer, who is regarded by the most excellent Russians themselves as a representative of Russia. Let us ask him. How does he, who has been vilified for decades by Russian intellectuals and other seducers of the Russian people, how does he judge this deification of the race principle to the exclusion of the education principle, how does he judge this brute force in relation to Europe? Let us hear him, not ourselves; let us hear the Russians about the Russians, not about the intimate forces of the Russian people, but about the forces that have come about through the conspiracies of mendacious Pan-Slavism and mendacious grand duchies. Let us hear the Russians talk about all that has been in preparation for a long time. He says: “Why does Europe not love us?” And he answers:

Europe [...] looks at us with apprehension and dislike, because the elemental power of the Russian people is dark and mysterious, its spiritual and cultural powers inferior, but its demands clear, determined and great.

The clamor of our rationalism, which seeks to destroy Turkey and Austria, to beat the Germans, to conquer Constantinople and, if possible, India, is loudly heard in Europe. But if we are asked what we will do for humanity after taking and destroying all of that, we can only remain silent or spout meaningless phrases. [...] Thus [...] the most essential, indeed the only important question that honest and reasonable patriotism should address is not Russia's power and mission, but its sins.

Because the subject that the Russians themselves must discuss has been introduced by the powers that I have just mentioned, for decades preparations have been made for what is now devastating Europe with such terrible storms, coming from the east. For if the question is raised from so many sides: “Who wanted the war?”, then the question needs only to be transformed into another: “Who could have prevented the war?” And there is a clear answer to this question, which history must also provide: only Russia could have prevented the war. Of course, the Western powers will also have to bear the consequences, because without them Russia would have avoided the war, at least for now. But only hints can be given about this. For the German who allows what I have been able to sketch with charcoal to take effect in his soul, what is now to be fought for in the East and West, at such unspeakable cost, must be something that opens our eyes, that shows us how much we need to reflect on ourselves, to reflect on that which allows us to find the strong forces of the German character. By the number of his enemies, the German can gauge the necessity of this search for his own strength, which depends on himself. In this respect, many things can be instructive for us.

We believed that an understanding would dawn, especially among the French, for the German way of being. Strangely enough, even shortly before the war, there were people who believed that an understanding could be found for the German way of being in youthful France. I must, in conclusion, shed some light on this matter. Some of our best Germans were amazed that a Frenchman, Romain Rolland, who was one of the first to join with Verhaeren and others in directing the bitterest invective against German “barbarism,” found in Romain Rolland a mind that understood the German essence, that understood Germany. Why did they find this? Yes, the question is difficult to answer, very difficult. This Romain Rolland has written a novel. In this novel, a German, Jean-Christophe, plays a role. I am well aware that I am passing judgment, and that my judgment can stand up to any aesthetic, and I am prepared for those who find the judgment I am passing “barbaric”.

So Romain Rolland wrote his novel “Jean-Christophe”. The hero is German, but he is concocted in such a way that a wild chaos results. This character is concocted from Beethoven's youth, the fates of Richard Wagner, Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler. All this is concocted in a jumble in this character. A character is shaped out of this, which in an artistic-aesthetic sense is basically repulsive to anyone who really has an appreciation for characterizations. And this Jean-Christophe – in German, this Johann Christof Kraft – is presented to us as he is placed in the terrible German circumstances. He spends his youth as a German among Germans, but he cannot stand these German circumstances. He has to get out of these German circumstances; he is not recognized in Germany. He does find some admirers, but he just can't stand the German way of doing things. He then goes to France. It is only in Paris that he finds what makes him a complete human being. This is described, along with other things, which are basically quite chaotic, just like Jean-Christophe himself.

And we have even been told by critics that this novel is one of the most significant achievements in the reconciliation of the German and French minds after 1870. And someone said the following about this novel:

I find myself at a loss as to how many times I should actually thank you. The human, the bon vivant, the artist, the German, the [worldly] side of me, each wants to come forward and say a word. But another time the artist should talk about this novel, another time the bon vivant, and the human wants to wait until he can shake your hand again. Today only the German should say thank you; for I have the feeling that French youth has become closer to us through this book, which has done more than all the diplomats, banquets and associations.

Someone printed this review as a letter to Romain Rolland.

In this book – forgive me for emphasizing this passage, but I can emphasize it without violating any artistic principle, simply because in Romain Rolland's work, which is a poor novel, you can hear Romain Rolland himself through his characters. When he gives his characters traits that are pleasing to him because he wants to talk about this German essence that he “knows so well”. It depends on what nuances are apparent to this young Frenchman, since he is supposed to understand the German essence so well. So we read the following, which comes about during a conversation with a visitor:

Since the German victories, the Germans did everything they could to compromise, to bring about a disgusting mishmash of new power and old principles. They did not want to abandon old idealism: That would have been an act of frankness that one was not capable of; in order to make it subservient to German interests, one had contented oneself with falsifying it. One followed the example of Hegel, the cheerfully duplicitous Swabian, who had waited for Leipzig and Waterloo to adapt the basic idea of his philosophy to the Prussian state

— In 1806, under the thunder of the guns at the Battle of Jena, Hegel wrote his fundamental work, which contains the basic outlines of all his later works. The Frenchman, who has not read Hegel either, or if he has, then without understanding, says that Hegel “waited for Leipzig and Waterloo”. And further.

and now, after interests had changed, it also changed its principles. When one was defeated, one said that Germany's ideal was humanity. Now that one was beating the others, it was said that Germany was humanity's ideal. As long as the other countries were the more powerful, one said with Lessing that love of one's country was a heroic weakness that one could very well do without, and one called oneself a citizen of the world. Now that victory had been achieved, there was no lack of contempt for “French” utopias: world peace, brotherhood, peaceful progress, human rights, natural equality; it was said that the strongest nation had an absolute right over the others, while the others, as the weaker ones, had no rights over it. It seemed as if the living God and the incarnate spirit, whose progress was achieved through war, violence and oppression.

That's how well the Frenchman understood the Germans!

Power, now that it was on his side, was canonized. Power had now become the epitome of all idealism and all reason.

To give honor to the truth, it must be said that Germany had suffered so much for centuries from having idealism without power that after so much trial she was well excused for now making the sad confession that she needed power above all, however it might be constituted. But how much hidden bitterness lay in such a confession of the people of a Herder and a Goethe! And what renunciation, what humiliation of the German ideal lay in this German victory! - And oh, this renunciation found only too much compliance in the lamentable tendency of all the best Germans to subordinate themselves.

“What characterizes the Germans,” said Möser more than a century ago, “is obedience.”

And Frau von Stael: “They obey properly. They use philosophical reasons to explain the most unphilosophical thing in the world: respect for power and the habituation to fear, which transforms respect into admiration.”

Christof found this feeling in the greatest and the smallest in Germany

- that is why he has to leave Germany -

from Wilhelm Tell onwards, the thoughtful, little bourgeois with the porter's muscles, who, as the free Jew Börne says: “to reconcile honor and fear, walks with his eyes downcast in front of the post of the tyrannical Mr. Gessler, so that he can invoke the fact that he did not disobey, who did not see the hat,” up to the honorable seventy-year-old Professor Weiße, one of the most respected scholars in the city, who, when a lieutenant passed him, quickly left the footpath to him and went down to the road.

Germany

— so says this good German-understander of France at another point,

Germany really bears the main burden of sin in Europe. If you have won the victory, you are responsible for it: you have incurred a debt against the vanquished; you have assumed the tacit responsibility of stepping forward and showing them the way. The victorious Louis XIV brought the world the splendor of French reason. What light did Germany of Sedan bring to the world?

Well, my dear audience, you may not find it wonderful when you have heard this that this Frenchman was among the first to weep with the others in the “Matin” over German “barbarism”. But you will find it wonderful that this book, this novel by Romain Rolland, was believed to be one of the most significant acts since 1870 in bringing about peace. It was quickly translated into German. The first three volumes were published shortly before the war. But this Frenchman wants to know the Germans, he also wants to describe them, where he finds characteristic moments in these Germans. As I said, he practices the technique of bad novelists, who are always audible when they let their characters speak. So this Frenchman, who is particularly surprising when he blows into the horn of the “Matin” et cetera, describes something that he really likes about the Germans. He describes how an admirer found Jean-Christophe a professor in Ulm. He visits him. Then the Frenchman describes what he calls a “German meal.” It was so good, the German meal, that even the cook Salomé peeks through the door to see how the gentlemen sitting with Jean-Christophe like it. That's when the Frenchman finds the “greatness” of Germany.

It was an exhibition of unforgettable, honest, unadulterated German cuisine with its aromas of all herbs, its thick sauces, its nutritious soups, its exemplary meat dishes, its monumental carp, its sauerkraut, its geese, its homemade cakes, its aniseed and caraway breads.

He describes something that he wants to depict as good about the Germans. But now, among those who came to see the German professor back then, there is one man who can sing well and who is truly not described in an outstandingly beautiful way by the Frenchman who understands Germans so well. And Romain Rolland loves music. His critics said that his novel was “the novel of modern music”. And he himself had grown to love Germany precisely because of music. So he describes someone who can sing. And he describes him in such a way that you can see that he, Jean-Christophe, wonders why a German can sing.

That is because the Germans do not know how to sing. They are seized by the power of song and the song works through them as if through an instrument. The spirit of the songs takes hold of them and they obey it. Because the soul of the German must do that. This soul obeys the song as the soldier obeys the general.

This is roughly how the Frenchman, who understands the Germans so well, describes the [German] art of singing.

And then he also gives us some insights into what the person who sings like this looked like. And so that you also have something good from the Frenchman's book in this area, I will also tell you that he describes this singer, who he admits sings excellently, for the reasons I have given, as a fat person who always sweats when he takes steps, but especially when he makes sounds. He describes his nature, his whole figure. Then he says: He looked like a Bavarian, a particular variety of German. He thinks that there are quite a few of these Bavarians, because they have the secret of preserving this human race, which “has come about through a system of noodles similar to that used to fatten poultry”.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, I could tell you many more things about the characteristics of what is behind what is now physically expressed. Particularly when one considers the contrast between Frenchness and Germanness, as expressed so clearly in the fact that, driven out of their minds by the eternal desire for revenge, the French have done something that they will only realize in the future: they have allowed themselves to be dragged eastwards, about which we have even heard a Russian speak. When one considers this antagonism between Central Europe and the immediate West, then words such as these might come to mind – truly, when one looks at everything that has been produced on the other side of the Rhine, when one summarizes it all – words like this might come to mind:

To the best of my knowledge, there is no natural law and no heavenly parliamentary act on the basis of which France alone, among all earthly beings, does not have to give back some of its plunder if the plundered owner can take it back. Nobody except France itself at this moment can believe that there is such a natural law. Alsace and Lorraine did not come to France in such a providential way that they could not be taken away from it. Richelieu's cunning, Louis XIV's grandiose saber; these are France's only legal titles to the German lands. Richelieu unscrewed them. And General Turenne happened to be unscrewed at the same time. Because Turenne was a real German by blood and nature. But Francis I had set his ancestor, the little Duke of Bouillon, on the path we saw above, and he gradually made him French.

And so on. And further:

For me, the saddest symptom in France at present is the figure its geniuses are now making, its highest literary voices, which should be its prophets and seers and which this figure has in fact been making for a generation. These voices apparently believe that new heavenly wisdom is radiating from France over all other peoples, who are sitting in deep shadow. France is the new Zion of the universe. And all the sad, dirty, half-crazed and in large part positively infernal stuff that French literature has preached to us in the last fifty years is a true gospel from heaven, full of blessings for all the children of men. Ah, one understands that France made its great revolution; that it raised its terrible voice of destiny against a world of human illusions, proclaiming with the trumpet of the Last Judgment: There shall be no more illusions!

These words were not coined by Germans! Rather, the words that I have just read were translated by the Würzburg professor of psychiatry, Rieger, from a letter that was indeed published in the Times on November 18, 1870 and that was written by Thomas Carlyle about France and the French way of life, French greed, and the claims to Alsace-Lorraine. It is a rather nice symptom that a psychiatrist found this letter and translated it, because there will be many a psychiatric chapter in world history when everything that is now being brought into the world from the east and the west about the German character has to be judged.

But if, on the other hand, we allow ourselves to be influenced by this German essence in the way that not pride but humble self-awareness has done, if we see what Germany's best minds have achieved in the German spirit, if we see how intuitions of spiritual science, spiritual insights have emerged in Schiller and Fichte, so that we have to say to ourselves: In this German essence lie seeds that oblige us to develop them further into blossoms and fruits, then we must fill our soul with the right future securities and future possibilities. And we will know that when our fateful and destiny-laden days are again replaced by such days in which history again speaks objectively, that then the question will hang over the enemy nations like one of the most terrible questions: Why do they call the people of Schiller and Fichte a “barbarian people”?

And in answering this question, one will feel how the German spirit has not completed its tasks in the world as a whole, in the development of humanity. One will feel how right Goethe was when he said to Luden, even in a fateful time:

The destiny of the Germans is not yet fulfilled. If they had had no other task than to break up the Roman Empire and create and organize a new world, they would have perished long ago. But since they have continued to exist, and in such strength and efficiency, I believe that they must still have a great destiny.

When one feels the German essence, one will feel how it has to defend itself today as if locked in a great fortress – even the enemies who do not understand it and want to trample it underfoot – and one will find that this German essence has not yet reached completion, that this German spirit must fight for its existence not only for its own good but also for the good of the development of the earth. And today we may summarize what this reflection could only contain in hints, we may summarize it in words that point out how, even if the German spirit has already achieved great things, what it has achieved must appear in the present as the germ of future blossoms and fruits. And one would like to call out to those over whom the question will hover as historical fate: Why do they call the people of Fichte and Schiller a “barbarian people”? In answer, one must call out to them what we want to conclude today's reflection with:

The German spirit has not completed
what it is to bring to the world.
It lives hopefully in future concerns,
It hopes for future deeds] full of life; -
In the depths of his being, he feels mightily
Hidden things that must have their effect as they mature.
How can a mindless enemy
Wish for his end to come:
As long as life reveals itself to him,
Which holds him in the roots of his being?

Automated Translation

Dear attendees! I will take the liberty of giving two lectures here, which have related content in a certain respect, so that some of what is said today will be followed by a special supplement tomorrow. However, for the sake of the esteemed audience, I would like to strive to present each lecture as a self-contained whole, which can be heard on its own.

If one speaks of spiritual science in the sense in which it is to be used here, one will, for the time being, meet with the strongest resistance and the sharpest misunderstandings. In particular, this resistance and these misunderstandings will come from those who believe that they are starting from the so-called completely safe, solid ground of the only true science, natural science, with regard to all far-reaching questions of world view.

Now, on the other hand, it must be said from the outset that the spiritual science meant here is not in the slightest contradiction to the most modern demands and achievements of modern natural science; indeed, that it wants to be a necessary supplement and a necessary conclusion to this modern natural science. If you only know natural science, it is very easy to become an opponent and rejecter of this spiritual science. If you are familiar with natural science, especially in its most important and comprehensive present-day results, and at the same time you know the spiritual science that is meant here, then, dear attendees, you are by no means an opponent of natural science.

The fact that today's scientific education is so dismissive of this spiritual science is primarily due to a very strange circumstance. And such things must be mentioned in the introduction, because it is very easy for someone who is hearing such discussions as are being held here for the first time to get the idea that what is being said here is unfounded and contrary to any truly scientific requirement. If I may make this personal comment, I would like to say that I myself, wherever natural science legitimately appears, go with that natural science against all amateurish or superficial endeavors in the field of spiritual science, but that precisely for this reason I have to represent spiritual science in the form in which I have to speak of it.

One may say that what is being achieved today in the field of the scientific way of thinking, of the scientific way of research, has, especially in recent years, struggled to achieve a great lack of prejudice compared to the very superficial materialism of the middle, the last third of the nineteenth century. Today, in contrast to the natural science romanticism of the past, we have something that is so objectively and convincingly presented, for example, in the recently published great work by Oscar Hertwig, “On the Nature of Organisms. A Refutation of the Darwinian Theory of Chance”. And one could cite many, many more similar examples if one wanted to speak in praise of natural science in the immediate present.

If we look at the attitude, the way of thinking and imagining that prevails among today's level-headed natural scientists, then these attitudes and this way of imagining are similar to those of the greatest biologist from the Haeckel school, Oscar Hertwig, who says that natural science to occupy itself only with the world of the senses, to investigate only the finite, and not to concern itself with the infinite; this must be left to – says a leading natural scientist of the present day – this supersensible, this spiritual must be left to metaphysics, to epistemology and so on. Again a saying to which hundreds and hundreds of level-headed natural scientists' sayings of the present day could be added. And one might believe that such attitudes, coming from such a quarter, would certainly pave the way for an unprejudiced approach to spiritual-scientific research. And yet this is not the case. For although this is said, on the other hand it is again tried to be made understandable, precisely from this quarter, that true science, genuine science, can only be that which stands squarely on the ground of mere external sensual facts. And so, on the one hand, only this ground of sense facts is investigated, the supersensible, the spiritual, is excluded; but at the same time it is pointed out, though quite covertly, that all that which is said about the spirit , about the supersensible, cannot actually be truly scientific, because it is implied that strict, serious scientific methods can only arise on the basis of sensory observation, of the finite.

It must be said: Indeed, these statements and thoughts are found in the narrower circles of natural scientists or those who build any kind of worldview on the foundation of natural science, and one might think that this does not particularly concern the great multitude of educated people. But that is not the case today. One must only be clear about the fact that today our many-branched educational and thinking life is nourished and satisfied through thousands and thousands of channels, and that such ideas, which in their place of origin are known only to those who familiarize themselves with scientific literature, that such statements are embedded and introduced into the way of thinking of the broadest audience in the most popular way. Hence the very widespread prejudice, which is habitually present in people's minds without them being aware of it, that anyone who talks about the spiritual, the supersensible, cannot be a true scientist.

In response to this, the following must be noted: Precisely when one is a true, but reasonable admirer of the modern scientific way of thinking, then one learns to recognize the methods and ideas on the basis of which this scientific way of thinking has achieved its great successes. But then one also learns to recognize that these scientific concepts, ideas and notions are highly suitable for the study of nature, and that they must achieve their brilliant successes on the basis of science, precisely when they are completely unsuitable to say anything about truths that relate to the spiritual or the soul life of man. Gradually, precisely those types of research have emerged on the basis of natural science that cannot be applied to the spiritual. That is why it is precisely because natural science has such brilliant, such penetrating ideas, because it can achieve such brilliant successes with these ideas, that it is necessary for its sake that a spiritual science be placed alongside natural science from a completely different side.

In earlier times, by observing nature, man, in his own conviction, received all kinds of spiritual knowledge from the realm of nature itself, through the concepts of natural science. Anyone familiar with older scientific ideas knows that with the concepts that were formed earlier, it was also convincingly accepted that nature is spiritualized everywhere. Natural science has rightly eradicated such concepts on its own ground. It has developed concepts that are only suitable for considering external natural existence without any spiritual element. Therefore, the necessity arises in the present day to explore the spirit from a different angle. It follows from the character of contemporary natural science that there must be a spiritual science alongside this natural science, if man is not to lose all connection with the greatest questions that must fulfill his soul's longing, with the questions, for example, for example, about human freedom, namely with the question of the eternal nature of the human soul, about the character, the essence of the human soul; all these questions culminating in the question of immortality.

Now I have given today's lecture the specific title: “Body, Soul and Spirit of Man”. This has a certain inner justification, for the reason, dear attendees, because – I cannot go into the details here – because since the ninth century it has gradually become customary, when speaking of the human being and his essence, not to speak of body, soul and spirit, but only to speak of body and soul. Anyone who has a clear understanding of the facts in this area knows that it is precisely the neglect of the spirit that has led to the inattention to the spiritual, that basically the knowledge of the nature of man has become completely obscured in recent centuries, that it must first of all be clarified again. If I may use the comparison, it is really the case today, even if one is familiar with everything that has been written in the field of philosophy, that it is as if a chemist has a compound substance and always starts from the preconception that two components must be found in it. He does not even assume that a third must be found in it. Therefore, when he experiments, he must constantly come up with the wrong concepts.

These are more or less the considerations that are made today from a philosophical point of view about the nature of man, especially about the eternal nature of man. It is assumed that one can only speak of the body and soul of man. One starts from the prejudice that the third, the spirit, must somehow be inherent in the soul, and one must therefore go wrong. To substantiate this latter point, and in particular to show provisionally how one has to speak rightly of body, soul and spirit, let us consider the following.

Those inner soul experiences that are most intimately connected with bodily conditions do not, however, provide any real insight into what is going on in the human body. I mean such inner experiences - one does not see them at all as soul experiences, but they are experienced by the soul - such experiences as hunger and thirst or other things that we perceive. He who only wanted to observe how one becomes hungry, how one becomes satiated, would not be able to arrive at what external natural science confirms: that while we are in a state of hunger or satiety, chemical changes in the blood are taking place in our body, or something else chemical or physical is happening.

But it must be said that the ordinary consciousness of the human being knows nothing of what is going on in the body while the person is experiencing hunger and thirst. It must be determined by special scientific methods, which relate to the examination of the human body, what happens when one feels hunger, satiety, thirst or the like. What we are aware of, what we experience through our everyday consciousness, is backed by something that our everyday consciousness knows nothing about, but only physical science can shed light on.

Consider, dear reader, how much a person in ordinary daily life actually knows about his body. He knows its outer form, knows that which is outwardly inclined. If you consider the relationship between what you know of the body and what you actually know, you will see that you know very little. But this is expanded and supplemented by what external physical science, anatomy and physiology have to offer. We can say that, on the side of the body, what anatomy, physiology and biology add to what we inwardly experience and feel initially remains unconscious.

The spiritual researcher now shows, as we shall see shortly, how we have different experiences on the other side of the human soul. These other experiences, these experiences of thinking, feeling, and willing, of which we already have a superficial awareness, that they are less inclined towards the bodily side than hunger and thirst, these other experiences - the spiritual researcher is the one who first of all addresses himself to these experiences when he wants to arrive at the other side with his science, from the soul to the spirit, just as the physical researcher arrives at the other side from the soul to the body in the way just described. That is the difference between the physical researcher, who follows what the person experiences mentally from the soul side to the body side, and the spiritual researcher, who follows what the person experiences mentally from the soul to the spirit side. Just as little as one can learn something about the physical being by only observing hunger, thirst or similar general physical moods, and just as little as one can know anything about the body by these means, but must penetrate into the body itself by special scientific methods, so it is also necessary and possible to do so on the spiritual side.

It is very often believed that the spiritual can be attained through what is commonly called “inner contemplation”. All kinds of mysticism are spoken of in this field. It is believed that if a person really immerses himself in his soul life, he must also gain insight into what underlies the soul as spiritual.

Without a special spiritual science, one achieves just as little insight in this way as one would achieve insight into the bodily side if one only ever observed hunger and thirst inwardly and immersed oneself in them. Mere mysticism, mere inner contemplation, can certainly be compared with brooding over hunger and thirst and breathing needs and so on. Just as one must follow these phenomena mentally, but then expand outward toward the body with the scientific methods of physical research, so one must be able to follow in the mind what one experiences through a certain deepening of the soul life in imagining, feeling, and thinking.

Now it may well be said: about the kind of research, how one comes from the soul to the spirit, how one comes to the body on the other hand, about this kind of research, one still has very few accurate ideas today. It is very easy to believe, dear ladies and gentlemen, chemistry, physiology, physiological chemistry are serious sciences, they have developed good methods. Every spiritual researcher will of course admit this. But compared to what appears to be quite simple, such as how to research spiritual life, everything that physiology, chemistry and anatomy have developed makes it seem so much easier, because everything that is the research of physical science can be more easily acquired. For no external manipulation, nothing that has its points of reference in the external world, can lead to knowledge of the spirit. It is a matter of that which one initially, although wrongly, calls inner life, being expanded, if I may use the pedantic expression, systematically expanded, that the threads are really drawn to the spirit.

Now I can only characterize the nature of the research that is necessary in broad terms. You can find more details about it in my books “How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds”, in the second part of “Occult Science”, “The Riddle of Man” and in the last book, which was published a few weeks ago, “The Riddle of Souls”, and so on. But what is described in detail in these books as the path to the spiritual worlds, I will characterize here at least in principle.

The point is that if one remains in ordinary consciousness, one cannot know anything at all about what underlies the human being as a spiritual being, and that if one takes a superficial approach, one is quite right to state a limit to knowledge at this point. If one wants to stop at what the ordinary consciousness gives, then one can say nothing other than that the spiritual realm is simply closed to man. But in truth it is not. Of course, for ordinary consciousness, the situation is such that what truly is soul and spirit is not known at all, that it is hidden at first and that one can only penetrate to the true soul and true spirit through very specific paths of research. What one experiences of the spirit is actually not much more than what one experiences of the body through the ordinary external way of looking at things without science. What we see of the body in everyday life is, as we said, only part of what constitutes the nature of the human body.

For ordinary consciousness, the spirit also presents itself from a certain perspective, but this ordinary consciousness knows no more about the spirit than it knows about the body when it only looks at it externally. What ordinary consciousness knows about the spirit is actually contained entirely in the simple, short word “I”. When one pronounces this little word “I” and at the same time feels and thinks through what is connected with this idea of “I”, then one has a part of that which underlies man as a spiritual being, but one has not much more than one has from the ordinary superficial way of looking at the body, without science.

The point is that when you go from the soul, from its experiences, hunger, thirst, need to breathe, to the body, you cannot help but actually kill or paralyze what the soul experiences, whether in the way you look at it or in reality. In this way you learn to recognize what underlies the soul experience. As a rule, we experience something through the body when we expel the soul from the body. In spiritual research, it is the other way around. The aim is not to paralyze what we experience in our soul, but to strengthen it, even when we undergo the much-vaunted mystical experience. And I would like to point out two inner activities that need to be strengthened.

In principle, the matter can be characterized as follows: If we look at the human will as it lives in ordinary consciousness, it is reflected in the life of ideas, but what underlies a volitional impulse is something of which we know nothing. You can find a discussion of this in an excellent book such as Physiological Psychology by Theodor Zichen, who excludes the will from the psychological point of view because, in his opinion, the will is not present in everything that can be found from an external point of view. What actually happens when a person executes any volitional decision, what happens when I just want to raise a hand, until the actual raising of the hand, remains unconscious, just as, for example, the experiences from falling asleep to waking up remain unconscious. We have ideas that underlie the motives of the will, but in our ordinary consciousness we have no idea of the process of the will itself. That is the one thing, the honored presence, that the spiritual researcher comes to, to be able to relate to the process of the will as such in the act of imagining, to be able to relate to the process of the will as one is otherwise able to relate to the external world.

I would like to give an example to illustrate what I mean. When we speak, it is a special volitional act. The fact that we produce images does not change what I have said. When we recite a poem that we have learned by heart, it is a continuous series of volitional impulses that gradually become habitual. Now everyone knows that if you try to recite a poem and at the same time make an effort to observe your own recitation of the poem as one would observe an external natural process, then you sacrifice the recitation.

This example in particular shows you, dear attendees, how impossible it is for the ordinary consciousness to observe itself. Self-observation in a higher sense than is usually meant – self-observation is what must be striven for. It is not enough for spiritual science to merely state: It is virtually impossible to recite a poem aloud or to recite it inwardly in thought and to observe oneself while doing so. Certainly, for the ordinary consciousness this is absolutely impossible; but the spiritual researcher must learn to do so. He must, just as the chemist applies his methods, also apply his methods; he must do everything possible - you will find a more detailed description in “How to Know Higher Worlds” . The spiritual researcher must do everything possible to be able to work through his will on the one hand, and on the other hand to observe at the same time what he carries out with his will, just as one observes an external natural process.

This is one of the things that can be said: It is easy to say; to actually carry it out requires a far greater effort than to acquire the methods of chemistry, physics, astronomy or a physiological science. Of course, it is not enough to observe oneself in such a case, but to learn to recognize that inner attitude of the soul, whereby one can simultaneously accomplish an act of the will and, on the other hand, face oneself while observing.

Only by coming to cultivate self-observation in this way, only by doing so, do we gradually come to distinguish between what is ordinary mental life and what is true mental life. For if one attains an inner practice in the way that has been indicated, in this self-observation, then one gradually comes to a completely different way of thinking. Thoughts such as one has in ordinary consciousness do not flourish in this way, but thoughts that have a much greater, inner, meaningful power, thoughts that have much more of what one can call a pictorial content, but which at the same time points to a reality. When one learns to observe oneself in this way, one comes to know something that is hidden in ordinary life, something that is part of this ordinary life but which, in this ordinary life, remains entirely unconscious, subconscious. Something emerges from the ordinary life of the soul that was previously unknown.

At first, one sees from the inner consequences how the matter actually stands. One learns, namely, only when one gradually learns to distinguish between the ordinary soul life and the true soul life, one learns more and more to find one's way up to the concept, which can then become a guiding concept for the contemplation of the actual human being. One learns to recognize that what we call the ordinary life of the soul is related to the true life of the soul, which one first discovers in this way, as the mirror image is to the real person standing before this mirror image. The important thing is that one acquires this great knowledge with reference to the soul life: that the outer soul life, known to ordinary consciousness, is the mirror image of the true inner soul life, which is unknown to ordinary consciousness.

The consequence of this is that we are only now beginning to gain an insight into the human body. Before seeking knowledge in this way, we cannot really know anything accurate about the human body. I will point out just one fact: The person who, in the sense of mere external natural science, fully recognizes its methods for [spiritual] science, even when they are applied in an outstanding way, as for example by Oscar Hertwig, who thus observes the external bodily life of man, he follows, among other things, for example, how the bodily life of a person leads back to the bodily life of the parents, grandparents and so on. One speaks of the inheritance of certain characteristics. Whenever we speak of heredity in the field of natural science today, we always have the view that we inherit something, but that in what we inherit as a body, the germs for the development of the I, for example, are also contained. It is said that, as the I develops into it, self-awareness, the I, arises in the course of life on the basis of the inherited characteristics. It is quite impossible for a different view of the matter to be formed while remaining on the ground of mere natural science.

But for someone who, in the manner described, learns to distinguish the true soul from its reflection, the ordinary soul life, such a view as that offered by natural science today is as if someone wanted to explain: Man stands in relation to the air through his lungs, and in the lungs is the origin of the air that man breathes out and in; the air comes from the lungs and returns to them. Such a person would be deluding themselves, as if what is air were somehow essentially connected to the lungs themselves, whereas air is in our environment and must be sought outside of the human being. If one is able to see through these circumstances correctly, then one will naturally not look for the origin of air in the lungs. But if you go through the spiritual path, you come to recognize in the soul and spiritual realm that the belief that the air comes from the child's body, as it develops according to the inherited characteristics from the parents, the I, the self, that this corresponds exactly to the belief that the air comes from the lungs.

One learns to recognize, through spiritual scientific methods, that the I is not something that can arise from the body, but one learns to recognize the independence of the I, one learns to recognize the coming of the I to that which comes from father and mother. These things must be emphasized today, for the reason that the opposite idea is so deeply rooted in the thinking and cognitive habits of the present that what must be said from the spiritual-scientific point of view seems quite absurd to some. Nevertheless, it can and must be said if one does not choose the starting point of amateurish inner observation, but rather a spiritual-scientific observation. In this way one learns to recognize that just as air enters the lungs from the outside, this I enters from a spiritual world into that which comes from the father and mother, that which is physically inherited. Just as the air does not disappear when it leaves the lungs, so this self, which has just as little to do with the life of the body as the lungs have to do with the air, passes through the gate of death.

If one then follows the path further, one comes indeed, precisely with regard to the point touched upon, via the bodily life to very definite, now truly scientific concepts, in relation to which even the fully appreciated results of natural science are amateurish. One arrives at this by learning to distinguish between what is the inner spiritual self and what is inherited. One arrives at forming a true picture of what one actually inherits from one's ancestors. These things can only be touched on today; I only want to encourage you and cannot give anything exhaustive. What we inherit is, in the deepest sense, our own bodily form. Anyone who is aware of how what we do in a certain sense in our ordinary mental life depends on the physiognomy of the body – by which I mean the inner structure of the body – will be able to imagine that the human being lives out his or her life in the inherited formations of the body, but the basis is always the inherited form. This inherited form, which in turn can shape the substance out of its structural forces from what we take in during our lives until we reach sexual maturity, so that this substance, which in turn passes on the inheritance to the offspring, now contains the form. This sentence, which spiritual science has to add to science: that only the form is inherited from the ancestors and that the form is inherited by the descendants through the substance, provides a supplement to natural science. It will be very informative with regard to a certain matter concerning the relationship to the higher aspects of the human being.

I have to progress in the consideration of the path of research into the spiritual worlds. I have first described how ideas must be added to the impulses of the will, how self-observation must occur in a higher sense. If one wants to get to know the being of the human being, the spiritual being of the human being, then not only must this self-observation be able to occur, but something else must happen: one must carry out that which, in one's soul, results in a strengthening of the soul life on another side, which, using a technical term, can be called “meditation”. You can find more details about this in the books mentioned; I can only give the principles here.

Just as we have seen that in the will and its impulses, the ideas must be led to self-observation, so on the other hand, the will must be introduced into the life of ideas. This is even more difficult. And precisely the introduction of the will into the realm of imagination, whereas otherwise we let the images run according to the sensory processes or let them run dreamily, for example in contemplation of what one has experienced. The person who wants to introduce the will into this world of imagination often needs years and years to achieve real results. The matter is by no means a simple one. Years and years are needed if one is to truly research the realm of spiritual life.

The point is to introduce the will into the life of the imagination, so that one learns, on the one hand, to direct the imagination as one directs the hands. The will must be introduced into the imagination. This is best achieved by trying to separate oneself from ordinary imaginative life and only reflecting on that which one introduces into one's consciousness through the will. Therefore, one should not introduce such ideas as are given from the external sense world or from the ordinary sensual world; but self-made ideas or ideas that have been suggested to one; these should direct the life of ideas. There it is the arbitrariness by which the life of ideas is directed. But it must not remain so, for then one would not come to spiritual research, but to dreaming. On the one hand – and this may sound paradoxical – the will, arbitrariness, must be introduced into the imaginative life; on the other hand, this will must be excluded, because otherwise one would enter into fantastic thinking, which must not be allowed.

But if you continue the meditative life with patience and energy, and keep trying to continue with the ideas you have put together yourself, whether they are symbolic or similar ideas, then you bring such content into your consciousness again and again. In doing so, you acquire an inner mastery of this imaginative life. One gets to know something that was previously impossible to get to know at all. One gradually learns that one can arrive at one mental image from another, even when nothing is taken up in these images from external sensory perception, through mere arbitrariness. Imagining at random is only the trial, only the path, but it gradually develops as a self-evident inner life process, in that one notices that just as one otherwise, when observing external ideas, does not arbitrarily place one idea after the other, one now notices that one must now follow something that flows into the ideas themselves; so that little by little, although one now follows the course of ideas inwardly, one cannot help but develop one idea from the other just as regularly, not arbitrarily, letting one idea follow the other, as one does when one follows the course of external sense observation. Just as one is subject to necessity there, so one is gradually subject to a purely spiritual, inner necessity. Just as the external sense world prevails in the external perceptions, so an inner spirituality gradually prevails in the imagination that one has thus developed.

Just as the other method I have described ascends from the outer soul to the true soul, so in this way one ascends from the imagination to the spirit, by discovering the spirit as something objective, just as the external sense world is objective. One knows very well whether one is merely stringing together dream-like images or... gaps in the transcript]. And as a spiritual researcher, you know exactly whether you... or whether you are going through the inner process that... not arbitrarily stringing one idea after another, but developing one idea from the other as the spirit demands this sequence of ideas. In this way, through meditative life, one ascends to a real observation of the spirit.

Again, if you want to carry this out in its strictness, it is a work that lasts for years and requires much more devotion and willingness to sacrifice than astronomical or chemical work, but which leads to inner observation of the spirit just as strictly as astronomical, chemical, physiological methods lead to the observation of external laws.

He who, as a spiritual researcher, has experienced in countless cases how one often begins a path of research in certain areas of spiritual life, and who has then seen how this path of research leads through a spiritual necessity just as much as through sensual necessity , the one who has experienced how what one has followed from a certain starting point turns out differently than one had actually expected, quite differently than what one had assumed, may well speak of an inner necessity of the inner spiritual path. There is no arbitrariness here. One experiences it only too clearly when one is truly a spiritual researcher, that before one begins to research, one has false ideas, that the inner necessity of the path brings one to ideas that one could not have arrived at through sensory observation. One may say: When one really progresses on the path of spiritual research, things usually turn out quite differently than one expects. And if one does not want to form arbitrary ideas in the sense of exploring the spiritual world - one expects something completely different and something completely different comes. And one is as surprised by it as one would be by an unexpected experience in the outer world.

These things are not dealt with because it is expected that everyone should go through them – although it would be desirable that as many people as possible in the present day would follow the path of spiritual research to the extent that one can follow my books, so that they can bear witness from their own experience that the spirit and man's share in the spirit is a reality. But to make spiritual science part of our culture, to assimilate what spiritual research brings to light, does not depend on one's being a spiritual researcher oneself. That which is to be researched in the spirit must be researched through those inner paths - in truth they are outer paths - which you will find described in my books; but once the things have been researched, anyone with ordinary common sense can find them confirmed.

I would like to say: Although today, to a certain extent, anyone can become a seer – you don't need to be a seer to recognize spiritual research as such, but rather, you can put what spiritual research brings to light into the service of life, just as you can put what chemistry and physics bring into the service of life, without being a chemist or a physicist yourself. I would like to use a comparison to characterize what is to be characterized: Not everyone can be a watchmaker, but most people will recognize the watch. Not everyone can be a seer; but what the seer science can research about the nature of man is of importance for the life of every human being. When someone goes into a watchmaker's workshop, he sees that the watch has not come together by chance. You can see that in the watch. When the seer shows the spiritual powers and beings from which life and its facts, its entities, flow, the life and the fact of life are present for every person. And just as one can tell, without having seen the watchmaker at work, from the way the watch is made that it was put together by the watchmaker, so after the seer says that the life has come from the spirit, one can judge whether what the shearer says is correct or incorrect. Furthermore, it is not the case that the seerical development comes before humanity without saying how it comes to its results. For everyone can observe whether what the shearer has to say is reasonable, how he comes to his results. And that which is found in the course of spiritual research will gradually have to become part of our culture, for the very reason that advanced science, in particular, does not have the methods to arrive at spiritual knowledge itself, because on the other hand, this makes it necessary to have a different way of arriving at spiritual knowledge. And even if many prejudices against spiritual science still exist today, they will be dispelled by the fact that people will increasingly recognize how life confirms what the spiritual researcher has to say.

I would like to briefly mention at least one point: recently, a well-known personality here in this city, Dr. Rittelmeyer, has pointed out the religious significance of spiritual science, as it is meant here, in a number of beautiful articles in the “Christian World”. He has also forcefully and appropriately characterized the very nature of this spiritual practice to come to the spirit. Recently objections have been raised against these statements in the “Christian World” from another side that is also highly esteemed. I do not want to touch on these objections any further, I just want to point them out. It is said that a major mistake of this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is that one does not rely on mere grace, that the spirit would come to one, so to speak, that one would be graced as one is gifted with a talent, with genius, but that this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science would try to lead the soul into the spiritual world, the spiritual realm, through arbitrary exercises. This is characterized as a particular mistake; it shows that nothing other than that this side, which is so highly esteemed by those who rebel against Pastor Rittelmeyer, simply does not understand what is important.

If one advances from the soul to the spirit, yes, if one advances only from the ordinary soul experience to the true soul, then one comes into nothing but activity, and that would be precisely the wrong thing if one wanted to remain passive in relation to the spirit. For everything that comes to one in a passive state makes one dependent on the body. To live independently in the spirit must be a free act, an act that arises entirely from the arbitrariness of the human being. Without entering the spiritual world by free decision, one cannot enter it. Anyone who speaks of spirit as something that can be attained without this free entry into the spiritual world does not know what spirit is; they only know the soul life, which, in a more or less refined and sophisticated way, is nevertheless dependent on the body.

Thus one sees how today, even in the most influential circles, there is not the slightest conception of what the spirit really is. This real spirit is an active spirit, it is not something with which one can connect merely passively. At most, one comes out of the essence of the spirit; one denies a spirit when one only develops that which behaves passively. The difficulty in entering the spiritual realm lies precisely in the fact that one enters it arbitrarily on the one hand, but that it can only be a trial, that one comes upon other necessities, that everything turns out quite differently than one had expected. One develops the will into the life of imagination, but in the end one knows that one can only develop this will by turning one's eyes from one point to another. But the will must prevail in everything that is to truly enter the mind. That is the essential.

And when we learn to recognize through direct contemplation what the true soul is in relation to the mirror image of this true soul, then we learn to know the soul - I have shown before how to recognize the I as something that is taken up by the body - we learn to know the true soul in relation to what are only the ordinary soul experiences. Getting to know this true soul, coming to the contemplation of this true soul, leads at the same time to knowing that this true soul essence is not enclosed within the boundaries between birth and death. Above all, one learns to recognize how this true soul essence is actually extinguished by the life of the body, how it can be seen in its true form through the consciousness that has been expanded, as I have characterized it, can be seen before birth or conception and after the person has passed through the gate of death. One learns to recognize that external life on earth is not at all as one thinks in ordinary life.

In ordinary life, one has the idea: well, what one experiences between birth and death comes to one in this way. Chance brings one thing, brings another; life is merely configured from the sensual outside world. It cannot be otherwise than to have this idea in ordinary life. But this idea alone brings one into a certain calamity when one can consider the life of the soul. If you have this sense, then you know that you would actually extinguish this soul life itself if you were to extinguish external experiences. The word “soul”, the abstract concept “soul”, is not important; what is important is the real, meaningful soul life.

But ask yourself, when you turn 40, what this really concrete, true content of your soul life actually is. It is actually what your experiences are. You cannot separate experiences from your soul life. Think about what you have in your soul and how it would be different if you had gone through different experiences. It is you yourself, and these experiences have become you. When experiences come up, as is the case, then you are saying that your soul has actually come up to you, as is the case. Observation of the true soul shows that this is not the case; it leads us out into the distance, as a telescope leads us out into the distance, it leads us out beyond birth and death. We see into worlds in which we are before birth or conception, in which we will be after death. We see into these worlds and we know: What we experience here from the moment we become conscious until death, when we lose our earthly consciousness and acquire a different one, what approaches us is not random. It is because we, let us say, lived from 1872 to 1925, but because we have previously lived in a spiritual world and have united with what we have inherited as a body from the spiritual world and have been led down from the spiritual world through the inner longings of the soul in order to live through the series of experiences that can be lived through in the place and time into which we are born. What external experiences of life are, what approaches us as longing, as the will to experience that, it exists in us before this life.

These external experiences are definitely connected with what we have lived through in the spiritual realm before we proceeded to conception or birth. And what we experience as inner soul experiences: We grow inwardly, spiritually with our outer experiences, we develop certain habits, we acquire ideas that guide our lives, and so on. This inner experience between birth and death, one can truly ask: What significance does it have for the world outside of us? One can ask that. And a contemporary philosopher who is strangely obsessed with complaining about philosophy – he says: Man has no more philosophy than an animal, and differs from the animal only in that... [gap] – who is a professor of philosophy at the university, he looks at the inner life of man and says: The natural life, the life in the great world, actually runs its course without concerning itself with the inner life. And he uses the expression, this philosopher: Nature is great and admirable, and we are moping!

One could easily come up with this thought if one has no connection with the spiritual world. One could ask oneself: Why, in addition to the events that take place in the cosmos, does something else take place that resembles an image of the cosmos? The truth is this: While the outer soul experiences are longed for from our spiritual existence before birth, the inner experiences, the gradual becoming of the soul, that which grows within us as a sense of life - that is what we carry over into the spiritual world through death; that is the germ of this inner experience to that which we experience after death.

Thus we are led beyond birth and death into a spiritual world, not by speculation, but by seeking first to develop the faculty of observation, by which we can grasp the eternal in our mind's eye. It develops the perspective into that world in which we really are. Spiritual science leads us to the contemplation of the spiritual world, to the development of what, in an extended sense, can be called, with Goethe, “spiritual eyes” and “spiritual ears”.

And again, the destiny of man, to extract something specific from the abundance of the matter, when you consider what we ourselves are and what our destinies are – and yet, the ordinary consciousness is again of the opinion: It happens as it happens, this fate; on the one hand it is a sum of coincidences that group together into a whole, on the other hand the fact that we ourselves are this fate, if we really consider not only abstract terms. When we consider this, we again come to a disharmony between what ordinary consciousness sees in fate and what fate actually is for what we essentially are as human beings.

When a person rises by experiencing the inner necessity, as I have described it, in his or her imagination, by being able to observe the mind, he or she learns to recognize that the body is a reflection of the mind, just as the ordinary soul is a reflection of the true soul. But also what we experience as fate is in a certain respect a reflection of the spirit, only something is at work in our life that is hidden from the ordinary consciousness. It has an effect when we see our fate approaching us – spiritual observation shows this – it has an effect on our present life that radiates as forces from earlier earth lives. That is the mystery of the will, the mystery of the fact that the will, without our knowing it - because it is in the unconscious - that this will, just as hunger feels drawn to food, feels drawn to that which then bears its destiny. The reason why we know so little about this will in our present life is that what now works as the will to fashion our destiny does not work at all in ordinary life. Just as the seeds of the outer experiences of the soul lie in the prenatal life, so the will that shapes our destiny lies in past earthly lives. And the wisdom that develops within the soul, which is hidden in old age, goes with us through the gateway of death, growing from the imagination to the will for the next life on earth.

Not only can we see through the soul if we are able to extend our ideas by drawing threads from the soul life to the spiritual life, but we can see through the whole course of the human eternal through births and deaths. We first learn through the first degrees of self-observation that the I is something that connects to the inherited body. We learn that our experiences of the soul are drawn from the spiritual world, which we pass through before birth. We learn to recognize that destiny, the wisdom of life, is what leads to repeated and repeated earthly lives.

I could only give you a few hints today, you can read more in my books. I will have a few more special things to say tomorrow. The indications I have given should above all characterize the fact that spiritual science is not about dreaming or creating concepts of the world, but that spiritual science is based on genuine, true research, on a kind of research that is just as strictly inward as the external natural sciences are strict in their field - yes, even stricter. Those who have followed the spiritual path can say this. And that this spiritual science can also shed light on scientific fields, you can see from the last chapter of my book 'Von Seelenrätseln'.

It may be said, dearest attendees, that what is explored as spirit actually sheds light on what surrounds us as nature. This does not invalidate natural science, but it is as limited as the view someone has when feeling their way around a dark room compared to the view someone has when they light a lamp and illuminate the objects. Of course, when you feel for the objects in the dark, the one, the second, the third – you always feel for the same thing. It is therefore not surprising that the room merely felt for is described the same by everyone. Because natural science conducts research in spiritual darkness, the concepts are always the same by themselves, but because when you light a light, you can shine it here and there, the configuration will be different from the different points. Hence the easily found, but by no means apt objection that one usually makes, that one spiritual researcher speaks this and the other that. That is the case, but it is the case for the reason that the spiritual researcher first also ignites the light spiritually from a certain point of view.

But there is a way out. And it is precisely the direction that I myself represent that seeks this way out. People shy away from the inner drama of the soul, from the drama of knowledge that one has to go through, because they fear getting into the subjective. This is a transitional phase, but then you enter a realm where the spirit is objective, where the spirit can be described from all sides in the same way as the world of the senses can be described. If you light a light in a room, you only have a certain aspect of the room. If you turn the light around, the impressions contradict each other; the room looks different from each place, but you gradually get an objective overview of the whole room.

In particular, the spiritual scientific direction that I am striving for seeks to apply the spiritual research methods and to illuminate everything with the light of the spirit, but it tries to do so from different points of view. This results in a different misery, but that is not too bad, that while one otherwise says that a spiritual researcher who takes the different points of view contradicts himself. He contradicts himself, but he does it in order to gradually characterize. This is the basis of the recently so popularized criticisms of my world view, where contradictions are sought. These contradictions are not worth more than four photographs of four sides of a room. The spiritual researcher must contradict himself in a certain way by characterizing life from different points of view. Only unwise people may come – precisely because of the presence of different images that the spiritual researcher gives, he wants to show his objectivity.

In the ordinary physical sense world, it is indeed the case that one need not be exposed to this if one merely describes external facts. But it is different in the spiritual. The spirit is a living thing, and the living has its contradictions. In fact, anyone who is familiar with spiritual science and then carefully and conscientiously immerses themselves in the way of thinking of natural science as it is developed in the present day will find that natural science not only does not contradict spiritual science in any of its details, but is a complete confirmation of everything that spiritual science has to say.

Therefore, I would like to say: the spiritual researcher does not shy away from having his point of view checked, indeed, from having his point of view strictly checked by the most diverse spiritual schools of thought that otherwise exist. Just check what the spiritual researcher has to say against true natural science, not against superficial natural science. After 30 years, monism still represents what natural science has overcome. If you test what the spiritual researcher has to say against true natural science, you will find it confirmed. The spiritual researcher does not shy away from real scientific scrutiny. Thus I shall never advise anyone who feels drawn to what I call spiritual science to believe in the power of superstition, to refrain from testing, to give in to blind faith. No, no one should believe what is said, no one should accept something on authority. But he would understand it all the more, the more conscientiously he tests it in the natural life of the present.

It can be tested in the same way in religious life. It is clear to those who stand on the ground of spiritual science that religious life - as Dr. Rittelmeyer shows - gains a firm support, a security, through what can be experienced from spiritual science, a support that is needed today. One must not succumb to this misunderstanding: spiritual science is not opposed to religious life. It does not say: Don't go to church! No, religion is not to be replaced by spiritual science, and spiritual science is not to be a new religion, but it wants to be something that stands alongside scientific research as a scientific research, but which, for those who approach religious life from a spiritual scientific point of view, enriches and more firmly establishes this religious life. Spiritual science does not say: Go to spiritual science and do not go to church! But: Go to spiritual science and you will see what religious life has to say in a new light.

And life itself, social life, ethical life, legal life, all of life, even the immediate practice of life, can all be enriched by spiritual science in that those who do not become sceptical themselves get their ideas in such a way that they better conform to reality, so that one does not think you are a practical person but are really a dreamer, but rather ideas that are imbued with reality, a feeling that has inner certainty, a will that can find its bearings in life, that can find the paths through life, that is what people can find from spiritual research.

Spiritual research should not be understood as a theory, but as something that goes through life like an essence, that makes people useful and strong for life. So you can go to science, you can go to religion, to life itself – spiritual science will not keep anyone from doing so. It will be glad to be examined by science, by religion, by life itself. For he who is grounded in its soil knows that these tests will not refute it, but that these tests, if carried out seriously, will always confirm it.

Not that one cannot err in the field of spiritual science, but error is possible in every field. That is not the point. The spiritual researcher does not demand blind faith in authority. He says: Go and test spiritual science; it will only gain in science, in religion, in life. Go ahead and test spiritual science against Johannes Müller's world view, for that matter; and spiritual science has no fear of losing anything by doing so. I will not in any way hurl back at Johannes Müller the accusation that he hurled at me in response to Pastor Rittelmeyer's articles: that spiritual science is something tempting, that it represents a new temptation for people. That would be cowardice; then people may let themselves be tempted if the anthroposophical world view should be a temptation - they will recognize by themselves, when they are not suggested that they are being tempted, but when it is said to them: Go to science, go to religion, go to life, even go to Johannes Müller – you will find that spiritual science is not refuted by this, but confirmed by science, by religion, by life and even by Johannes Müller. For this spiritual science – as I have been able to sketch out – tomorrow I want to say something about the conditions in the spiritual world itself – this spiritual science wants real science, wants conscientiously gained knowledge. And above all, it has to be introduced into cultural life in such a way that it can withstand the impact coming from the natural sciences.

Du Bois-Reymond, a physiologist whom I hold in high esteem, has in his famous studies on animal electricity and in other brilliant speeches explained a great deal about how to characterize the newer natural science. But at the same time he said: this natural science can only extend to the world of the senses, for beyond that, science must cease. That was a dictum. And today a wide circle of humanity is under its influence. But what this dictum means – let me express it by way of a comparison: someone sees a tree growing out of the ground. How it is rooted in the ground, you cannot see inside; that bothers you. The tree grows and grows: what is in the ground has something to do with it. You now want to look at the tree with the means at your disposal, you dig it up; you put its roots in the air. It dies, it is killed because it is uprooted. In more recent times, because people did not want to move from human knowledge about the external sensory world to what is at the root of all knowledge in the spiritual world, attempts were made to uproot knowledge about nature, as one uproots a tree. Just as the tree dies, so too does knowledge die when it is torn from the soil, the spiritual soil.

In the future, spiritual science should provide more and more evidence that, when we are torn from the soil of spiritual life, we can only develop mechanical, materialistic science. Instead of Du Bois-Reymond's dictum, “We seek science, but where the supersensible life begins, science ends” – instead of this dictum, there must be the insightful saying, the attitude: When knowledge and science are wrenched out of the soil of truly spiritual life, then science dies out. Not that science must cease where the supersensible world begins, but when science is sought outside the supersensible world, then genuine science dies out, is uprooted and killed. This will be a conviction that connects people to the spiritual world in terms of their attitudes, and this conviction – which spiritual science seeks to achieve – should become the conviction of as many people as possible in the future.

Dear attendees,

If today, as an outsider, one considers the attitude and way of thinking of spiritual science – or, as one is accustomed to calling it, theosophy – and tries to form an opinion about the peculiarity of this spiritual science or theosophy based on the usual conceptions of our time , then an outsider can very easily form the, in a sense, justified opinion that spiritual science is something that conjures up high ideals before the human soul: ideals that tend towards certain insights - perhaps the outsider will say, towards supposed insights - about the human soul, about nature and spirit. And outsiders will say to themselves: Well, these ideas, these insights are very beautiful, they satisfy the human soul that longs for inner certainty, and so it is understandable that many profess Theosophy out of this thirst. And when those who have something to say in spiritual science express what they know about the world of appearances and what goes beyond what our natural science - which is admired by spiritual science - has to say, the outsider may say to himself: Yes, what the spiritual scientist has to say about natural phenomena sounds fantastic. The fantastic element is something that the outsider must notice at first. Those who are immersed in spiritual science will find it extremely understandable that the outsider finds so much fantasy in spiritual science. Those who really want to be grounded in natural science can only say: I can't do anything with it. That is quite understandable. If we now consider, by contrast, a person who has penetrated somewhat deeper into theosophy, who has familiarized himself with what is really presented to the striving soul, who has informed himself about what the human soul and human spirit are, we can see feelings of a completely different kind arising in him. Such a person can direct his gaze to what our present age, out of its scientific views, has to say about the task, goal, and value of spiritual life and its engagement in practical work. And here it sometimes seems truly fantastic to the person who is familiar with spiritual science what the materialistic attitude has to say about individual branches of spiritual life. One need only listen to what is offered in the field of education and pedagogy. To the spiritual researcher, it seems like a collection of empty phrases and words. One can look around in the wide range of what educational cultural endeavors are and will find all kinds of fine words. Who has not heard the words that everything that is implanted into the human soul should be avoided, because it is about the education of the human individuality. But who can say anything other than fantastic, empty words if they cannot grasp the true concept of what the human individuality is. Compared to spiritual science, materialistic science appears as a sum of abstractions; it appears as something unrealistic. And if you cannot convince yourself that spiritual science not only has to cultivate life practice, but that it is capable of realistically getting to the bottom of things, you misunderstand the importance of realistic knowledge for life practice.

When we reflect on the growing child, in relation to whom we have an educational task, with the ideas of spiritual science, then, as this child finds its way into life, we are overcome by the feeling that we have a sacred mystery before us in this being, which we can only solve with deep reverence. In every growing soul we sense that there is something in it that is different from anything we see. We sense an unknown in the developing human being, and we are right. Our awe and reverence cannot be great enough when we face the education of the child, and our humility before every being that always confronts us like a new mystery cannot be great enough either. I would not dare to speak about it if I had only been occupied with spiritual science. But I dare to speak about it because for fifteen years as an educator I have felt the sacred riddles myself.

From the point of view of the modern man, it is child's play not only to scoff but also to refute with the appearance of reason the fantastic idea of the re-embodiment of man, the idea of the reappearance of the human soul in a new life. Today, this idea of re-embodiment will only be mentioned in as much as it is pointed out that our soul, which today lives through the time between birth and death in our body, has often gone through life and that we live through the present life as a cause in order to experience the effects and fruits later. Theoretically, this idea is easy to refute. The matter looks different when one is involved in practical educational work and sees the child's soul growing and developing from week to week, from year to year, with the right feelings. If one starts from the premise that one wants to educate correctly, one must say to oneself: You have to intervene in what has been laid down for millennia. And if you look at every expression of the child from this point of view and take every measure accordingly, then you will see how fruitful the education is. Anyone who knows the laws of so-called logical refutation knows how little a theoretical refutation means. But if you work in the spirit of this view, then you feel its truth.

Now one is indeed faced with a difficult task if one wants to see clearly what is growing in the developing child's soul. Everyone knows the purely external facts. But who has not experienced in life how powerless the educator often is when certain tasks are set by external laws or by the demands of parents, how powerless he feels when the tasks set contradict the abilities and talents that are present in the child. Who has not felt and seen in life that we often cannot achieve anything, even with the greatest effort, if the child's talent does not meet us halfway. How often does life show us how powerless we are, not only because of the child's lack of talent, but also because of our lack of insight.

We have tried to educate the child; however, it is not immediately apparent when we have educated the child wrongly. If we follow a pupil in his later life, something peculiar often becomes apparent to us, namely that he must later squeeze talent and aptitude out of his soul through difficult struggles. And we realize: if we had recognized this, we would have been able to help him, we would have saved him much effort in what could only come later. And we realize how necessary it is to focus on this difficult question: what about the child's abilities and talents, and how should we approach the educational tasks?

Even today, there is understandable confusion regarding these fundamental questions, because there are still influential suggestive ideas and suggestive concepts that understandably have a numbing effect on people, and such concepts guide the whole of human thinking. One such concept is that of inheritance. When talking about a child's disposition and talents, who would not initially think: What has been inherited from parents and ancestors? I have already pointed out that Goethe once expressed the words with very understandable modesty, but they stem from deeper insights:

From my father I have the stature, the serious conduct of life, from my mother the cheerful nature and the desire to tell stories.

And after he expresses some more inheritance relationships, he concludes with the words:

What is now to be called original about the whole figure

?

Posterity has already answered this in part, and a later posterity will still answer it.

Anyone who has studied Goethe for a little more than twenty years has a right to speak about him without bias. All respect for the Frankfurt councilman, from whom Goethe inherited “the stature to lead a serious life”! And when one sees the mother's mobile, loving way of looking at life and dealing with people, then one also realizes what Goethe means to say about what he inherited from his mother, “the cheerful nature and the desire to tell stories.” Try adding all this up and see what comes out. When one adds up and reflects on all that was inherited, one finds: What Goethe could not inherit was precisely that which was effective – that was the actual Goethe himself, that was what allowed the guiding powers to flow in. They used the inheritance that presented itself to them to express [what was special about him.

And it is the same with every individual, as with great and significant people. You can't get by if you want to trace everything back to heredity and don't take into account the individuality that unfolds according to its own laws. For those who look at this life impartially, the question of how what we may trace back to our ancestors, what is visibly there, relates to the individual, is by no means simplified. What is inherited is not denied by spiritual science. But how does spiritual science relate to what is incorporated into what is inherited? After all, inheritance can be seen everywhere. There are people who say that when new traits appear that we do not find in our ancestors, we can still think of heredity, because the traits that we have inherited may have been present in our other ancestors, but they had no opportunity to develop them. This is something that is often said. If you talk like that, then you really have a very vague concept of traits. That is not realistic; one can dream up concepts anywhere. Such people seem to me like someone who says: every brick has the potential to fall on someone's head. But there has to be someone there [for the brick to fall on]. Those who think realistically cannot speak of potential in this way.

It is the task of true education to separate what is inheritable from what is not. Basically, one could – because it is popular today to delve into the animal kingdom – get an idea of heredity. The chicken egg contains what is inherited, but warmth must be added from the outside. Thus we see that an essential prerequisite is warmth, which is not present in the germ itself. Nevertheless, a superficial consideration shows that in animals the things are hereditary, while in humans we must certainly also speak of non-heritable things. Consider how, in the animal, what we call instinct is undoubtedly there from the start, and visibly so, in that it must lie in the line of inheritance; and the animal is a generic creature in that it inherits all the qualities that are more abundant in it than in man, for example, in relation to skill. In this respect, man is worse off than the animal. When he is humble, man tends to twist the concepts according to humility, or when he is proud, to twist them according to pride. And when he is proud, he is inclined to say that animals are far below man. This does not apply in such an absolute sense. Everyone can read about how culture has developed, how long it took human intelligence to come up with paper production, for example. The wasps had already invented paper long before that. So when we look at the animal kingdom, we can see that intelligence is simply realized directly from instincts. One could conclude from this that humans are actually no more intelligent than animals.

There are certain things that humans cannot inherit. Everyone will admit that the ability to build a wasp nest is inherited. But no one should doubt that a person who is placed in a wasteland will never develop language or self-awareness. Language and human self-awareness cannot be inherited; they are not passed on to the next generation, they must always be learned anew. Thus, outward appearances teach that the most important things are not to be judged as they are in the animal kingdom. Nevertheless, who would deny that there are indeed things that are inherited? Who would deny that? When Schopenhauer says that he inherited much of his thinking nature from his mother and much of his will nature from his father, who would deny that there is something important and true in this, even if it is expressed in a misleading way. Thus we see that man actually comes into existence with inherited traits, and we have the task of distinguishing these inherited traits from that which is not inheritable. Experience shows this. Now someone might say: We are happy to admit that language and self-awareness cannot be inherited, but we do not need to make such a subtle distinction, because that takes care of itself; if a person is born into a particular language area, it will simply follow that [he speaks that language].

But what if there are perhaps non-inheritable characteristics that we first have to extract from the deeper sources of human individuality? In this case, it is not quite so easy to distinguish these abilities and talents that lie at the core of a person's being from the inherited characteristics. It is certainly a matter of heredity when seven musicians come from the Bach family. Nevertheless, anyone who takes a practical approach to education will not be able to do other than to single out the inner core of the being from what is inherited. Here one must be completely clear about how the conditions of heredity present themselves in life. We see when a child comes into existence that it resembles the father or the mother more, that it has certain qualities that point to the mother and certain qualities that point to the father. Anyone who looks at life with an open mind will soon notice that there is indeed a difference between what is transmitted from the father and what is transmitted from the mother to the children. Of course, the circumstances mix, but one can still distinguish between what is maternal and what is paternal. And if you look deeper, it becomes clear how the two parts are distributed: it turns out that everything we see in inherited traits and that relates to the quality of intelligence or judgment, to the agility of intelligence or judgment, can be traced back to the mother's traits. And those qualities that can be summarized by saying that the strength of character, the strength and the power to face life, everything that is of a strong-willed nature in the son and daughter, can be traced back to the qualities of the father. I am not saying that the child's intelligence leads back to the mother's intelligence, but I am saying that the child's intelligence leads back to qualities of the mother's intelligence, and the child's strength of character leads back to qualities of the father's character.

If we look at these things more closely, it soon becomes apparent that there are great differences in the way parental life progresses and in the characteristics of the child's life, especially with regard to whether a child is, so to speak, an early child of marriage or a late one. If a child is born later, it shows the educator completely different relationships to the parents than if it is born during the parents' youth. Observation shows that in children born late in marriage, those qualities of the mother or father that have already been lived out in a certain way in their profession tend to emerge more strongly, and in these children the imprint of the parents is much more clearly visible. There is much greater flexibility of intelligence, and the character is much less clearly defined. It is interesting to consider these facts in relation to the child, because we have to take them into account and ask ourselves: what is it that carries the inheritance?

Inheritance is a process that takes place in the physical world. What is inherited? What is inherited is what has actually entered the physical body. If we say that the qualities of intelligence are inherited, we must know that what appears in the child is bound to the physical body, for example to the brain. Because we receive this as an instrument, so to speak, it is natural that we show hereditary traits. We inherit the more intimate formation of the organs and have to adapt to them. Thus it is explainable - because we have inherited organs - that we are dependent on these organs. A somewhat crude comparison: if you are born without a hand, you see how dependent you are on it. It is basically always the physical that comes into consideration when we speak of inheritance, as I have done now. And from this crystallizes that which shows itself to the practical observation of life as an individual core, which we do not understand when we trace it back to inheritance conditions.

The child comes into the world with a certain agility of intelligence and judgment. We look at the mother and see the origins. We study the child's character by looking at the father and thus gain insight into the child's character. But then something strange remains – and that is the most important thing for the educator. Only when he brings this into harmony with heredity can everything [that happens in education] be successful. The judgments that develop have qualities that point to the mother. But within this type of judgment, there are indications of very specific spheres of life that cannot be traced back to the mother. Within the mother's qualities, one child may show an inclination towards music, for example, while another may gravitate towards mathematics. It would be a serious mistake to direct the child's intelligence in any particular direction. The nature of the intelligence can be inherited, but the specific direction, the aptitude for this or that, may be revealed by the nature of the intelligence, but it cannot be inherited. It is left to us as educators to look at the mother and to understand the mobility of the intelligence, for example, why the child must think slowly or quickly. But it still remains for us to understand the inclination towards this or that, towards the specifically individual.

In other respects, strength of character and self-will clearly emerge as traits inherited from the father, and we understand this in the child when we look at the father. But there is one thing we cannot understand. Something emerges, crystallizing like a nucleus: that is the direction of interest towards which this character is turning. We see this direction of interest in one child, and a different direction of interest in another – these are specifically individual.

And if we are clever as educators, we will ask: What are the judgmental qualities of the mother and the character traits of the father? But if we want to educate properly, we need to know the direction of interest of the character and the direction of intelligence. It is very easy to confuse these two aspects. This is why, in a family where a child takes after the father, the father has a difficult time bringing up the child. And conversely, where the child takes after the mother, the mother has a difficult time. Children who take after their father are easier for their mother to bring up. Children who are particularly mother-oriented are more easily brought up by the father. If a child is father-oriented, then it has the will impulses of the father; the father cannot transfer the direction of interest, but the talents occur within the mother's sphere. One consequence is that the father will understand little of the child in this area; the child will take after the father in character, and the mother is best able to cultivate the talents. If, on the other hand, the child takes after the mother, the mother will find it difficult to direct the child's interest; the father can do that:

A talent develops in seclusion,
a character in the stream of the world.

Talents develop in the mildness of the mother's care; characters develop in the firmness of the father's care. This is a golden principle.

As a rule, people do not approach us in such a way that they clearly represent a mixture of the qualities inherited from father and mother; as a rule, it is the case that either more paternal or more maternal influence comes to the fore. This gives rise to extraordinarily important principles for the educator. If we assume that the maternal element predominates, then we can often see that the child appears to be of excellent character, and it is easy to guess the specific talent in this abundance of intelligence. But if the paternal element is suppressed, then it becomes really difficult for us to find the special direction of interest in the suppressed paternal inheritance. In such cases we, as educators, must supply what has not been provided by heredity. We must look particularly at the father to see whether he is relaxed or firm, and then we must replace what has been left out of the inheritance. We can do this by looking at the opposite side. We soon find the talents and abilities, but what is not given in the inheritance, we must replace through education.

What should the educator do? There is something infinitely important here: if he sees that what can be inherited from the father is not pronounced sharply enough, then he must work to ensure that the talents are not left without guidance. He must work to direct the child's attention to such activities and pursuits that correspond to his talents. The talents must be tied to external objects. The interests must be awakened. A child who is inclined towards the mother, we must especially accustom to the fact that it has the objects corresponding to its talents in the environment, to which we draw its attention. But we must not follow the principle: the child has its own abilities, so we let it follow them.

Now, let us assume that a child takes after his father, then it becomes difficult for us to guess the talents, abilities and aptitudes. On the other hand, the direction of interest confronts us with an extraordinarily strong will impulse. This interest will express itself in the intensity of desire. And we must be especially careful not to assume that the direction of interest will always point to the right gift. In such a case, we must pay particular attention to studying the interests in the right way. But if we allow interests to mature for which there is no gift, we harm the child. What expresses itself as a soul quality and does not correspond to any gift is reflected back into the soul. This is a constant source of illness that disturbs the physical nervous system. Many such disturbances can be traced back to a failure to harmonize interests with gifts and talents. It will show - which is extremely instructive to see - how certain interests express themselves impulsively, but lead to clumsiness, while others lead to skill. Far too little attention is paid to this. But one should carefully distinguish between the interests. And then, as an educator, one has the task of keeping away what would lead the interest to clumsiness.

The best way to get along is to ask yourself: What is the father like and what is the mother like? - and then carefully examine what appears as a crystal core within the paternal and maternal inheritance treasure. In this sense, we can say that education must really be based on knowledge and not on empty phrases such as “educate harmoniously” or “take the individuality into account”. How can we educate harmoniously if we do not know what the interests are? How can we emphasize the individuality if we do not know how to find what is specifically individual?

Now, this is only one side of education. The human being is not placed in the world for his own sake, but for the sake of humanity. We cannot merely take into account what appears in the child as inherited. The educator will soon realize that with the law of karma a great, harmonious relationship is expressed in spiritual-scientific terms. You can easily observe outside [in nature] how a being is placed where it belongs. The edelweiss does not grow in the lowlands, but on mountain heights. Every being grows into its environment and cannot thrive where it does not fit in. It is the same with the human core, which fits into the “environment” to which it belongs. Things fit together better than one might think. That is why the talents go well with the mother and the interests go well with the father. Nevertheless, we have to look at something else. The human being is not designed to speak his own language, but that of the community into which he is born. That is the generic. Thus, through the common language, the whole way of thinking and feeling penetrates into the soul.

This can be observed to a certain extent. Try to compare the soul of a Franconian person with that of a West Prussian person, and try to realize how the respective way of thinking and feeling works within him. It is the same with everything into which the human being is placed in accordance with the species. If we educate consciously, we must know that we do not educate the human being only individually. Just as we cannot give him his own language, we cannot do anything extra for each child as educators. Human nature is designed so that the human being fits into what is there in the cultural process. The human being must be educated into what belongs to humanity; it must take root in him. If we bear this in mind, we shall say to ourselves: In the face of these elements we seem quite powerless. If we look at the talents and at the demands of life, it may seem impossible to us to bring harmony into them.

[Only the intimate observation of the human being can help us here]. I will describe two children to you, [put them before you as examples]. One of them was born into an environment where a particular language was spoken. They grew up with this language; it became the property of their soul – a part of the whole inner human being. Anyone who has reflected on the relationship between language and the human being will know that through language, the human being not only learns to think logically, but also to feel. For example, the way the A or U sound works in any language has an enormous effect on the soul's capacity for feeling. Language provides a “skeleton” for feelings and sensations. If we place next to this child, who is completely interwoven with his language, so that he has not only learned to think in language but also to 'be' in language, another child who, by the will of fate, is forced to learn and make another language his own after he has barely learned his mother tongue. We will observe how his soul life is much more mobile, much less grounded. I would like to say that a language that acts like a “skeleton” of the soul gives more robust natures. A language that wears our soul like a “dress” makes the soul more fluid, less solid. The result is that the soul of such a child is much more easily influenced; it cannot face the external influences of life with such robustness.

If we now leave aside the language, it can teach us that it is of great importance for education when what is later to be the educational principle and purpose in life connects with the earlier stages. All erraticism in education destroys the soul life in an enormous way. One of the greatest damages to the soul is when one does not build on what has gone before. On the other hand, conscious building has a wonderful effect. If you have a child with a weak character and you sit down with him from time to time and begin to speak very subtly of what he did three years ago, you can do much more to correct the present than you can by directing your thoughts to the present. You can make the biggest mistakes if you lash out at the child with punishments and disciplinary measures out of anger. When the deed is fresh, it is easy to make mistakes. Life is not without contradictions, you cannot help but make mistakes, but they can be improved. If you are inclined to punish, sit down with the child and talk about a previous misbehavior; the child has moved on and no longer feels the previous one so strongly. Feelings become dulled; they take a completely different path than thoughts and memory. It turns out that we can discuss the past objectively, and the more often we do this, the more we can refresh our memory and turn our attention to the past, and the more we can do for the development of character.

These are the individual rules that arise for the unbiased observer. However, one needs the perspective of spiritual science to group the details correctly. But then one can see the big picture and draw important principles from it. One is forced to look not only at the individual, but also at the whole. Then, however, one must look for harmony between the individual, single nature and the general human nature. By going back to the past, you can draw a certain sympathy. You will find it very difficult to reconcile the child's selfishness with the demands of the environment, but when you go back to past experiences, you will see how the child responds to them. The educator must reconcile the earlier with the later. He must see to it that what the individual human being must harmonize with the demands of all humanity happens by drawing on the past. You educate all the better the more you draw on the child's earlier experiences.

So you have to gather together these things that are good for raising children. In particular, it is a wrong to leave pronounced talents undeveloped and thus put the child in constant conflict with the environment. All these are causes of illness. Suppressed talents and interests creep into the human soul and can later manifest as mental illnesses. We commit a sin against human health when we leave a person's talents undeveloped and his interests unused. And we also do wrong when we fail to take into account the need for adaptation to the environment. If we do not do this, then what arises as a contradiction between the child's soul and the demands of life seems to be pushed back into the soul and is felt as a deep dissatisfaction in life. And for all people who go through life and always complain: I have such a difficult time in my soul - then the soul's judge must say: Yes, there are interests that should have been legitimately cultivated, there are talents that should have been developed, and that has been missed. And that is why the person cannot cope with putting themselves into life and is unsatisfied.

One could easily say: What you are talking about is based on more intimate properties of the soul that can be discovered within the intelligence and the direction of the will. But these are precisely the most important things for the educator; they are the core of the soul and where he can do the most harm. Why? The interests and talents we cultivate initially lead to a certain agility of judgment, and at thirty years of age it is dexterity of the fingers and hands. If someone is thirty years old and handles something clumsily, it leads back to the time of about his seventh year, when he has not yet learned the agility of thought. And the apathy that sets in when we do not develop the interests that shows up as a casual attitude in all practical tasks. Above all, it must be noted that it is precisely the individual essence of the child that is expressed in these qualities.

The humanities scholar will recommend that the child be kept busy, but in such a way that it happens through play. Why does the child play, and why should he play? I will mention something from later life. You know a phenomenon in life, fatigue. Where does fatigue come from? You will often get the answer that it shows up in the evening when the muscles are worn out. Is it true that muscles can come into a state of fatigue by their own nature? If that were so, then the muscles that move your heart would have to be resting from fatigue. It is not in the nature of the muscle to get tired. The muscle does what it is supposed to do; it does not get tired. The heart muscle remains unaffected by external activity. Fatigue only occurs when you ask your muscle to do something that relates to the outside world, that is connected with a conscious action. We can say that a mismatch between our muscles and the demands of the outside world causes fatigue. This is true: fatigue comes from the internal organization not matching the outside world. It shows that there is a certain contradiction between the outside world and the internal organization.

I only want to draw attention to one thing: we must be clear that the human process of culture cannot proceed only according to the implanted laws, so that it only corresponds to the inner [physical] organization. The essence of the human soul life is not directed towards the preservation of the species, but towards the development of the soul-spiritual. Two currents are expressed here: progress [of the soul-spiritual] and that which is inner [bodily] organization. It is written in the eternal laws of existence that man must sacrifice purely organic laws to spiritual laws. He who sees through these things will not complain about it. But he will find it understandable that, on the other hand, a balance is necessary. We must be prepared for life in a healthy way, so that we can grasp external things with our hands and think about external things with our brains. A balance must be created, and this will only be achieved if we are able, at certain times, to cultivate an activity that is not directed towards the outside world, but is content with the activity itself.

When it comes to play, our inner nature follows what is required here. We do our child the greatest favor when we shape the play individually, and in doing so we strengthen our inner being. If you shape the play in a stereotyped way, you can see the consequences. Today, people want to fit everything into a template; they do not even want to admit that clothing should be tailored to suit the individual. It is the basic trait of contemporary culture that even those people who are the worst Nietzschean followers [i.e. the worst individualists] will still eat together at a “table d'hôte”. We must not allow this to influence our education, especially not in play. We have to organize play in such a way that we individualize, that we pay careful attention to the talents and interests of this or that child, otherwise we are committing a sin.

This can lead us to the realization that it is necessary for us as practical educators to believe in the spiritual in the child and not in the muscles, which are supposed to have the strength to counteract their wear and tear. The soul should be left to its own devices in play, and the material should not interfere, so that the child can be free from the “tiresome” influence of the outside world. If we do not believe in an inner soul-being that liberates itself, then we cannot educate practically. But if we approach the subject in a truly practical way, we can see something else of significance; we can also recognize that it is necessary to be free from the coarse material laws of the outer world in childhood. The earlier these laws impinge upon the child, the more they take hold, and this does not allow free activity in play. Childhood needs truths that do not slavishly adhere to what is in the outside world; it needs truths that it can embrace with heart and soul. That is why fairy tales and myths should be given to the child's soul; in this way, inner truths liberate the soul. Mankind used to do this out of a sure instinct, and in our time it will be necessary to take more account of this.

Now one may ask: how does an educator acquire these special talents? It is not really that difficult, because what I have already mentioned is actually the main thing that belongs to the educator, and in a very comprehensive way: the holy awe for what wants to break free as the individual core of the human being. If we have a sense of awe for that which has been preparing itself for millennia and in whose development we must assist, then a sense of responsibility arises that blesses us, that is, it has a certain quality: it makes us “genius” in our education. The educator often has no idea why he is doing the right thing. The child itself tells him what it needs. What is necessary in the educator's profession is love, which is characterized by the fact that we learn to love the blossoming of the child's abilities; and we will see what love can do in the spirit. In the outer life, love may often be blind. When love is directed towards the inner becoming, it opens the soul, for behind this love there is always a mighty faith – the faith that truly enables us to view life in the right sense and that shows us the human being as standing in a world of spiritual life as well as of sensory life, and that we have to establish the connection between them. In the child we see the spirit descending, the marriage of the spirit with the body. And when we see in the child how the spirit unites with the body, then our educational activity can become an expression of what we can call the actual belief in life, which may be expressed in the words:

It surges to the human mind
From the depths of the world, full of mystery
The rich abundance of matter,
It flows from the heights of the world
Into the depths of the soul, full of content
The spirit's clarifying light.
They find each other in the human heart
To form a reality full of wisdom.

Dear attendees! Anyone who takes a look at our spiritual life will realize how deeply the mystery associated with the name of Christ Jesus is intertwined with our present education. And it may well be said that all questions touching the present time are the consequence of the Christ or Jesus problem, one of the most significant problems of all. We have even seen that even men of our time who believe they are above what they call the religious prejudices of Christianity are intensively occupied with this problem. For example, there is the fact that interest in this mystery has been shown from more or less monistic sides. The only question that arises is that it has been tried to solve this mystery in the most diverse, the most profound and sometimes also the most superficial way at all times since Christianity has existed.

Since we have to start from a very specific point of view, namely that of spiritual science, let us first visualize the underlying reasons for the particular coloration that our present age gives to this riddle. We must then see – and this is particularly indicative of our present time – that in souls, in hearts, an enormous contradiction is emerging: on the one hand, there is the need, the intense longing to know something about those questions that have occupied the human mind since time immemorial; on the other hand, there is the cleft, the chaos that emerges. While one feels too soft or too weak to really attack this problem in all its depths, there are again experts in this field who deal with it in the most detailed way, expecting some new revelation, some new event in relation to this problem.

The peculiarity of this question is already included in the two names that come to mind: “Christ” and “Jesus”. And if we just take a brief look at what has happened over the centuries, from the time of the evangelists, the first Christians, and across the centuries, we encounter the question: How can man form a conception that the divine essence of Christ can embody itself in a human being, in a human body? How is it possible that the divine nature has accomplished in a human body what is called redemption? In short, we can say that what has occupied humanity so powerfully at all times is the question: How could Christ appear on earth, how did that very union of the two natures, of the God Christ and the man Jesus, come about? But the closer we get to the present, the more and more the question takes on a different form. The question takes on a form - that is the remarkable thing - that is completely adapted to the respective cultural view that humanity has struggled to achieve. When we look at the present, we find the opposite pole, the complete opposite of what was recognized at the very beginning of Christianity in relation to the Christ-question.

One could point to hundreds and hundreds of cases similar to the one I am about to mention. In a Swiss journal of 1861, a man who was close to Christianity says the following: If I were compelled by anything to admit that Christ rose bodily, that the resurrection is at all possible in an evangelical sense, then I would have to admit everything that, not corresponding to my own worldview, would somehow confront me; then I would have to find that my whole worldview has a crack. How many people of the present day, including religious scholars and theologians, would have to make the same confession! If they thought about it, they would come to the conclusion that they would have to confess the same thing.

Let us contrast this confession with what Paul said when he said:

If Christ is not risen, then your works are in vain and so is your faith.

If you look at what Paul says, you have to admit that the most essential thing that permeates him is the fact that the Christ has risen. You have to admit that Christianity loses its meaning altogether if the mystery of the resurrection is removed, if what happened for the development of humanity is removed. Paul regarded the resurrection as the most essential thing, as the fundamental nerve of the Christian world view. And in our time it has come to this - this is deeply significant - that certain people say to themselves, if they had to acknowledge the resurrection, then their whole world view would be split.

It does not exactly touch someone sympathetically, to whom one has not yet plastered over these things, to find the fundamental question of Christianity – because that is what it is – presented to the soul in this form. But theosophy does not have the task of whitewashing things, so to speak, but rather of characterizing them according to their true names. In a sense, time cannot, out of itself, [out of its nature]; the general character of the formation of time is also expressed in the conception of the Christ-question. We see the Christ-question transformed into a Jesus-question in the nineteenth century; we see how, through the progress of science, it is becoming less and less possible for man to see in the man Jesus of Nazareth a divine-spiritual being, as it could be seen in ancient times. As the gospels became more and more accessible through the spread of education, people read deeply into them, and their souls were, as it were, drawn up to something divine. Then a gradual transition took place from the most paradoxical ideas about the Christ Jesus to what many theologians now profess, namely, that one has to assume that Jesus was only an exceptionally outstanding personality in world development, so that what man regards as the highest ideal was present in him to a great extent. One sees in him only a human being, albeit raised to a higher level.

Naturally, all possible shades of opinion are to be found in the conceptions of Christ Jesus. Thus, in the eighteenth century, we are confronted with the fact that people only put into the Christ Jesus problem what they could imagine, what they could think. Thus, to the Enlightenment thinker Reimarus, Christ Jesus appears hardly as anything more than an especially outstanding human being. [In contrast, Lessing had a substantially different spiritual image within himself.] He once said that he wished he could still live to see someone come along who would thoroughly refute what is being spread about Christ Jesus. Everything [at that time] was based on the criticism of the Gospels, especially on the contradictions, and specifically on those that come to light when comparing the different resurrection accounts. The obvious conclusion was that the reporters had passed on something that was not real – but this is by no means a fact.

If witnesses are heard in any matter who give different testimony, this is by no means proof against the fact itself. If we now imagine a world court case and ask: Are these witnesses credible? this is not correct. Rather, another question is the only decisive and important one: Who won the trial? Undoubtedly, Christianity, which was based on the fact of the resurrection, has carried the victory in world history. So the fact is that even if the witnesses testified differently, the trial itself is decided.

Then the time drew nearer and nearer when the matter was so arranged that every possibility of thinking of something superhuman in it disappeared, or, to speak with the spirit of that age: The time is drawing ever nearer when it will be impossible to think and speak of the resurrection in the same way as we originally did. Therefore, in the nineteenth century, the first concern of religious history was to get a picture of the man Jesus from the Gospels. We do not need to discuss here what has been done with the Gospels, how attempts have been made to compile the synoptic material in order to arrive at an approximately uniform overall picture, or how attempts have even been made to exclude altogether the Gospel that has the most supersensible content, the Gospel of John, on the grounds that it is a hymn to the individuality of Jesus of Nazareth. But there were also other researchers in the nineteenth century who said that if the Gospel of John were no longer recognized, then the whole of Christianity would have to be abandoned. One scholar, who is now considered outdated but who was once highly regarded, emphasized the facts of the Gospel of John. But all efforts were aimed at credibly presenting the man Jesus to the soul; however, from the outset, much had to be excluded that was indeed in the Gospels but that could no longer be believed in the nineteenth century. So a lot of facts, such as miracles and so on, were taken away and any possibility of admitting anything non-natural ceased.

It was therefore of particular significance when a theologian of the nineteenth century, Franz Overbeck, who lived in Basel, wrote a very remarkable book entitled “On the Christianity of Today's Theology”. This book is remarkable not only for its content, but it is significant for anyone interested in such things as an expression of the confession of a man who, as a theologian, had to struggle with the fact that he had to stand before his students with such feelings in his soul. Overbeck had to wrestle with this fact until it finally pushed him to express what lived in his soul. Anyone who understands such things will truly see a stormy destiny in following the strange life of the Basel native Overbeck, who basically answered the question, “Can theology today still be called Christian at all if it is also a science?” only with “no”. As a theologian, he sought to prove that theology as a science could not be Christian at all, because any science - according to Overbeck - must do away with and break with much of what is the basic meaning of any religion; the moment a pre-Christian religion came into contact with science, it underwent a process of decomposition, and so it happened with Christianity: science destroys Christianity under all circumstances and must always be an opponent of it.

When this is stated, it may not go deep to the heart, and in a certain respect it may be easily accepted by the layman. But when one is confronted with an era that urges such a significant theologian to make such a confession, one must feel how deeply the corresponding question [about the relationship of Christ to Jesus], the Christ-Jesus problem, actually goes to the root of our current development. And Overbeck says something else, namely, roughly the following: Whatever thoughts and scientific reasons we can muster about the Christian worldview must seem terribly small and inadequate to support the Christian creed. In the early days, Christians lived with the idea that a new world was coming, but soon a different time came, and it was no longer the doctrines of the Church Fathers that fertilized Christianity. At first there was hope for heaven to come to earth, but then finally the feeling that this world could never satisfy the human heart; an ascetic mood became apparent.

Today we see that people place some value on scientific truths – these are self-evident, they conquer the world of the outer senses, and so we see the driving force of religious belief slumbering in people. Who would not want to admit that this is deeply, deeply characteristic of our time? Is it not moving, distressing, that that which gave thousands upon thousands consolation and hope should increasingly lose its power? Let us face a fact: in 1873 an attempt was made in France to count those who were still touched by Christ, and it was found that one-third of the total population still believed in him. Today, it is estimated that only about one-fifth of London's total population is still imbued with Christianity. What does it matter that those who are quickly satisfied with themselves say, “What do we need a new foundation for? The old is enough for us.” Those who think only of themselves and are satisfied with that may speak thus; but those who think of humanity and see how the best truth-seekers can no longer find support will have to admit that the times are serious and that it is understandable when people long for a renewal of the old.

And so it gradually happened that on a theological basis a man named Jesus of Nazareth arose, from whom all the supernatural had been removed. In the nineteenth century, there was also a reaction of a strange kind. One could say: in order to deal with the Christ problem, which had been completely lost sight of in the Jesus problem, people sought to hold on to the Christ nevertheless, to recognize him. But in doing so, he was made into a being who basically lacks true reality. It has led to the Christ being made into a mystical being who does not need to be bound to what the evangelists tell – they tried to hold back the gospels [so to speak]. It would lead to chaos if one wanted to cover all the trends of the last few decades – at any rate, we are dealing with a crisis.

For those who have followed this development, there is something easy to grasp. The combination of mystical insight with all that has been brought to light by gospel research represents the last phase of this development. Something emerged that can be described as the connection between these two currents, and the result was that people even doubted whether a Jesus had lived at all. It is entirely in keeping with the style of our time that, once the mere external, historical yardstick was applied to Jesus, the question arose: Is there anything left at all in the Gospels that provides us with proof that a Jesus lived? — But one has no right to deny that a Jesus existed, because with a certain justification one is led to the conclusion that the existence of Jesus is clearly provable. However, for anyone familiar with today's historical research and aware of the current state of Jesus research, proof of the existence of Jesus cannot be provided because it is possible – if one wants – to challenge the documents of the Gospels. And one would have to be reckless not to admit that this challenge has quite significant reasons.

But what does all this show us? It shows us that we are in a state of crisis in the whole field [of Jesus research]. However, a new world view has also become part of the present education, which initially knows how to plausibly demonstrate that it has different sources of truth than those that have been available so far - I am referring to Theosophy or spiritual science. Even if Theosophy has something to say about Christianity and its origin, it could still be necessary for religion and religious research to deal with what Theosophy says about Jesus Christ. It is therefore important to know that both sides start from some elementary, fundamental events that have happened and cannot be denied.

The thing that our present education must undoubtedly take the greatest umbrage at is the story of the resurrection, that something has occurred that can no longer be understood today, namely that there was a victory of life over death. From a theosophical point of view, something can only be said about this if one considers the most obvious thing, namely the scene of one's own heart and soul. And what does this scene show us? It shows us something that cannot be admitted by the prevailing education; it shows us how the possibility exists for man that an inner miracle takes place at some time in his life. If we can call a miracle that which can be characterized as being in contrast to what is connected to the intellect, then it is a fact that such a miracle can take place in the human soul. And for every soul in which this miracle has taken place, it is inwardly clear that miracles exist.

It is a fact that there is an inner, mystical experience in which something enters the human soul that has no connection with the soul in the natural course of life. To understand this, one must follow the natural course of a person's life. It shows that, alongside all the external facts of life, we are constantly dealing with a deep inner life - we are dealing with the fact that the course of life shows itself in the human soul. Let us take a soul that belongs to the struggling souls in life - not a scientific one. Let us take a human soul that is dealing with the existential issues of life, that experiences inner tragedy, pain and suffering, but also bliss and salvation. Let us take such a human soul that has been living in such moods for years, and let us imagine that someone has not seen this person for ten years. He would make a remarkable discovery, namely that this struggle of the soul expresses itself in changes in the physiognomy, gestures and so on. The spiritual struggle expresses itself in the body. What takes place within a person also works on the transformation of the human exterior.

But what is much more interesting is the following: anyone who struggles in this way senses that when an answer or a solution to certain riddles has occurred, they are in a different state of mind. And the characteristic feature is that when the solution has occurred, the transformation of the physiognomy stops and the expression remains constant. As long as the struggle lasts, furrows form. But this too has an end; it is as if the human body reaches the limit of its elasticity. When the human being reaches this limit, the physical transformation finally ceases. The forces of consciousness transform, the soul forces. First they work on the body, and then, when this is no longer possible, they consciously work their way into themselves. It has been established that these human soul forces work inwardly throughout the whole of human life, and it has been shown that sometimes something of what is working in the depths of the soul also rises up into consciousness, and this shows itself in particularly strange dreams. This means that the dream images reveal something of what is going on in the soul.

Let us take a typical dream from the life of a friend close to me. When he was a young person attending secondary school, he had to do a drawing in the last grade, and because they knew he had talent, they gave him an especially difficult template, and that is precisely why the work progressed rather slowly. The end of school was approaching, and the student realized that it would be impossible for him to finish on time, since only a small part had been drawn. He felt anxious about this, but at the end of school his performance was still enough for the teachers, because they realized that he had only progressed slowly due to his great talent. The man grew older, became a draftsman, and strangely enough, this school experience came back to him in his dreams at certain intervals, and he experienced everything exactly as it had happened once, only the fear that he would not be able to finish was much, much greater in the dream. It happened that the dream came back regularly for days in a row, then it stopped for years and then came back.

The full significance of this dream experience can only be understood by comparing it with life. It turned out that every time this dream experience occurred, this person recognized an increase in his abilities. He could do more in terms of observing forms and expressing them through his hand; he experienced noticeable progress every time. Man works spiritually and mentally like this draftsman, and from time to time his soul work is revealed in 'dream' - in that strange state that exists between consciousness and unconsciousness, in that transition from the subconscious to the conscious. We see this throughout life.

We have an important point in human life, up to which one remembers in the course of life. Everyone must say: I remember up to a certain point in time, but what lies before that point in time is completely unconscious to me, and I only know something about it through the reports of others. This point in time is the one at which we have appropriated the word “I” for ourselves. But what happened before that moment? Let us look at the child, with its clumsy movements and actions. We know that the most important organ in the human being, the brain, is still completely undeveloped when the child comes into existence, and it is only during life on earth, until the child learns to say “I”, that it works on the organs of thought. We are therefore dealing with a spiritual-natural consciousness that is completely independent of the human being, with a supersensible-spiritual activity that represents the starting point of that cerebral activity. The following example characterizes that supersensible, spiritual element in man.

It is common knowledge that Nietzsche ended in madness. In the last period before the outbreak of madness, he wrote “captious” letters to acquaintances, including the Basel theologian Overbeck mentioned earlier. When Overbeck received one of these letters at the end of the 1880s, he knew that he could no longer delay in picking up his friend Nietzsche from Turin, where he was staying. The following now appears important as an example of what I have mentioned: When Nietzsche met Overbeck, he had no attention for what surrounded him; he let himself be done with whatever was wanted and showed absolutely no interest. Only when he heard the name of the personality standing before him, who was the same person who had been his colleague for years, did it flash through him: “That's the psychiatrist I was with back then.” And Nietzsche, to Overbeck's greatest astonishment, began to continue a conversation at the point where it had been interrupted seven years ago. A person who has no attention for the outside world continues a conversation at the point where it was interrupted seven years ago! Overbeck had forgotten that conversation in the meantime, but he remembered it immediately. And it is remarkable: when Nietzsche was brought to Jena and Overbeck visited him in the insane asylum, one could not talk with him about what was going on around him — only about what he had thought, devised, mentally struggled with and experienced years before; only about that could one talk with him.

But what does this show us? It shows us that there is a supersensible body within the physical body. If one builds on facts, then what is at issue here must be recognized as highly important. Man can only enter into connection with the objective external world through his physical organs. Nietzsche's organs were destroyed, and therefore he could no longer do this; only the central spiritual core within the physical body was unaffected. This one example could be multiplied a hundredfold. The existence of this central spiritual core in the physical body cannot be denied, and it is a fact that under certain circumstances man is able to see into the supersensible world. When we place thoughts that are symbolic through the strong will into the center of consciousness in such a way that all attention is focused on them and nothing is distracted, when we only look at them and repeat them over and over again - for a year, and if a year is not enough, then for ten years: a result will eventually emerge. The soul manages to bring everything up from the depths; she looks into everything.

This supersensible state cannot be reached with the help of ordinary tools, but only through intimate soul work. When a person has concentrated all thoughts and worked with them long enough in this way, he finally comes to a point where he says to himself: Yes, I am now experiencing something within me that I am quite sure is something supernatural. But strangely, I cannot think it in the way I usually think things. - Man then feels something that only comes to the consciousness of those who experience it, because in this moment of transcending the resistance of his physical body, the brain is no longer capable of expressing what has been experienced. Man recognizes: That which he was accustomed to feeling in the soul wants to transgress into consciousness. But he senses: the bodily tools were indeed suitable for the natural life up to now, but now I am experiencing something for which my brain is not yet sufficiently developed. Man then perceives the duality of the spiritual-soul being. He then experiences further how that which was initially weak finally begins to work perceptibly and tangibly on the brain, on consciousness, on the body.

I have now described this process of development to you. It is not a matter of something arbitrarily conceived, not a theory, but a fact that every true seeker of the spirit can experience. But what does the seeker of the spirit experience? He experiences what I have termed the “miraculous fact”. Something extra-worldly enters into the soul, to which man had no relationship before. One could describe what enters as a higher human being in the human being, as something that joins the spiritual that was already there before. Now a question might arise: Yes, but only a small circle of people experience something like that, only the spiritual seeker experiences something like that, who undertakes these exercises with the soul. — But what has just been described can be experienced by every soul, albeit in the most diverse shades, in the most diverse gradations, corresponding to the individuality of the person concerned. When we read the descriptions of those people whom we call the Christian mystics, we sense that these mystics did not experience what I have just described, but that something of a different nature has entered into these souls, something other than the existing spiritual - this transformation is called 'resurrection'.

Anyone who immerses themselves in the descriptions of the gospels with the necessary devotion will experience what I have described to a greater or lesser extent. But everyone can experience it - apart from studying the Gospels - feel that there is a feeling in the soul that cannot be found in the natural course of life in the soul. However, the Bible is the easiest way to bring a supersensible spiritual world into the horizon of consciousness. If one admits this miracle fact, then humanity provides a necessary supplement to it, and this arises from Theosophy itself. If we look back at what was said about the central core of spirit, we see that this central core of spirit cannot be traced back to the mere beginning, to the origin of the body, because this central core of spirit is completely independent of the beginning of life, of the brain activity of the human being. Rather, it must be traced back to an earlier human life, so that we must speak of repeated lives on earth. What we have come to know as the central core of the spirit, as supersensible life, asserts itself through death, and with this point of view we stand on the ground of spiritual science.

This view of repeated earthly lives has already been incorporated into our newer culture. Lessing was compelled to speak of the repetition of life out of an inner necessity. He said: “If one considers the entire human development, it appears to one as an all-embracing education of mankind.” It would have seemed senseless to Lessing if a soul that had ended completely [with death] had lived. Lessing thought that the soul takes with it what it possesses in the way of training, [then comes back to earth with it and so on. In this way a unified organism would be created: the soul, which is in a state of development, does not die], but lives on and on, lives forever. The nineteenth century, however, had little interest in elaborating on this fact. But this fact emerges with necessity. When a few decades ago a prize was offered for the best literary work on the subject of 'The Immortality of the Soul', the first prize was awarded to a work entitled 'The Immortality of the Soul on the Basis of Repeated Life on Earth'. This is proof that even then there were people who were drawn to this view of repeated lives on earth.

If we consider the development of humanity, it turns out that only from a certain point in time was it possible for the human soul to experience that inner miracle, that certainty, which [initially] comes to the soul as a question. We can distinguish two great epochs: the old, pre-Christian times, when man had not yet come to the consciousness of his ego, and the time after Christ, when man enters the world with the full maintenance of his self-conscious ego. Just as human descent can be traced back to a primal being, so too must that which can prove to be an inner resurrection for each individual in the soul be traced back to a progenitor for this inner miracle. Just as resurrection takes place for the individual, so it must also have taken place for humanity, and Theosophy shows us clearly: What makes the individual a different person also made the man Jesus of Nazareth a different person.

Just as we live with our central spiritual core, to which no boundary is drawn by death, so the world with its central spiritual core is subject to its own law. Therefore, according to theosophy, the resurrection for the whole of humanity is virtually the same miracle as the inner miracle for the individual. After [Jesus'] physical body was hung on the cross, the spirit [of the Christ] lived on. Let us consider Paul's words in the Gospel, that the Christ died for humanity and was resurrected on the third day, and that he then appeared first to Peter, then to more than five hundred people, and finally to himself. He did not appear to Paul in his original Jesus form, but in a spiritual form, which he had to recognize as the Christ form, which was such that the conviction asserted itself from within: the Christ lives! We cannot speak of the resurrected Christ in any other way than to say that that which lived in him spiritually, independently of the physical body, was not truly dead in death, but continued to be there, to live on.

It would take us too far afield today if I were also to explain to you what happened to the body. The important thing is that Scripture clearly and unambiguously points this out to us: from the moment of the resurrection onwards, we are dealing with the emergence of a new spiritual power that was not present before, with an outpouring of the spirit. And this inward miracle leads back to the resurrection from the dead, to the continuing life of the Christ, who was crucified as Jesus of Nazareth. Christ has made possible a new relationship with the spiritual world for humanity; thus the miracle of the cross is the progenitor of all miracles that take place in human life. In this way, spiritual science shows us a path to Christ; it shows us that the Christ is necessary for humanity. Only a timid mind could sense danger in such a path to Christ, because every path to Christ that is based on truth must and will be welcome (to those seeking the Christ).

Spiritual science does not want to be a new religion and is not a sect either. The relationship to science is expressed by an image: the spiritual scientist relates to ideas and concepts in the same way that a farmer relates to his harvest; he takes some as seed and consumes the rest. One can think the modern scientific concepts and ideas or, in another case, also live them. If you live with a part of what science gives, taking it as you take physical nourishment, then you come to emphasize spiritual science. Natural science demands spiritual science. An example from water for the question: Is there a spiritual element in nature? It is in it like hydrogen in water. You are completely grounded in spiritual science when you call it spiritual chemistry; spiritual science wants to separate the spiritual and soul from the physical.

Anyone who is interested in the things that concern them will notice that they retain them, that they develop a good memory for them; the health of the soul depends on memory. Whether we can see ourselves clearly back to our childhood depends on our attention; this seems easy, “but the easy is difficult”. This attention can be increased to the limitless; the art of driving this attention further and further is part of what the spiritual researcher has to do. This is called the concentration of soul power. The objects of reflection must be placed at the center of the soul life through one's own power and activity. This concentration must be carried out with the utmost energy and patience. The only apparatus is the human soul, and the only experimenter is the spiritual researcher himself. A spiritual researcher must first develop concentrated thinking within himself; the whole person must become an observer of self-selected ideas, and that is why the spiritual scientific current is like a continuation of the natural scientific one.

In reality, it is concepts and ideas that science has brought. They must be elevated to a symbol. In this way, the human being achieves that the spiritual-mental is lifted out of the physical-corporal, like hydrogen out of water. I then no longer imagine in my body, but in the spiritual. Then you know what it means to think outside of your brain. It is a feeling of yourself outside of the body, initially outside of the brain. You then feel your body like an external object. Ordinary thinking is robust and wears out the brain; but usually you do not pay attention to it. Re-immersing yourself in the physical brain brings a certain fear. By applying inner forces, the spiritual-mental can be separated from the physical-bodily. The act of separating from the body becomes an inner play of expression, a facial expression. Something active, something energetic is the separated part. This inner play of expression has a meaning; otherwise it only shows hints when one makes a face.

The second step is complete surrender. A person must completely extinguish and submerge everything that is thinking, feeling and willing in them into the stream of world events. This devotion must be increased to the point of no return; to the point where the person commands a complete standstill in his or her other mental life.

Then he experiences himself not only in the soul-spiritual, but he comes to perceive in the spiritual-soul world and is in the midst of spiritual beings. In the spiritual world, one must immerse oneself in every being one wants to recognize. One must be able to carry one's own being into these beings. I must experience the spiritual process as my own, and that comes from cultivating real devotion, taken to the point of immeasurability. You have to mimic what is going on in them with your expressions. You have to experience what the beings experience with them. You cannot experience passively; in recognizing you have to imitate them. This is then expressed in the facial expressions of one's own spiritual life.

Something else is developed through concentration and devotion; one separates again the spiritual-soul from the physical. What one uses for speaking in ordinary life, one can keep in the soul, not use for speaking. In the spiritual body, one can learn to speak inwardly, outside of the physical body. One must not even stir up what is stirred up in the brain, let alone what is stirred up in the rest of the speech apparatus when speaking. A person always thinks in such a way that speaking resonates; even when he only thinks, the hidden speech movements take place inwardly. Certain will impulses are associated with the ideas; for example, one concentrates on the idea of a luminous circle. One imagines that the luminous circle is the symbol of the wisdom that reigns in the world. One must not only concentrate in thinking, but also participate with one's affections. Then one learns to speak inwardly and one can immerse oneself in spiritual beings - and only then can one immerse oneself in one's true own spiritual being. With the spiritual-soul power separated from the power of speech, one can immerse oneself in what the soul is. Now this occurs: an expansion of the ability to remember beyond birth and death. One then stands before the teaching of repeated lives on earth.

A third thing can be excreted from the body as soul-spiritual. The child cannot yet walk, has not yet integrated into the cosmic existence. Herder has pointed out how human soul life in its intimate essence depends on the human being coming into the vertical position and directing the face towards heaven. This happens through an inner power, through the human being himself. One can find the powers in the human soul through which man makes himself into a true, heaven-gazing earthly human being, through which man gives himself his moral and intellectual character. These forces can be found outside of a body; when you experience them separately, you experience the spiritual beings; then you experience that there are also beings in the spiritual world that do not come into the physical. You only experience them by using the power that makes you an upright human being. The separate directing power of the human being experiences the human being like an inner physiognomy. He experiences being in other spiritual beings through this. By extracting himself from his body, he pours himself into a spiritual world, into a region that was previously only penetrated by faith.

Can anyone become a spiritual researcher today? No. Just as not everyone can or should become a chemist. - The spiritual researcher can speak the same language as another natural scientist. One must not merely believe what the spiritual researcher says - only inspiration can come from such a lecture. Understanding is based on understanding the language that is spoken. Just as one can understand the scientific world, so the spiritual researcher describes it. What seems paradoxical need not be untrue: little by little it is raised to general understanding. The spiritual researcher faces the real spiritual goals of the present day. Science has lost sight of the spiritual goals of our time.

Wilson, the president of the North American Union, says in his various writings and reflections again and again, and this runs through many writings like a common theme: If you look at the present, you always notice how quickly the whole of life has changed. The laborer may not get to know his employers in his entire life. What people once established in terms of laws and relationships and considerations between employers and employees is outdated, and our time has moved on. — He considers it most necessary to catch up on this: what people have thought about living together has lagged behind what time has brought. Human souls have changed significantly, especially in the nineteenth century. Those who keep saying, “We do not need to rise to the spiritual world in a new way, we only need to rise to what once was,” must take this into account. Such people do not want to have their goals set by the tasks of the time. Humanity cannot be harmonized by renewing old beliefs. New inner longings, new life riddles are given to the soul. The souls live in world riddles that are no longer solved in the old way, even if this old way is brought to the souls in the most perfect way.

We can penetrate into the spiritual world using the model of natural science. But spiritual science makes demands on people that are still uncomfortable for them today, it presupposes an increased activity of the soul. Today, people prefer to observe things rather than participate. A modern philosopher literally said the following in a magazine: When I immerse myself in Kantian and Spinozian philosophy, I feel that my concepts are becoming confused. How does he want to remedy this? Through the cinematograph, through film! He wants to demonstrate how two concepts unite in a higher one. The editor of this essay in the journal takes it very seriously, because he adds a footnote in which he says that it would be praiseworthy if age-old human yearning could be satisfied by it. So we should not be surprised if, in the near future, a cinema is described as follows: “Spinoza's Ethics is being ‘filmed’ here!”

People do not want to reign in the invisible in order to rise to the spirit, they do not want to work inwardly; they just want to look. Spiritual science makes the opposite demands. It demands that the soul is inwardly active, that it seeks to experience the concept. Inwardly creative, you must participate in the creation and creation of the world spirit. Modern life demands that the soul of each individual develops inner activity and liveliness, otherwise the soul will be crushed by modern life. Only such a soul will be able to do justice to life in the future. The counterpole to the external must lie in what lives in the soul through the exploration of the spirit. Thus spiritual science is connected with the aims of our time.

From what point of view is our time a time of transition? The saying once occurred:

You shall be as God and distinguish between good and evil!

What man has achieved in the way of freedom is also connected with this. There is something paradoxical in the analogy for our time. It depends on the impulse that lives in the following words: If science alone remained, what kind of idea would man absorb into himself? If we were to stop at the level of natural science alone, at what many people today want to believe is natural science, then we would say that human beings are only at a higher level of the animal kingdom, that they have only developed animal instincts to a higher level. But if human beings were only the most highly developed animal, then the quoted word would be transformed into the other: “You will be like the beast.” If our moral sense is nothing but heightened instinct, then the only thing left is the monon: “You will not distinguish between good and evil.” That would be the reverse Fall of Man. This is what we are facing. The effect of nature remains neutral with regard to good and evil and should not be lumped together with it, otherwise morality would be nothing but convention.

We need an elixir of life, inner harmony to prevent the loss of the soul, inner health, inner mood, inner strength of soul, which should come, that is the main thing. This must come from a new realization, from a new love for the deeds that earthly existence demands of us. The goals of the development of the earth are those that spiritual science has in mind.

Despise reason and science alone,
Man's supreme power, [...]
So I have you already unconditionally.

Mephistopheles certainly acknowledges external science, but spiritual science is affected. He is called “tempter” in the Bible. He may be called such who not only tempts, but wants to drive into the slave yoke of mere natural effect, who wants to rob man of the freedom to enter into the spiritual.

Spiritual science may be ranked with the best that has been expressed in earlier times as a presentiment by the best. The soul can feel strong and loving and dutiful through spiritual science because it knows itself in the spirit; it gives the soul the consciousness of eternity. What one of the spiritual scientists has expressed is emotionally summarized in the following. What Herder expresses in his “Ideas for the Philosophy of the History of Humanity” is how the lecture concludes, in terms of feeling: “If I step through the gate of death out of life into the spiritual world , I may look upon the change of my life as I pass through death as something that I await as calmly and confidently as I experience the course of being in the experience of passing from waking to sleeping.

Question & Answer I

Question: What is absolute good or evil?

Rudolf Steiner: Evil consists in an increase of selfishness. The person concerned does not know how to harmonize his actions with the course of the world. Where this selfishness comes from is shown in the writing “The Threshold of the Spiritual World”. In the spiritual world, selfishness is an organ through which the human being can perceive. The possibility of evil is based on the fact that man carries down into the physical world that which, like the eye, must be connected to the human being in a higher world, where it does not belong. Evil in the sense world arises from the fact that human spiritual powers are abused. Through earthly fate, man will be educated for the good in repeated earthly lives. Mineral, plant and animal cannot be evil in the moral sense. Man can transform his lower instincts and passions into noble powers. The lion's rage, on the other hand, cannot be easily transformed. Death means something completely different to an animal than it does to a human being; the focus must be on the fact of death and not on concepts and ideas. The fact that it exists in a certain place is what makes it what it is in the world; but it must not be placed elsewhere. Question: What are the spiritual beings that the thinking, separated from the body, submerges itself in?

Rudolf Steiner: Eliot at Harvard University said something like this in June 1909: At all times, it would have been natural for the human soul to recognize that it is something distinct from mere corporeality.

Recognition of the spirit is not yet knowledge of the spirit, because this is knowledge of the individual entities. You get to know nature when you get to know it in individual entities, for example individual flowers: violets, cowslips, lilies of the valley and so on. Likewise, there are individual entities that do not descend to the physical body, but which appear to be a continuation of the entire sensory world. We speak of concrete spiritual entities. A child who has not yet seen a live horse would claim: “A horse must always be made of wood.” As soon as one delves into the individual entities behind history, behind natural beings, one does not want to believe it; one says: “That does not exist.” What the best of humanity has always felt becomes truth through spiritual science. Herder says in his “Ideas for the Philosophy of the History of Humanity”: Man is a creature between the sensual and the spiritual world. He grows with death into the spiritual world with the powers he has gained in the physical-sensual world.

Question & Answer Session II

Question: What is absolute good and evil?

Rudolf Steiner: This question has nothing to do with the conclusion of the lecture. It is a completely different question. What is good and evil must be determined from the spiritual world, not from mere natural effects; one cannot speak of absolute good and evil there. One cannot get by with good and evil if one only wants to speak of a sensual world, not of a spiritual world that stands behind the physical-sensual world, but of course permeates it, forming a unity with it. Man's evil actions, which can justifiably be called evil, are always connected with an increase of selfishness. If man does not want to bring himself into harmony with the whole of the world, but only wants to follow himself, then he will increasingly fall into evil. In the spiritual world, egoism is a higher sense organ; there it does not lead to evil; otherwise one would extinguish, not even come to perceive in the spiritual world, because through egoism one perceives in the spiritual world, there it is something completely different. One should not transfer a concept from one to the other without further ado, this is how so many misunderstandings and errors arise. For example, for a human being, death is something completely different than it is for an animal. A knife is not just a knife; it can be used for shaving and not for cutting meat. You have to approach the facts everywhere and not the concepts and ideas. A quality is not absolutely good or evil, but only in that place this and that. For example, if you are asked: Is the lion's power of rage good or evil? - the answer must be: If this rage occurs in other beings, it can be used for the noblest of actions, whereas in the lion it wreaks havoc. In nature, the lion's power cannot be transferred so easily to a noble being, but man can do that, he can transform the powers into noble powers. What Schiller wrote to Goethe must be applied: It is necessary to take all of nature together to gain clarity about what is at stake. This also applies to the spiritual world. Mental powers must be misused to be evil. The stone cannot be evil, nor can the plant, if one does not want to speak symbolically. Through earthly fate, the human being is to be educated precisely for the good.

Question: How can the power of the soul be increased through concentration?

Rudolf Steiner: In the previous lecture, reference was made to my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”. I would have to read my whole book to you here, which would be too long even for the most willing listeners.

Question: What is disembodied thinking, in which the soul immerses itself? Rudolf Steiner: Well, then you are released from the body!

Question: How should we imagine spiritual entities?

Rudolf Steiner: By imagining spiritual things at all. It is the same as with the sentence: Living things can only come from living things. Three and a half centuries ago, no one had yet thought of recognizing this. The feeling for the spiritual can initially glow out of the thought. Acknowledgment of the spirit is not yet knowledge of the spirit. If someone were to say about all phenomena, “That's nature, nature, nature, nature, nature”; would he know it? To doubt the possibility of spiritual knowledge is like a child saying: My horse was always wooden; no horse made of muscle meat can exist. Always, even in the most diverse variations, one hears the same refrain: There is no such thing, because one cannot even imagine such a thing.

Spiritual science is theosophical in nature because it leads man back to his original source. People today fight against theosophy and are therefore anti-theosophical in their thinking.

The entire soul and spiritual being is engaged in the first years of childhood in order to develop the physical organization, especially the nervous system; all forces are consumed in this work. From a certain point on, the human organism has become harder and more determined. This is the moment when self-awareness arises in the child. The spiritual and mental powers are reflected back upon themselves; before that, he [the human being] threw them all into the organism. Now the spiritual and mental is thrown back upon itself. At first we see as through a pane of glass, but then the organization becomes like a mirror that reflects the spiritual and mental life back upon itself. Then he says to himself “I”. From then on, life proceeds in self-awareness.

The fact that in early childhood our physical organization is transformed into a mirror and our spiritual and soul life is reflected back into itself is how the human being owes his entire earthly destiny and essence. The forces he has brought with him from his previous lives he has worked into his physical organization. In life, the forces are poured into the organization. At first, the child has no self-awareness because the spiritual and soul forces are still flowing into the physical and material organization; this must face us like a mirror. Man would be born a theosophist if he could see this working into the physical organization himself. A new germ is also forming in man, as in plants, that future life demands.

The child would have to remain stunted if it were conscious, because then the spiritual-soul forces would not all pour into the bodily organization. In the spiritual-soul forces, through which we raise our self-awareness, germinal forces for our next life are formed. These, however, must not rise up into our self-consciousness; they must remain asleep, for they are constructive forces and may only unfold their character in our next life. If man were aware of these germinal forces, he would have to fall into a dream or sleep; if we knew of these germinal forces, we would know ourselves in the divine, we would be born theosophists.

The forces that can develop our self-awareness ever more strongly must be formed out of the soul-spiritual world. During our earthly life, we must swim through a stream, on one bank of which lies the transition from theosophical to self-awareness and on the other, the transition from self-awareness to theosophical consciousness. It is precisely from our being set apart from our divine-spiritual mood that we draw the forces of our self-awareness. Our earthly mood must be anti-philosophical.

After the preparations, he [man] can penetrate to these germinal forces, as was explained in the previous lecture. The human being would believe that his self-awareness would be endangered, undermined, and therefore the human being is afraid to let the germinal forces arise for his next life, hence the anti-sophistic mood. The human being has a revulsion for the fact that the germinal forces could overwhelm his self-awareness and throw him into world consciousness. The human being has a secret fear of letting the connection emerge from the foundations. The soul must first become strong and energetic before it can confront the deeper forces, just as a self-confident person confronts this mirror. Man can make his future into a mirror to see his spiritual self, just as we have a mirror in the physical body through which our self-consciousness arises.

By having the secret human being within himself, the spiritual researcher has a guarantee that he is immortal, that he is preparing a life in immortality; just as the germinating powers of the plant guarantee the emergence of a new plant.

We must cultivate those forces most strongly that lead us away from our divine spiritual connection; we cultivate an anti-sophical mood. Humanity has to develop between opposites. Just as man oscillates between freedom and bondage, so he also oscillates between theosophy and anti-theosophy. But there are moments when man becomes aware of his original source, and this mood can grow and lead him to theosophy. Our present culture in its complexity was favorable for the anti-sophical mood. When life was much less complicated, the time was favorable for the theosophical mood. King Leon of Phlius, as Cicero tells us, once asked Pythagoras what he considered his life's work. “I see myself as a philosopher,” he said. ”I can express it in a comparison. I see life as a kind of fair. People come from everywhere to enjoy the festivities, to buy and sell things, for the sake of profit. But there are also those who come just to watch and see everything.” He feels the same way about the fair of life. He leads an inner life that is of no external use to anyone, that exists for its own sake; Pythagoras, a philosophos, was considered such a person.

Now a strange philosophical worldview is coming over from America to Europe. James, Schiller and so on are its representatives, and it is called the pragmatic worldview. This wants to say: What people acquire in ideas that go beyond sensory observations has no basis in truth. One only forms the ideas that are useful; what is useful for life is seen as truth. We form the concept of breath because it is useful to imagine something like this; one cannot perceive it. It is useful to imagine life in terms of ideals and to organize life according to ideals, which is why ideals are true. For our view of the world, it is useful to imagine a God and to bring order to the world. The “Philosophy of the As If” is the European edition of the American one. After its author ceased to be a professor, he published this philosophy. You can't find security, so you act as if there is a God, as if there are ideals, not that they are there in any way. This philosophy is also called fictionalism. Under the ownership of the former and the current religion, it was possible for a “philosophy of as if” to arise, and no matter how much this old religion is renewed, it will continue to develop as a “philosophy of as if”.

In his Ignorabimus speech, Du Bois-Reymond, the great physiologist, sought to define the field that science is capable of grasping. He shows that it is impossible for this science to comprehend sensation, the simplest psychic phenomenon. Regarding everything that is spiritual and mental, Reymond says: We will never recognize it. This attitude makes people materialistic and monistic. At the end, Reymond says: Science must limit itself to what exists and happens in space and time, and therefore must remain incomprehensible to everything that looks beyond spatial and temporal events, because only supernaturalism could know about that, but that is where science ends. If this sentence were true, then no logic could exist, no speech could be there. Spiritual science seeks to explore the question: How do people come to say: Where the sensory ends, science must end?

The soul is greater than consciousness. Many people cannot give clear reasons for their actions, and this is recognized by psychology. The unconscious reasons can be imaginative or affect- and drive-like. The hidden person in us still has power, still beats; man is under his influence.

So man is under the influence of fear; it can be conscious or unconscious, he acts accordingly. The Danish scientist Lange has written a paper “On the Expression of Emotional Movement”. Under the influence of fear, a person turns pale and their eyes become cloudy. The person cannot find a way to find their footing. The vessels contract and with them the muscles. Then the person cries: Where is something I can hold on to, or I will fall over? Thinking directed outwards brings the person into the same state in his nervous system, in his vascular system, as fear. This fear does not come to the consciousness, it remains subconscious. On the one hand we see the timid person who is too weak to stand on his own, who needs external support; on the other hand, the thinker who, through his outward-looking thinking, comes into the same situation. All materialism is an unconscious fear; its clamor for matter is a result of its subconscious fear. They need the material world to support them. When I enter the supersensible world, I fall over; may something hold me – so they unconsciously call out to the material world out of fear. What Reymond said last was an expression of horror of thinking.

Today the human pendulum is swinging in the direction of anti-Sophian sentiment. The consequence will be that Theosophy will also grow strong. Anti-Sophia is one-sidedness; the whole soul must do justice to the consciousness of self and of God. The soul finds rest only where its power is bound to the divine power. The best people, those who have advanced humanity, have sensed Theosophy. Goethe was imbued, aglow and warmed by the theosophical mood. Once, an anti-theosophical mood met him; anti-theosophists can also be great minds. One of them was Albrecht von Haller. He said:

No created mind can penetrate the innermost nature,
Happy the man to whom she shows only the outer shell.

To remain in the shell is anti-philosophy in the most eminent sense of the word. Goethe's answer is well known:

Nature has neither core nor shell, [...]
Only thou, thou, examine thyself,
Whether thou art core or shell.

Fichte says from his theosophical mood: Whoever recognizes himself in his real self is already standing in the spiritual world. - In his lecture on “The Destination of the Scholar,” Fichte expresses himself as follows:

I raise my head boldly to the threatening rocky mountains, and to the raging waterfall, and to the crashing clouds floating in a sea of fire, and say: I am eternal and I defy your power. Break down on me, all of you, and you earth and you sky, mingle in wild tumult, and you elements all - foam and rage and grind in wild struggle the last sun dust of the body that I call mine call mine; my will alone with its firm plan shall float boldly and coldly over the ruins of the universe; for I have seized my destiny, and it is more enduring than yours; it is eternal, and I am eternal, like it.

To those who are anti-Sophian, he says:

That ideals cannot be represented in the real world is something we others perhaps know as well as they do, perhaps better. We only claim that reality must be judged by them and modified by those who feel the strength to do so. Even if they cannot be convinced of this, they lose little by doing so, once they are what they are; and humanity loses nothing by it. It merely makes it clear that they are not counted on in the plan for the ennoblement of humanity. The latter will undoubtedly continue on its way; let kind nature prevail over the former, and give them rain and sunshine, beneficial nourishment and an undisturbed circulation of the fluids, and, in due course, wise thoughts! Question

Question: Can reincarnation be linked to facts, or does it have to be accepted as dogma?

Rudolf Steiner: It is no more a dogma than memory is. After all, memory is also an inner fact. You can't pump out and look at what you need to remember. Thus, we cannot prove past memories of previous earthly lives other than by experiencing them.

This is how it is with all supersensible truths. To understand them, only an unprejudiced contemplation of life is necessary; to investigate them, one needs clairvoyance. Between death and a new birth, the decisive point of view is the striving to perfect oneself and also the whole world, not the question of whether it is pleasant or unpleasant or causes pain. One can come to an understanding of reincarnation if one behaves as if strokes of fate are not random, but [as if] one has inflicted them on oneself. These are soul proofs, so we must be there ourselves.

Question: [What about the] seven-year periodicity, and what deeper causes [does it] have? [What about] suicide?

Rudolf Steiner: Regarding the question of suicide, the [Schopenhauer] saying applies: “It is easy to preach morality, but difficult to explain it.” One should do good because it is absorbed into one's soul. (?)

Question: Which is the best prayer? Is it the Lord's Prayer?

Rudolf Steiner: The Lord's Prayer is indeed a universal prayer for the most primitive and the most developed mind. It has this power in itself, even if one does not know its laws, just as a plant grows according to laws that it does not know. Every prayer must be carried by a devotional mood, otherwise it can also be of evil. “Not my will, but Thine, be done.” It is only through this mood that every prayer becomes a true prayer.

Question: The point where man simply feels the connection with the higher worlds, how does he express himself? Please give me more details.

Rudolf Steiner: This is similar to the question: How can I imagine the spirit? - Just spiritually. No spiritual materialism! In the Theosophical Society one could hear such expressions [as]: Today there are wonderful spiritual vibrations in the room. The spiritual researcher would simply say: There is a good atmosphere in the room today. In the theosophical books, the spirit is described as follows: First there is matter, then it becomes thinner and thinner, but matter never actually ends. You should imagine the spirit without leaning on anything material. Feeling is something that has its center within itself.

We speak of the mysteries of the world. Fundamentally, man is surrounded by such mysteries [of existence everywhere]; [and] we can ask questions about every thing and every being that lead deep, deep into the depths of life and being. But there are certain individual, particularly towering pillars within this mysteriousness of existence, and among these are undoubtedly those that are designated by the two words that are to be the subject of our consideration today: illness and death.

If life is a mystery to many people – illness and death intrude into this life to make it quite mysterious to us, with death as that which confronts life as its opposite, and illness as a troublemaker. And not only in this respect are these two things mysteries of life, in that they encourage us to reflect, but they are mysterious because they cause us worry, and for many people fear and trepidation. Therefore, we should not be surprised that illness and death have always, since time immemorial, challenged the research instinct of all those who have wanted to reflect on existence, on the world. A long list of great thinkers would have to be cited here if I wanted to tell you everything that has been said about the two concepts of illness and, in particular, death. That cannot be my task. We want to penetrate into these two questions in the sense of spiritual science.

Just so that you can see what a beautiful task awaits us, let us look at a few things that have been taught by important people in order to approach these things more closely. Schopenhauer, the philosopher of pessimism, who reflected on the suffering of life and was touched by it, said that life is an unfortunate thing and that he first wanted to get to the bottom of it by thinking about it. He has put forward a variety of ideas about death. But if we look at them just a little, we see that even a deep thinker can easily fail on these questions. One thing seems grotesque to us: Schopenhauer tried to open up a kind of emotional understanding of humanity towards death. He said: Man is afraid of death. Truly, since life is such a bad thing, he does not need it, because death is a release. If one feels that life is a painful thing, then death is consoling. One can say to oneself, it puts an end to it. — Thus Schopenhauer saw in the bad sides of life a consolation in the face of death, and in death a consolation in the face of the bad thing of life.

In another part of his writings, he attempts to express himself on the necessity of death in a manner that is not so grotesque, but not much more fortunate. There he lets the earth spirit speak. [He says:] I need space for my many living creatures, so I have to clear them away, so I need death. Thus, for the guiding spirit of the earth, death is merely a matter of space.

Eduard von Hartmann says in his last book: It is in the nature of living beings, [and] especially of man.

I would like to point out that today we will only be talking about humans in the sense of spiritual science when it comes to death and illness. The world's mysteries are so diverse, and only those who want to put everything in the same category can apply what has been researched about one thing to something else. For the genuine spiritual researcher, things that appear to be the same, such as illness and death, are so very different for different beings. Hartmann says that man is so constituted that at a certain time in his life he loses his understanding of his environment, and a younger generation must follow that has this understanding. Man would be a stranger within the world if he were not taken away. — You see, again nothing substantial! What are we to make of this?

But one word shines through the ages, which for thousands and thousands of people has contained a kind of solution to the problem of death, albeit a word that is not even understood in its literal sense today; it comes from Paul and is:

Death is the wages of sin. (Rom 6:23)

It is understandable that a person with today's concepts and ideas, who has little knowledge of spiritual science, cannot become familiar with such a word. He has learned to see death and illness as natural processes, and it is completely foreign to him to see something [purely] natural that takes place within the world of purely natural processes as an effect of something moral, of something that depends on the arbitrariness and free will of man, of sin. That something moral can be the cause of something organic is far removed from the thinking of our time. If the apostle's word were correctly understood according to the wording, it would be quite futile to talk about it to our contemporaries. But it is not even understood correctly according to the wording. The Bible is a strange book of secrets, and those who think they understand it best usually penetrate its spirit the least.

We shall gain a better insight into our subject and a better understanding of it if we first try to understand it entirely from the mind of its author and from the thinking of the people from whose circle the Apostle Paul grew, the ancient Hebrew scholars.

In this context, “sin” means something quite different from what we call moral transgression today. And anyone who understands sin in the way that it is understood in today's church doctrine does not understand this word. We arrive at an understanding if we imagine what Paul called a doctrine of development. I would like to tell you about it not in a scholarly way, but only in outline. It is a superstition of modern science that the word “development” was only discovered in the last few centuries. People have always talked and thought about development, about the emergence of the perfect from the imperfect. It is just that the secret scientists of the time from which Paul grew up said: living beings represent a sequence of stages, from the most imperfect being up to the most perfect being. The human organism was literally thought of as a goal towards which all other living beings strive. They become more and more perfect in order to become like the human organism.

But what is the point of the human organism being structured in this way and the other living beings having it as their goal? For Paul, it makes sense that the human body should contain a soul with independence. He said: If a soul is to live, if it can find within itself the impulse to act, to make decisions out of itself, which is expressed in the word “freedom” or “arbitrariness” as a center of the being, then it must have just such a body. Therefore, the whole series of living beings would have to take this path under the influence of this freedom. The human organism is organized in such a way that a free soul can express itself independently within it.

What is an independent soul? Look at the universe, the cosmos. Look at the living beings! They are all connected to their environment; this connection becomes looser the higher we go in the evolutionary scale. The living beings become more independent, and humans are the most independent of all. He confronts the cosmos as a being that can act independently. But he, too, has outgrown this universe. Is it not the case that we can make the whole thing clear to ourselves through a very simple comparison? Take a glass of water; there are many drops in it. Each drop is contained in this mass of water without us being able to distinguish it from the mass. But if you single it out, if it becomes independent, then it presents itself as something independent of the whole, and if it were to develop forces within itself, then we could compare its position to the position of man in the cosmos. As long as the drop is in the whole of the water in it, it expresses those currents that come out of the mass. Having become independent, it has an effect back, like an opposing force on the mass.

It is the same with human beings, that is, to be “independent”. But if everything were to stand out as something special, it would destroy the whole harmony, and it must destroy it if harmony is not found again. Thus, from a certain point of view, the human being does go through the universe, opposing it. In other words, it is rooted in Paul's theory of development that the human being, in order to achieve independence, enters into a kind of hostile relationship with the universe. Paul says: independence and freedom must arise out of egoism. If man had never been led to egoism, he could not become free. A being that was always being led by the hand could never become an egoist and could never become free.

This liberation, which is built on the basis of egoism, this acceptance of selfishness by a being, is what Paul calls sin. For him, selfishness is the original sin. And so it was connected with the being of man, which developed into sin, that a body was organized through which the whole process of development led to this sin. But such a body could not help being mortal because of its detachment. So the essence of man requires a mortal body for its independence. Whoever penetrates into this will see that what has been said completely coincides with Paul's view. And that will give us the mood for what we have to consider.

Another person has also said a beautiful word about death: Goethe. In the essay: “Nature, we are surrounded and embraced by it” — there is also the word: Nature is alive everywhere, it has invented death in order to have much life. — These are to be introductory words to give you an indication of the direction from which we now want to penetrate our topic in the sense of spiritual science.

If we want to understand these two important events of human life, illness and death, we have to look at the essence and nature of the human being; and so, with your permission, I will repeat what this essence of the human being is. I can only do this very briefly. What the naturalistic [materialistic] thinker, the sensory perception, regards as the whole of the human being, his physical body, is for spiritual science only a part of the human being. Man has this physical body in common with all so-called inanimate beings that surround us. In this physical body, all substances and forces are found together, or precisely such forces as are at work out there in the so-called inanimate world. It is the same as the mineral.

At the end of the eighteenth century and in the first half of the nineteenth century, it was also scientifically accepted to say in a certain direction: That which lives is not merely a combination of substances and forces, but rather that which lives has a special power within itself, which brings the substances and forces of the inanimate world into very specific combinations, brings them into inner activity, kindles them into life; and this was called the vital force. Thus, it was said, humans, animals, and plants have vital force within them. And this makes it so that not only a chemical process takes place in the stomach and in the blood mixture, but that the whole thing is alive. The word “vital force” has become a term that could only be pronounced in the second half of the nineteenth century, and from a certain direction one was regarded as backward, as a fool.

But today, for a number of years, one is not such a great fool [before science] when one utters this word. For those who today consider the somewhat advanced state of the science of life phenomena cannot help but say to themselves: there is more to beings than a mere chemical-physical process. And many are of the opinion that they are speaking of a life force. They know that this is speculation. Spiritual science does not take this speculative point of view. It takes the view that there is a higher experience, that man is able to see more when certain powers slumbering in his soul are awakened. Comparison with the man born blind and the man who has received sight: the one who does not see can never decide whether something is there or not, but the one who sees it can. There is no possibility of speaking of limits to knowledge. For man makes the discovery that he has as many worlds around him as he has organs to perceive them. This is how spiritual science differs from what is called science today: it starts from discussing things that enter our existence as something new through the awakening of organs.

Imagine there is a piano here, a player is playing, and a deaf person is sitting next to it. They cannot hear anything that the player draws from the strings. But there is a method of making them perceptible to him, these things that are happening. You put paper tabs on the strings, they are thrown off by playing, and he can get a certain idea of what the others hear. The relationship between the world of sounds as perceived by the deaf man, who can only hear them indirectly through the little tags, and the world of the hearing, is the same as that between what is investigated within the material world and what can be experienced by those with higher organs. And the only thing that this claims as its assertion is the truth that there have always been people who had such higher organs and saw another world. Not through speculation, but through a higher perception, spiritual science comes upon what it now calls the life body or ether body, similar to the speculated life force. This is what brings the inanimate substances, the mere chemical-physical processes, to life and what man has in common with the plant and animal world.

The third link in the human being is the so-called astral body. It is the carrier of all that we call pleasure and suffering, joy and pain, affects, passions, drives and so on. Plants do not yet have this astral body, only animals and humans. The being that has it relates to the outside world differently. Today, even scholars often blur the difference between plants and animals by saying that plants also have certain sensations, and [they] refer to the fact that certain plants contract their leaves when a stimulus is applied. This is amateurish talk compared to spiritual science. If it only mattered that a being responds with a movement from within when it is stimulated, one could also claim that blotting paper, which absorbs ink, is a sentient being.

These are things that, because they occur, are highly dangerous because they confuse the senses of man when they are put forward by authorities, as they are today. What is true is only that what belongs to feeling is a reflection of the external stimulus, not what only moves and gives an answer. Not only must the being do something under the influence of a stimulus, but a reflection of the stimulus must take place in the innermost being. Not only must the tip of a needle touch us and we must defend ourselves against it, but the pricking must be linked to an inner process - pain or pleasure; that is part of it. A being that has such inner processes has an astral body. Man has this in common with the animal.

Man has become the pride of creation by being able to say “I” to himself. The “I”, that power that enables him to do so - let us say the “ego body” - is the fourth link in the human being, so that we initially recognize four links in the human being. We can disregard the higher links. We will understand the conditions that arise in the course of a human life, as well as illness and death, if we get to know the relationships between these four members a little better. Both today's lecture and tomorrow's are based on a correct presentation of the different members of the human being. We can do this by following human development. This can only be done sketchily here; it is intended as a suggestion.

We start from the physical birth of the human being and realize what this represents. Before this birth, the human germ is closed off from the outside world. It rests in the mother's body; the physical human body is surrounded on all sides by another physical matter, and birth means that this enveloping matter is pushed back and that which has developed as organs in the human body is directly exposed to the external physical world. Thus, physical birth is a pushing back of the physical shell and a free emergence of the human body into the physical environment.

Spiritual science does not just speak of this birth of man, but also of others; and this must be understood. Until this physical birth, the physical human body is surrounded by an outer physical shell that nourishes and protects it, sending its juices into it. What happens to the physical human body until physical birth happens to the etheric body until a certain point in human development. Even after the human being has been physically born, the etheric body is still enveloped by a protective motherly shell of etheric matter for the initiate. When the human being is physically born, he is not yet born eterally.

The birth of the etheric body does not take place as quickly as the physical birth; it happens gradually; little by little [the etheric body pushes the etheric covers away from itself, little by little] it emerges, at the time when the young person is undergoing the so-called change of teeth, towards the seventh year. Just as the physical body is surrounded by the physical sheath until physical birth, so the etheric body is surrounded by the protective etheric sheath until the birth of the etheric body. For spiritual science, the change of teeth is something very similar to the physical birth as seen from the outside.

And when the etheric body is born, the astral body has not yet lost its protective shell; and a third birth takes place. The third birth of the protective shell takes place in a similar way to the reining back of the etheric shell with the maturing of the human being in a sexual way, with sexual maturity. This is a third birth. Just as the physical body is exposed on all sides to physical impressions, so the etheric body in its nature and the astral body in its nature are exposed to their external world.

We have to take these facts of [spiritual science] as a basis if we want to understand human development. Therefore, we will recognize that the time from birth to the seventh year is a particularly important one for the development of the physical body. Not because the physical body does not develop afterwards. But the physical body develops in a very specific direction up to the seventh year, to a very specific point. [And] something happens in terms of physical human development that is characteristic: this is the hardening, [the] consolidation of the physical body. The human physical body is characterized by undergoing a process of hardening. The solid parts that serve as its support are bones. And from the softest parts to the solid bone system, there is a process of solidification, and this process of solidification goes through its main characteristics up to the seventh year; and the change of teeth, the acquisition of one's own teeth, is the conclusion of the solidification. There the power of solidification has reached its conclusion, has put out what it can work into the physical body in terms of solidification.

This is important. One must realize that this working into the solid structure happens more and more, and with the pushing out of one's own teeth, it reaches a kind of conclusion. The power that gives us teeth works within us. The previous teeth are inherited; what lies within us, in our own personality, in terms of creative power, is expressed [in the end] in our own teeth. When this point has been reached, the life force at work in the human being no longer has the constraint that it would have to have. Now the etheric body pushes back the protective etheric covering, becomes free and works differently. Now it mainly does the things in the body alone that are its task: growth, enlargement of the body and so on, whereas before it was busy creating forms. Now what is predisposed is increased. Now, in fact, until sexual maturity, the etheric body is the dominant factor in human development, the etheric body that has become free. It again puts a full stop, it pushes the power of forming, of growing, to the point where growth transcends itself.

Just as the power of solidification has been fulfilled in the teeth, so the power of the etheric body, in the maturing individual, reaches its potential in the moment of sexual reproduction. And at that moment the astral body is born. It is now free, no longer constrained. Human development is indeed so complicated when we look at the four elements that compose it.

We must now realize how these limbs, [whether they are more or less bound as] before the individual births; [or whether] they are free, [how they actually work in man]. First, let us look at the etheric body. We see that the etheric body is that which works in the human being, the power of growth, nutrition, reproduction; the etheric body is the carrier of this.

But that which brings the human being into a relationship with his surroundings, [which] enables him to enter into an interaction, that is his astral body.

While the etheric body of the human being works mainly within, enlarging the organs, working from [within] outwards in reproduction, the astral body is what is there to make the outside accessible to the inside and connect it to it. This happens all the time. Every ray of light, every piece of nourishment that a person takes in, is an interaction between the person's inner being and the outside world. The regulator is the astral body, and essentially the relationship is regulated by needs, by pleasure and pain, by desire. What a person desires, he appropriates, and the faculty of desire is the expression of the astral body. [This is what man demands of his environment.] You see, then, that man fulfills various tasks through his limbs. This now requires a significant distinction to be made with regard to the limbs in the whole of human life. This distinction will become clear to us when we consider the nature of sleep. When a person sleeps, all desire and suffering, all interaction with the outside world, everything that the astral body conveys, has sunk down. No sensible person will say that a person decays in the evening and is reborn in the morning. His astral body is there, but not as it is during the day. While during the day this astral body dwells in the physical body and allows the things of the outside world to flow out through the organs of the physical body and processes them, at night it is separated from the physical body, it does not touch the physical body. This is not the case with the etheric body. What it has to do continues during sleep.

When a person sleeps, the physical body and the etheric body lie in bed. The astral body with the ego has stepped out. What does this astral body do at night? If we look at this, it sheds light on the nature of the entire human activity in the world. The spiritual scientist knows that the astral body, if it remains within the physical body, could never remove that which finds its expression in fatigue. Call it an accumulation of fatigue substances or something else, it is there and must be removed. Where does the fatigue come from? How is it removed?

Fatigue is a by-product of what the astral body does in the physical body. As long as the astral body is in the physical body and uses the physical organs, the physical body will tire; and as long as the astral body is in the physical body, it cannot get rid of the fatigue. It must go out and work on the physical body from the outside, and this work takes place at night when the person is asleep. Then the seer sees the astral body working on the physical body and removing the fatigue. This is the source of the refreshing effect of healthy sleep. There is something healing about sleep. What is worn out in the physical body – the physical body is used by the astral body like a machine – all this is removed. An astral body that works on the physical body from the outside works to repair it; an astral body in the physical body consumes it; even destroys it within certain limits.

This is related to another phenomenon about which a man who is little known today said a great deal: Paracelsus. He knew the essence of sleep, but he knew something else as well. He realized that something special happens to this astral body when it emerges. It will become clear to us through a comparison. Imagine a vessel of water; there is water inside. Take a small sponge that can hold a drop and throw this sponge into the water, and it soaks up a drop. It used to be in all the water; now it is outside.

This is how it is in fact with the relationship between the astral body and the physical body. The astral body is not something that is original and separate from something greater. There is a mighty astral body, which is the astral body of our entire planet, and this astral body is like the mass of water in the vessel. The physical body is like the little sponge. When we are awake, the physical body has the astral body within it, and then it has separated a drop for itself from the astral sea, and this drop of the earth spirit works separately from the rest of the earth's astral body; and that is why it has an eroding effect during the day, it has to erode. Imagine a finger, separate it, and in a short time it will wither. Why? Because this finger must be connected to the whole life process, to the whole astral process, if it is to exist, and because the drop of astral mass that remains in the finger cannot lead its own life as a detached drop. The human being's astral body can do this to a certain extent, but it needs to return from time to time to draw strength from the entire astral body; this happens at night.

Thus, every human astral body connects with the entire astral body of the earth at night. This is why Paracelsus says: At night, man rests in the whole womb of spiritual nature and absorbs that harmony which has been destroyed during the day. — Thus we see that when a part is rejected from the spiritual world, it must return to gather strength there. In the state of separation, the astral body consumes the physical body.

Let us look at the ether body in relation to this. It is in the same position, it is also a piece of the general ether mass. But it does not return at night, and remains united with the physical body until death; it has a wearing effect on the physical body. The latter has drawn it out and made it independent, like the sponge and the drop of water. But now independent, the etheric body wears away the physical body, and this process of wear and tear is the life process of an individual being.

Now we can say: From the moment when this etheric body is born, when it emerges as an independent entity, it is completely independent and draws on the physical body. It draws in the way you can make clear by means of a comparison. Imagine a piece of wood that is burning; there is never a flame without a piece of wood. Just as the flame is released from the wood, so the etheric body is released from the physical body at the end of the seventh year; it shines like a flame. Just as the flame consumes the wood, just as it consumes its nourishment, so the etheric body consumes the physical body.

Until the etheric body has brought its own power to the final point at sexual maturity, until that time it replaces in some way what it has consumed. But at the end, it has nothing more to add, so it draws on the physical body. And a being that could not replace from any other side [what the ether body consumes, which in turn could not supply the ether body with new strength] would have to die when it reaches sexual maturity. In the animal world, there are such beings. How is it then that in the case of human beings the etheric body [after sexual maturity] receives further strength to grow? Because with sexual maturity the astral body is born, and this is now in a period of free growth.

What is this astral body? It is the forces accumulated by the person from a previous incarnation. The more capital a person has accumulated, the more they have to invest; and the more strength they have for their astral body, the longer their ascending line of life will last. The astral body rises; the time that expresses itself externally in the life of a person, morally, begins with sexual maturity. The human being is full of ideals, his longing goes beyond the measure of his reflection. All a sign that there is excess power in him. That is the excess power of his astral body.

Just as the physical body grows until the second dentition changes, and the etheric body until sexual maturity, so the astral body grows until mid-life. If you, as a clairvoyant, could measure the power that the astral body contains and distribute it over the years, you would be able to calculate mid-life. Because at that moment, when the astral body has given back everything that was put into it, has developed, then the middle of life has arrived. At that point, the astral body begins to consume. It consumes itself. Now the time comes when ideals fade, when man is no longer full of hope, when prudence sets in, when the astral body looks more to its surroundings, to experiences, whereas before it drew from within in the ascending current. The ideals of the young man, born from within, often do not correspond to the external. Then the time comes when harmony is established, and now he has the descending line. What the astral body has produced earlier is gradually used up, and then, when the astral body has used up itself, it begins to draw on the ether body, then it takes the strength from the ether body.

You may know that the etheric body is not only the seat of growth and so on, but also of memory, habits and temperaments. You see, just as the astral body begins to consume the forces of the etheric body from a certain point in life, so it later uses up the qualities we have just described. Memory begins to weaken and so on, and when the powers of the etheric body are consumed, what then? Then it goes to the physical body. This is then no longer able to work on itself, it ceases to stir up the life process within itself.

As long as the physical body can still enjoy the powers of the ether body, it processes what comes from outside to strengthen itself. When the ether body can no longer do this, substances are still absorbed from the outside, but are no longer integrated organically. Now the opposite of what happened earlier takes place. Whereas the substances that were taken in were integrated organically, now they are merely deposited like physical ballast substances in the tendons, in the soft parts of the human being, so that these harden; the bones become harder and harder. The physical body is actually consumed in the descending life. Just as the astral body can be born through the etheric body like a flame from wood, so the astral body first consumes itself like a flame from wood, then the etheric body, and then the physical body. What life has brought forth, what life has brought out, is at the same time what consumes this life. Just as the flame would not be without the wood, so the life of the astral body would not be, nor would consciousness, nor pleasure and pain, without the etheric and physical bodies. But just as the flame consumes the wood, so the independent life consumes its basis, the physical body. Therefore, death is not a process that takes place outside of life; rather, it is produced by life itself. This is the main thing we must realize: we could not have life at all if this life did not give birth to death.

Another thing is that the astral body is the mediator of everything that can come in from outside. If this is to happen, it must be appropriated by the physical body through the process of life. What does that mean? Light approaches us; if it were not for light, we would have no eyes. It is the same with everything that arises from the interaction of the physical body with the environment. The physical body appropriates the external environment and transforms it into organs. We transform the elements into organs when the life process is ascending.

We have to consider the following fact. A certain tribe in Africa that hunts needs certain dogs for hunting. Now there lives a poisonous fly there, the tsetse fly; it stings the hunting dogs, and they perish. Now, as so often, the “savages” have come up with something extraordinarily clever – spiritual science is familiar with the processes. This “savage” tribe now takes its hunting dog to the areas where the poisonous fly is found, just at the time when the dog can give birth to her puppies before she dies from the bite. The puppies are now immune; they can be stung and yet not die. This is an example of the adoption of an external aspect of the internal life process in the ascending line of life. Where life rekindles, where it passes through to the point of inner illumination, where the life process is re-established, it takes the poison within itself, integrates it and makes the organism strong against the poison.

This is basically how our organs came into being in the body. In ancient times, when there was no eye, a ray of sunlight fell on the skin; something like a small pain could be felt. The light had to integrate and the life process digested the light, appropriated it, transformed it into an eye, so that man had an eye to face the light.

This is how man interacts with his environment. This is to suggest that through external influences, which occur by means of the astral body, the physical body of man is organized as a receptive being that integrates the outside world; and the extent to which one can integrate the outside world gives pleasure, joy, desire. Where joy and desire are healthy, they are nothing more than the expression of a need, and that is the most reliable indicator of the life process. This can be seen in children. If their original instincts for nourishment are corrupted, they have no instinct for what is good for them. For example, if you overfeed a child with eggs from an early age, you will notice that this child loses the security of the food instinct. If not, the child is always ready to reject what is harmful to it and to want exactly what is beneficial to it. Such a child is much less exposed to damage to the organism. Too much protein is harmful.

So you see how desire is the measure for the life process itself. The life process is entirely under the influence of desire. But this also enables the human being to go beyond the measure of enjoyment and need. In order for life to be maintained, need must arise. Without hunger, life could not be maintained. Enjoyment is the concomitant of satiety. This is always the case where the external world is appropriated.

Because enjoyment is the concomitant of the life process, it can go beyond in terms of the appropriation of external substances. And so what it appropriates becomes a destroyer because it goes beyond measure; and there you have what predisposes the disease process through the activity of the astral body. Of course, we must not believe that this simply happens because it is expressed in the life between birth and death. Certainly, every excess has a destructive effect on this one life, and all moderation has a beneficial effect; but this happens to a greater extent beyond death. Here we must again consider the idea of reincarnation. The destructive forces, which are not yet harmful in life, are taken along into the next life, so that debauchery in one life means a disposition to illness in the next.

These are the most important foundations of illness. From this you can see how things are connected, but you can also see that what are actually internal causes of illness are necessarily linked to the life process, that they really arise from it. And now you will understand that we make our body stronger when we bring it into such interaction with the outside world in the ascending life process that it acquires something. This makes it strong against disease. We do not need to investigate other causes of disease. These are the ones that have less significance for life.

You know that today the bacillus plague does not only consist of being infected by it, but also of looking for the bacilli everywhere. This bacillus plague actually comes into consideration only in the second place in relation to spiritual science. Being invaded by bacilli is no different than being shot through with a bullet. In this case, the organism is so badly destroyed that the ether organism can no longer compensate for the destruction. As long as it is not destroyed, this ether organism also has the ability to compensate. The more it is connected with the ether, the more it has the power of compensation. You can cut up a polyp, and a new polyp will arise from each piece, because the etheric body of the polyp is still connected to the whole - [from which it can draw power, because in every drop of the etheric body there is the same power as in the whole] - and the connection still exists. Insofar as the etheric body becomes independent, it must lose this power. If, therefore, independence is at the same time a growth in relation to the impossibility of overcoming disturbances of the organism, then you have the Pauline sentence in a modern form: selfishness is the cause of destruction and death, and death is the wages of sin (Rom. 6:23). It is to be understood only in this sense. But someone may say: Yes, but is it compatible with the wise process of the world? Yes, if there were no possibility of illness, the great incentive for the etheric organism to become strong in order to grow by overcoming the illness would be missing. The etheric body emerges strengthened from every illness it has overcome. When germs attack us, it is important that we have a strong etheric body to overcome them. And does not the etheric body, precisely because it is forced to become an overcomer in the illness, give rise to higher forms of the etheric body? Yes, it develops itself upwards through this. Therefore, it can be said that illness is like the pearl oyster and the pearl; the noble pearl emerges from an illness of the oyster. Many things in the world have emerged as higher forms by building themselves on the basis of a process of destruction.

All this makes us understand, in a certain forceful way, illness and death. We can understand that we could not have life as we have it; if this life did not itself provoke death; as one could not have the flame if the fuel were not destroyed. Certain increases, intensifications are not possible without the possibility of illness. Sometimes strong health is the result of illness. Perhaps you will say: nature is healthy in all its parts, and even if it gives disease, it gives it to have much and strong life. In any case, it is clear that nature is everywhere, and it has, that is true, invented death in order to have much life, to have strong life, to have life. Because this can only exist if it creates death as its opposite pole.

You know that the saying that is to be the leitmotif of our lecture, “Blood is [a very special fluid],” is found in Goethe's “Faust.” Mephistopheles, the emissary of hell, and thus of evil, demands that Faust sign the contract he is concluding with him in blood. The point is that Faust, whom Goethe presents as a representative of striving humanity, is placed between good and evil, that Faust is to be served by the servant of hell and that Mephistopheles is to accompany Faust throughout his life and Faust in return surrenders himself to him. This contract should be signed in blood, as Mephistopheles demands. Now you know the answer to Faust's remark as to whether such a form, and especially blood, is required: “And blood is a very special fluid.”

There is a whole literature about Faust, but very few people know the meaning of the word “Mephistopheles”: the liar, the corrupter – from the Hebrew =; much less [do they] know the meaning of the blood. In one of the last commentaries on Faust, you can read that one has to understand the saying of Mephistopheles in this way: Mephistopheles demands the blood and remarks ironically: “Blood is a very special fluid” because he hates the blood, because it is particularly unpleasant for him, so he demands the signature in blood. You really have to be a “Goethe explainer” to be able to make such a statement. Can you in your right mind demand something as a special prize because it is the most unpleasant thing to you? You don't do that; when you demand something, as strictly as Mephisto does, with the signature, you are designating this something as something valuable. Common sense simply dictates that the emissary of hell places a very special value on blood. Hence the signature in blood.

We can trace the legend on which Goethe based his poem back to the sixteenth century. Even then, we find the signature in blood, and it is still vividly depicted. How Faust's vein is opened, how the blood trickles out, how it then coagulates, how the sign finally appears: O man, cleanse thyself!

The Faust saga is in turn only one of the many sagas in which blood and blood oaths play a role. The blood oath did not come into the Faust saga by mere happenstance, but through that through which we find a deep wisdom expressed in so many sagas and myths. How mysterious a fact often appears! But the spiritual researcher knows that when we explore the old legends and fairy tales, not in the way of today's materialistic scholars who speak of a poetic folk fantasy that the connoisseur of the people certainly has never found them anywhere, and who speak of fantastic creations – if we observe not in this way, but as spiritual researchers, we find profound spiritual truths expressed in them everywhere, figurative expressions for profound spiritual truths. It is most remarkable that when we look at simple expressions of the people, we have before us great spiritual truths, presented in images. These are fairy tales, myths, legends! And we can always ask ourselves: is there perhaps a deep spiritual truth contained in this folk tale, perhaps in this one saying? And then, as spiritual scientists, we want to examine this saying.

Today, we will deal with the significance of blood, the significance of this particular fluid, in the life of the individual as well as in the life of humanity and nations. By illuminating the mystery of blood, we will shed some light on important cultural issues of the present.

We will understand what we have to say about it if we keep to an ancient saying, a saying that is called the Hermetic Principle. It comes from one of the greatest initiates, Hermes Trismegistus, the Egyptian initiate. Many scholars consider him to be a fabulous personality. However, spiritual science knows that he was the greatest teacher of Egyptian culture. This sentence may at first seem strange, it reads: “Everything above is as it is below, everything below is as it is above.”

What does this mean? You will understand when you consider the following: You see a smiling expression on a person's face; it is immediately clear to you that serenity is present in that person's soul. You see a tear, and it is clear to you that sadness or pain has settled on this person's soul. You draw conclusions about the inner being from what the eyes see on the outside, and about the material from the spiritual. Now, in the sense of the philosophy of Hermes Trismegistus, the material is called the lower, and the spiritual-soul is called the upper. And anyone who is familiar with this philosophy is aware that there is a spiritual world and that everything that takes place in this spiritual world can find expression in the material world. This philosophy tells us that at some point every spiritual reality finds material expression. There is no spiritual reality that does not express itself in the material world, and no material reality that does not have a spiritual side. Everything down in the material as well as up in the spiritual.

In medieval philosophy of that great, wonderful brotherhood, which is called the brotherhood of the Holy Grail, you could have been an invisible spectator between the teacher and students of the Holy Grail covenant and overhear a long-lasting teaching scene. I cannot sketch this in any other way than in the form of a conversation. It did not take place like this, but you will get an idea of what happened between teacher and student.

It was made clear to the student: just as you can tell a person's soul and their cheerfulness by a laughing expression on a face, and their sadness by a tear, you can do the same in all of nature. For such a student, what Goethe characterizes as the earth spirit was not just a poetic image, but reality. Just as every human being, when he sees his fellow human beings laughing or sad-faced before him, says to himself: Here I have not only flesh and blood, but a soul, so the medieval Grail disciple had been brought to say to himself: When I look at this earth with its stones, plants, animals, people and everything else, , it is, like the human body, the expression of a soul or spirit; and it was made quite clear to him: If your finger were to imagine itself to be an independent entity without your soul, you could easily convince yourself that this is not the case by cutting it off from your body. It would wither away in no time. It cannot live an independent life. Nor can you, who belong to the earth soul. If you could separate yourself from it, you would wither like the finger if you were to move only a few miles away from the earth. The finger does not indulge in the foolish illusion of being an independent entity because it has grown; if it could walk around like a person, it would do so.

Thus the saying became a deep truth for the pupil, and the earth spirit a real being. And when he walked across the fields, a realization shone in him, going deep to his heart. When he saw one plant with a laughing face, it was the expression of the cheerful earth spirit, and when he saw another with dark purple flowers, it was the expression of the grieving earth spirit; the whole earth became the expression of a spirit, as did the seemingly dead stone.

When the student then went on to the so-called Rosicrucian school, which was founded in the fourteenth century, the teaching continued with the following: Look at the stone, this crystal! It consists of a certain substance. Compare this substance with animal and human substance. This is permeated by instincts and desires, by cravings and wishes; but desireless, without desire - only of glass - illuminated by the light, the stone substance stands there; chaste in the face of animal and human substance. - And so the disciple had to delve deeper into the chaste stone. As a lofty ideal, the goal was before his eyes, to become as pure as the stone in its kind. The disciple had to feel this way about the chaste stone.

I may only tell you the first sentence of a very solemn formula that was spoken every time there was an important section in the teaching, the formula that indicates the passage of divine wisdom through all nature. Where world wisdom works down in the realm of stones, it is characterized in the formula: The stones are mute. I have placed and hidden the eternal creative Word in them, and chaste and modest, they bear it in the depths.

And another scene that took place within the Grail Schools was this: one pointed to the plant calyx, which stands out from the plant, and said: “Behold the plant! It stretches its roots into the earth and its organs of fertilization towards the sun, those organs that appear here in chaste purity and are kissed by the sunbeam, which is called the holy lance of light. And this plant chalice contains the same reproductive organs that must be covered by the sense of shame in the human realm. Man is the completely inverted plant. The roots are the head of the plant. We have to imagine that, through the absorption of desires and instincts, the human being has to shamefully conceal what the plant holds up to the sun as a chaste chalice. A development takes place from plant to human being. Imagine the plant indicated by a downward stroke, the animal makes half the turn, the human being the whole. This is drawn: a cross is created. Plato expressed it thus: the world soul is crucified on the cross of the cosmic body. — For the three kingdoms were felt in spiritual science as the cross, and as the world soul passes from the plant to man, it passes through the cross.

And now the disciple was told: Imagine this development, imagine the chaste chalice of the plant as a model for the human power of procreation, and this purified from all desire; imagine man as a creative being, as pure and chaste as the calyx of the plant, then the chalice appears to man as the spiritual organ of production of the future, kissed by the sun of spiritual life. This ideal is called the Holy Grail. - So the spiritual content of the Holy Grail was distributed to the students.

Those who walk through nature as scientists see in the chalice a deep reference to what man should become. The lower, matter, expresses the spirit, the upper, everywhere.

And we learn to understand the lower when we get to know the upper. We understand the matter of blood when we get to know the upper that corresponds to it. Our task is first to look at the human being spiritually and then to see what corresponds to the blood in the spiritual.

We no longer need to get to know the nature of the human being in detail in the spiritual. Four members: physical, etheric, astral body and I, through which the human being has become the crown of creation. The I is that which sensitive natures always feel as the expression of the actual and eternal in man. And you need only make a very small effort to consider what this name 'I' means in contrast to all other names. Anyone can call a chair a chair; but this cannot be done with the name 'I'. No one can say 'I' to me, the name 'I' can never approach us from the outside if it is to mean anything to us. The soul must begin to speak from within. With the I, we express something that gives itself its name. The true religions have always felt this. For example, the ancient Hebrew secret science called this divine the God himself, and the name for it the unspeakable name of God. “I am, who am” means nothing other than this “I am” in the soul. And that is what those who heard it, the listeners felt: the resounding of the spiritual in the soul when it was spoken: “Jav” = “I am who I am”; that is the unspeakable name of God.

The I is therefore the highest of the four members of man. Of these four members, you can only see and touch the physical body here, et cetera. The other three members are the upper part of man; but to every upper part there corresponds a lower. Each of these three members is built up in the physical body by special organs. The physical body, of which the ordinary materialistic anatomist knows something, is also a many-membered being. Its organs are not all the same; man has four kinds of organs: those that are purely physical, built only by the physical body itself; then those that he could not have developed without the etheric body, without the astral body, without the ego. Certain organs are the lower part of the etheric body, certain the lower part of the astral body, and certain the physical expression, the lower part of the ego.

At the same time, you must not believe that physical organs, which are only composed of the physical, can also be in a purely physical body; all are permeated by the etheric and astral bodies; but these first ones take their form only from the physical body. The ear and the eye are physical apparatuses. In his senses, the human being is an expression of the physical body. Now go from these senses to the organs of nutrition, reproduction and growth: these are no longer mere physical apparatuses, they are structured and are the lower part of the etheric body. You have to imagine that the human body, in its sense organs and its skeleton, is built by the physical principle itself. The fact that it is permeated by the etheric body means that the others are incorporated into it. The plant is also permeated by an etheric body, which is why it also incorporates the organs of nutrition, growth and reproduction. The moment a being is also permeated by an astral body, a nervous system is incorporated into that being. This is the expression of the astral body.

As man gradually developed as a material being, he passed through the various kingdoms of nature; he has found his way from the mere physical body up to the higher ones, and the higher members of his being have incorporated more and more organs from the lower ones. The organs are not of equal value. The nerves are the expression of the astral body, the stomach and liver those of the life body; they find, as it were, their outer physiognomy in the lower for the upper.

The matter can be explained in even more detail: the astral body has developed slowly; it consists of different members, first of all the so-called sentient body, the lowest member, then the sentient soul, then the intellectual soul, and finally the consciousness soul. They have developed little by little. If you want to understand this gradual development of man, you have to start again at the bottom. Look at a physical being! Great philosophers call this a mirror of the entire world system. Why? Look at the smallest stone, consider that it could not be as it is if the whole environment were not as it is. The great naturalist Cuvier said: If you show a very wise anatomist a single bone, he would be able to see from its structure what the structure of the whole animal to which it belongs should be; if the bone were a little different, the whole structure would have to be different. The whole is expressed in the individual; this applies to the whole cosmos.

Just as a single bone must be as it is because the whole is as it is, and would be different if the whole were different, so a very wise being could tell from the smallest stone how the whole planet is formed. The individual is a mirror of the cosmos.

But if we ascend from the mere lifeless mirror of the cosmos, as it already shows itself in the stone, this cosmic reflection appears to us in a higher form when we see it where there is life underlying the beings. There the cosmos is not reflected as it is in the stone; there the process of reflection continues within. The being closes itself off from the outside. Processes within are stimulated because certain processes are taking place outside. In its movements, the plant reflects what is happening outside.

In the nervous system, the reflection is even more complete. The simplest nervous system is the one that still exists in humans as the sympathetic nervous system, which spreads out in two strands on either side of the spinal cord and whose activity our consciousness is unaware of. This nervous system, as the lowest nervous system, is the lower one for the sentient body. Now you can see, as is shown in my Theosophy, how the sentient soul integrates itself into the sentient body. There is an expression of this in the lower part: the spinal cord nerve strand integrates itself between the two ganglion strands. Everything below is like everything above!

The material world is a wonderful expression of spiritual life. Theosophy will offer you a spiritual image of the world. This has the seal imprint outside. And this is the meaning of the word seal. In the language of revelations, St. John calls it “sealed” where we have something material in front of us and we do not yet know the spiritual aspect of it. And our world will become apparent with its seven secrets. The whole world is sevenfold: seven colors, seven tones, seven limbs of the human being. There is nothing miraculous about this, only the same basic law. This sevenfold universe is, as far as it is not revealed, a book with seven seals. When it is unsealed, one will recognize the upper part for the lower.

For the mind soul, which is a higher link in the astral body, the brain is the outer expression, the lower.

Now the question arises: if the physical body is, so to speak, its own physical expression, everything that belongs to the nutritional and et cetera system, the expression of the ether body, if the nervous system is that of the astral body, what then is the expression of the eternal?

That is the blood and the blood system. Wherever blood appears, it is an expression of an ego.

In this way, we will understand in a spiritual-scientific way why, for example, in the human being, when the germ develops, the heart and blood come only after all the organs have been formed in the womb. This corresponds entirely to what takes place in the spirit. The I is the crown of everything and also appears last.

There is also a wonderful connection between blood and the I. You may be able to get an idea of how blood is connected to the I, to the very essence of the human personality, if you consider the following: where the I is afraid, where it is horrified, its physical body turns pale; where it wants to hide, the blood appears in the form of a blush. Wherever the ego is particularly engaged, we see external expression in the discoloration of the face. This is trivial, but it gives us an idea of the connection between the ego and the blood.

You see, our materialistic science regards the heart as a kind of pumping station. It is of the opinion that the heart pumps blood through the body, quite mechanically. Hegel was the only German philosopher of the nineteenth century to know that this is not the case. He said: it is not the heart that drives the blood, but the blood that gives the heart its movement. And the blood gets its movement from the soul, is driven by the spirit. The heart beats faster when the spiritual impulse is there. The blood is the driving element of the heart.

It was a bold statement, but it is common knowledge in spiritual science. It has never said anything other than this: that it is the soul itself, under the impulse of the ego, that causes the blood to flow either under a sense of terror or under some other feeling that belongs to the soul, that this soul, this ego, drives the blood and thereby the heart.

And at the same time, this will draw your attention to something in spiritual science that will make one thing clear to you. Namely, the heart is something that thwarts today's material science. The voluntary muscles are so-called striated muscles, all involuntary muscles are so-called muscles with smooth muscle fibers. The heart is now an involuntary muscle; most people cannot control it. And yet it is striated; where does that come from? Spiritual science explains it thus: the heart as it is today is at the beginning of its development; there will come a time when what is still an involuntary movement today will become an involuntary one, subordinate to its spirit. The brain is the thinking organ of today and the heart will become the spiritual organ of the future. In the future, the heart will occupy a completely different position. Man will consciously make his blood circulate through his body. The heart will be the expression of his spiritual life, a consciously working muscle. In the future it will be so. That is why it is already present in the germ. Thus we have these very different organs of man, blood and heart, as the expression of the I and can follow it in its significance for the world.

We speak of blood relationship, of the importance of blood. We sense this, but we have no real insight into it. I will present such intuitions from life: Anzengruber and Rosegger, who are both known for their depictions of rural life – the latter describes them as he sees them, but the former very aptly describes them entirely from his own perspective, without having observed and studied them more closely – had a conversation in which Rosegger said to Anzengruber: You live and have lived entirely in the city, and yet you have characterized the farmers so admirably. If you were to go out to them and take a good look at them, you would be able to describe them perfectly. That would just drive me crazy, Anzengruber replied. I have lived in the city all my life, but my ancestors were farmers, all farmers, it's in my blood.

It is in the blood – that could seem like a picture; but is it a mere picture? Anzengruber really did describe from his blood. He didn't have a notebook. Why? Not because blood is inherited, it cannot be inherited. Not a single drop of blood passes from father to son. It is even the latest thing to arise in the germ. But just as you inherit your father's nose, the structure of external organs, you also inherit the structure of your nervous system, the structure of your internal organs. Everything that is the expression of the physical body, the etheric and astral body, you inherit from your ancestors. You could just as easily examine the similarity of your stomach to that of your father as you could your nose. And you could examine the similarity of the Anzengruber brain to that of his peasant ancestors, like the nose. The limbs of the human being that prove to be similar to the ancestral forms express themselves in the blood as in a tablet, because the blood represents the I. What makes an impression on the blood makes an impression on the I. If I live entirely as a son of my ancestors, and what has been inherited is the strongest in me, then what has been inherited is imprinted in the blood, and I feel in the blood what was still present in my ancestors. If the impressions of the outer world are stronger, then what has entered my ego, my blood, drowns out what flows from within. I forget what the ancestors have allowed to flow in.

Thus, the one of whom it is said that he has “race” will truly be a son of his family, have the structure of his ancestors. He imprints this in his blood, his I. The one in whom the race is no longer so strong is dependent on external impressions. Everyone has these impressions, whether they are the son of this or that father. They have drowned out their inner impulses when faced with stronger external impressions. If the impressions of the outside world are stronger, then he has its blood, if race lives in him, then race has his blood. What the ancestor has experienced is then expressed in what he does and writes.

Expand this and consider the spiritual origin of man. Imagine: Even more is expressed by what is inherited. Imagine that; it really happened.

If we go back to ancient times, we find a certain starting point in every people. Very different marriage relationships, relationships of love and belonging and kinship prevailed then; within the family, the tribe, the individuals married. In every nation, you will find the transition from what can be called close marriage to what is called distant marriage. In the time of the former, it would have broken the custom, the law of a tribe, if a male or female member had married outside it. In every nation, however, we see how close marriage is later broken, how individuals married into other tribes. And everywhere this transition from close marriage, where blood relatives marry, to distant marriage, where those who are distant unite, is linked to a change in spiritual life.

The legends of the peoples have preserved this transition from close to distant marriage in a special, unique way. There are many legends in which women are abducted and taken to foreign tribes. Something tragic in the transition from the old order to the new is expressed in them. The transition to distant marriage is linked to a transition from an ancient clairvoyance to a modern one, more dependent on the observation of the external world of the senses. Where close marriage is common practice, people still have something like a natural clairvoyance. This is lost when foreign blood is mixed with the close blood. What Anzengruber felt in his blood was also felt by those who were in close marriage, but to a much greater degree. They did not feel what their ancestors had experienced as darkly, as half unconsciously as Anzengruber, but as something they had experienced themselves. Through the close relationship, the inherited structure was so strong that it was imprinted in the blood. Thus the ego, the blood, the whole family felt, not just itself. Only when foreign blood was added did the power of generation cease, did the old cult of ancestors lose itself. Where a distant ancestor was honored, it was not the product of the imagination, but rather the feeling that the most distant descendant felt connected to the ancestors in his blood, in his ego. Clairvoyance was there. All legends, which are like images of truths, become understandable to us when we know that they arose out of other perceptions, out of clairvoyance, which can still be found today in primitive, natural peoples.

You need to know this if you want to understand the writings that are based on spiritual science. One writing belongs here above all: the Bible. You cannot understand the most important parts of it in today's times. It is impossible if one does not know one thing: that in ancient times a name did not refer to what was represented in a personality, but to what lived on in the blood of a distant relative for entire generations. Because the inherited structure was expressed in the blood of the most distant descendant, one felt all of this in one's self. It did not yet work as it did with the Anzengruber, but rather like a true memory. The person in whom all the blood had merged with another through the distant marriage remembers only his own life, while the person from the close marriage remembers everything that the ancestors have experienced. They, the ones from the close marriage, referred to it as belonging to their ego. Through generations the same name resounded, because the experiences of the ancestor were recalled. Thus Adam was not the name of an individual man, but of a continuous memory through generations.

Let the Bible describe the original ages; it knows that the names were given in that way. A wonderful light falls on those ancient reports. They are correct as soon as one knows that their names belong to the time when the same structure was expressed in the blood over and over again.

And then we find everywhere, where the transition from the near to the distant marriage takes place, how that ancient clairvoyant memory is killed. Today you can find everywhere the very first elementary truths, which are thousands of years old in occultism. You can find the sentence presented: The more closely related the blood relationship is, the more vivid the power of vision is. The mixing of blood had an extinguishing effect on the life of the spiritual body. Today, researchers are trying to see if the blood of different animals can be mixed. The blood of mice does not kill rats, that of rabbits does not kill hares, because these animals are closely related. Blood from more distantly related animals kills them. Distant blood really does kill here. It was different with humans. Distant blood did not have an extinguishing effect on the physical body, but on the spiritual body, which was the carrier of that higher wisdom.

This shows us the function of blood. We see that the one who has the blood has the I. Where the outside world has gained greater power because foreign blood has been added, there the external experiences have taken effect and these have the blood. Whoever has the blood of a being has the being's I.

Not everything is the same for all time. When close marriage existed, conditions on earth were different. This does not apply to the new era; because conditions on earth have changed, the I had to move into distant marriage. The old aristocratic families have retained the old ways, and this has adverse consequences today. What in ancient times was the bearer of high spiritual human development must have a harmful effect in materialistic times.

In the future, humanity will rise again to higher levels of consciousness, but in a different way, in that the individual will take possession of spiritual rebirth; he will become so strong that he himself as a person will be able to imprint the spirit in his blood, gaining power over his blood. Then man will become clairvoyant again, so that he will not merely conquer abstract knowledge, but will be able to transfer this knowledge into his blood. Try to acquire as much theoretical knowledge as you want, it remains dry and abstract, sober and bare; try to develop knowledge in such a way that concepts become feelings for you, higher affects, touch your blood, then it becomes higher knowledge. Hence that medieval schooling that led the student across the fields, that let the flowers speak to his blood, and not just to his cool mind.

This is how things are connected. It is necessary to research the function of blood. Just as blood is the creator of what holds the ego together, so if we bring spiritual life to the blood from the outside and it does not match the blood, the spiritual life cannot be understood by the blood. Therefore, the European cannot simply impose his culture on a “savage” tribe. They can preach as much as they like, but they will not achieve their purpose and will only destroy it. This is how the Spanish destroyed the Indians: the blood differences were too great. The Indians had very different blood from the Europeans.

Thus you will see that the spiritual intercourse between nations must be consciously regulated. One must pay attention to the mission of the blood, the blood question is related to the colonial question. Here again one can see how practical Theosophy is. The time will come when we will have to consciously guide what we call cultural mixtures. We must not overlook the fact that only the upper part can penetrate into the lower part, where it can truly find expression.

Study the conditions of your blood, for then you will get to know the conditions of your various selves.

When you speak to a person in everyday life, you speak to them in terms of abstract, bare, and dull concepts! The other person can learn a lot from you, but everything they can learn remains in a certain shadowy conceptual state. If you speak to them about something that touches their heart and makes their blood boil, then you will not only have their mind, but also their soul, and you will have them inside you. Whoever has a man's blood has his soul. Whoever has a nation's blood – not in a materialistic sense, but as an expression of the soul – has the nation, and whoever wants to have a nation, to teach it, must understand the soul and the expression of the soul in blood. Whether for good or evil, if you want to take possession of a human soul, you must take possession of the blood.

Thus the folk tales have spoken wisdom here, by emphasizing the blood oath, to indicate that a person gives himself completely. There is profound wisdom in the legend that lets the devil win Faust, his entire self, by obtaining the signature in blood. Once Mephistopheles has the blood of Faust, he has his ego. That is why he did not mean it mockingly, but it is truth and really the expression of deep wisdom; yes, it is precisely the deepest wisdom about the nature of man in the sense that the lower is the expression of the upper, it confirms this sentence to us: And blood, yes, blood is a very special fluid.

More than in any other form of learning, however wise, it is often in simple myths and legends that we find deep, profound wisdom and truth. It seems as if an ancient truth from the human breast were speaking to our soul when we hear a very simple but deeply moving Mongolian fairy tale. This fairy tale goes something like this: There is an old woman. This old woman has only one large eye at the top of her head, and no other eyes with which she could see. She goes all over the world, and everything she encounters along the way, she picks up: every stone, every plant, everything, everything; and then she takes what she has picked up to her only eye to look at it, and when she has looked at it, something like a tremendous horror expresses itself on her face. Then she throws the object far away from her. This story goes on to tell us: This old woman once lost her only child, and now she searches the whole world for this only child, believing she will find this child in every stone, in every object she encounters. When she has raised an object to her eye and once again realized that it is not what belongs so deeply to her, disappointment paints itself on her face and she throws the object away.

Now, if we wanted to interpret fairy tales and legends, we could find a deep wisdom in this fairy tale, which is rooted in the most primitive folk minds. We don't want that now. In such fairy tales, one can find many, many interpretations; but it seems to us that this fairy tale expresses a yearning in every human breast. Every human being, when he becomes clear and distinct about his deepest soul values, feels that he must seek something in the whole world, something that is most deeply related to the innermost part of his soul, something that he must believe can manifest itself in every stone, in every being. And every human being feels that what he is actually seeking cannot be seen with the outer eyes and perceived directly. Every human being feels within himself a higher spiritual eye with which he walks through the world, and he senses that what meets the outer senses are only the means of expression for something that lives behind them, and so he walks around in the world like that woman, looking at every object. As long as he only looks at it with his external senses, it gives him something that, when he holds it up to the eye of his longing, deeply disappoints him. And he throws it away, saying to himself: Again, again not what I feel, what must live in all external things. For it is indeed the spirit behind all sensual physical beings that man seeks unalterably and perpetually, the spirit of which he knows that it lives within him, and of which he knows that he must somehow find it behind external objects as well. It is spiritual science that points man to what is behind sensual things and what can truly satisfy his spiritual gaze.

This spiritual science, if we look at things objectively, has, despite its short life, found a fairly wide distribution among the educated of our world in recent decades. Nevertheless, the strangest prejudices are in circulation among many people who only deal with this subject superficially. We always hear: This theosophy wants nothing more than to transplant some oriental worldview into Europe. We hear that it is a sect, that it leads to the most blatant superstition.

Not a single trace of this is true. However, it is true that if a person wants to see what this spiritual science can give them, they have to delve deeper and deeper into it. If it really gives the spiritual, if it satisfies the human longing that has been characterized, then it is more than what mere curiosity can satisfy. It is something that man needs for his life. It makes it clear to man again that in the spirit is the origin, the germ, the source of everything, including the physical, and if that is the case, then with the spirit it gives man strength at the same time, the source of life in general. Those who engage with it more deeply find this to the fullest extent.

Nothing is more fundamental, more significant for this spiritual science than the proposition that the spiritual in us, our thoughts, perceptions, feelings, are facts that have a deep effect and significance for our outer life. If we apply this specifically, if we single out one of these facts, we can say: true, genuine thoughts of the spirit give a person satisfaction, inner harmony. But inner harmony and contentment mean, if the spirit is really power, health in its effect on the physical organism, while doubt, the isolation from the spiritual world, gives man inner insecurity, hopelessness, inability to work. It gnaws at his deepest being. And because thoughts are facts, doubt and hopelessness affect his health in such a way that they weaken it. This is an assertion at first. But anyone who delves deeper will gradually be convinced of its validity.

Nowadays, there are many obstacles for people who want to approach this spiritual science. Anyone who is familiar with this spiritual science is by no means inclined to underestimate the serious obstacles that stand in the way of a person's understanding of spiritual science if he looks at things impartially. Among these manifold obstacles, there is something that is directly related to the greatest advances and most significant achievements of our age: natural science. But not to the facts of natural science! To claim that the humanities, or any kind of pursuit of truth, could come into conflict with the facts of science is madness. Facts are facts. And there can be nothing that somehow comes into conflict with the facts of science.

But when we talk about science today, for most people who lean on this science, it is not just about facts, but rather about a confession, a kind of belief that has been gained from science. And in particular, it has been the last 60s and 70s of the last century that have gradually produced a kind of scientific confession for many. This confession is expressed in the fact that there are many people who say that speaking of spirit, of a divine-spiritual background, is impossible for today's man; childish-fantastic ages spoke of spirit or soul. It is impossible for today's mature humanity to speak of these things, because scientific facts force us to do otherwise. And that which is spreading today as a kind of scientific religion and gaining more and more followers captures the imaginative life of many to such an extent that it is simply true that many who are caught up in this captivity must regard what spiritual science has to say as pure nonsense, as mere reverie.

The humanities scholar must understand what is at stake here. We can certainly experience the following. The humanities scholar comes forward with what he believes he can say based on his faithful observation of the spiritual world, with manifold teachings about what lies beyond the physically perceptible. These things have often been spoken of here, spoken of what we call the higher aspects of human nature, of the fate of man between death and rebirth, of worlds other than the physical. What is said here must seem like fantasy, if not something much worse, to many who today profess some kind of scientific doctrine. And today our consideration is specifically devoted to this fact, to the fact: What must someone who, over the last sixty years, has developed out of what is not directly given by the natural sciences, but what has developed on the basis of them and professes them, what must he think of Theosophy or spiritual science, or what can he easily think of them?

Before we go into the position of these contemporaries, who believe they have a scientific creed, we must characterize the essential point of the points of spiritual science in question. The point of spiritual science is to show in everything that the spirit is the original, matter is the derivative, that is, what appears as the effect of the spirit. So, for the spiritual researcher, substance, matter, sensuality is also spirit, but like spirit in another form. Take a child, for example. It comes to you with a piece of ice. You say to the child: This is water, real water, just in a different form. The child will say: Yes, but this ice is not water! — Then you will say: If you familiarize yourself with the nature of ice, you will understand it. Thus, when someone has matter, something sensory, before them, the spiritual scientist will say: This is spirit in another form. The materialist, on the other hand, will say: But this is matter. And the spiritual researcher will say, just as you would answer the child: You must first familiarize yourself with the extent to which matter appears in another form than spirit.

And this, which has been presented to your soul in a very abstract way, is what spiritual science seeks to explain in detail, for example, to show that what you recognize as a sensual person, see with your eyes, touch with your hands, that this outer material person is nothing more than the result of a spiritual person. Just as ice is water in a different form, so is the physical person a spiritual person in a different form.

Now, of course, when we present something like this in a few strokes today, we have to remind ourselves of what has been said in other lectures. It is difficult for those who have not heard these lectures. This spiritual science shows that if you go further and further back in time from the present, you will find other forms in the course of development, ever simpler and simpler outer physical human forms. These physical bodies of man would appear to you, if you go back far enough, more and more simple, until, if you go back far enough, you would find very simple, primitive human forms. But the further you go back, the more primitive the physical forms become, the more you find an invisible human form linked to this physical form. And if you go back even further into the times when the physical human being became smaller and smaller, the physical body becomes inconspicuous, but the spiritual human being is there, and that is the creator of this physical human form. And if you go back even further, the human form disappears altogether, and you come to the original human being, out of whom the physical one has concentrated. He is a spiritual human being.

Let us visualize how the formation of man happens now, through a comparison. Take a certain amount of water. In this, let a small amount of it freeze into ice. Then there is a small amount of ice in the middle and water all around. Now let more freeze. Then you have a more complicated ice shape. If there is already less water than before, then the water is combined into ice. The more water that freezes into ice, the less water remains. More and more ice should be created until we have almost allowed all the water to freeze into ice, so that what used to be water is now expressed in the hard, tangible form of ice.

This is roughly how we have to imagine the development of man if we stick to the comparison. We can only see the water, we can no longer see the spiritual man. Out of him begins to shine the first primitive, original form of man, which stands at the lowest level of organization. All around is this spiritual man, he condenses. This is how it continues to this day. Our present human being, as he stands before us, has been formed out of the spiritual man into the physical. The spiritual form has become more and more material. Today's human being is the expression, the revelation of the invisible man who has become visible.

Now we take up another train of thought, assuming that we had not allowed just one lump of water to solidify, but a number of them. We would have allowed the first one to solidify, then we would have taken it out. It now remains as it was and shows us the stage of development that existed at a certain phase. Now, if we had allowed a second lump to solidify at a higher level, we would have taken it out. It remains as it is. A third one as well. Finally, we can now present the whole long series of developments, where more and more water freezes into ice, until finally a point is reached where there is only one lump of ice. We have bits of ice that have lost the ability to attach other bits of ice because we have separated them from the water. This is how, in the sense of spiritual science, one imagines the development of man in his relationship to the animal world.

Once upon a time there was a spiritual man; he originally formed primitive bodies for himself. The part that retained and further developed the spiritual man reached up to today's humanity. But where a stage of development broke away, it stopped. Thus, on the first stage, when the spiritual man had developed the primitive form, a small gelatinous ball broke away, remained as that piece of ice and formed today's lowest animals. They lost their spiritual foundation. At a later stage, creatures remained behind that took the form of worms. Later still, others took the form of fish, then amphibians and so on, until finally, in a time that is not long for the spiritual researcher, the ape family emerged from the spirit, so that it could no longer keep up. Man has also progressed beyond this stage.

So you can never say that man derived from any form that now exists. Rather, it is the other way around: the forms outside, which surround you everywhere, these forms present us with developmental epochs that man has overcome because he retained the original spiritual human being within himself, because he did not tear out what had become physical from the spirit. When man looks out into his surroundings, he says to himself: I am the first in our evolutionary series; I was already there at the time when the most primitive animals had not yet appeared. I have gone through all these stages; I see my stages in my surroundings.

This is how the spiritual researcher thinks about the development of man, who, as a spiritual being, descended from the bosom of the Godhead, who has progressed while the animals crumbled away and had to remain at an earlier stage because they lost the source. When we look at any physical being, we see how it is formed out of the spirit.

But the spiritual researcher goes further. He sees in everything around him, not only in living beings, in all matter he sees, as it were, solidified spirit. Atoms are nothing other than solidified spirit. For him, the spiritual is the original, the material the derivative. When we see a stone outside, how should we think of it? That even this stone is condensed spirit.

This view has nothing to do with the extreme view that wanted to deny matter. By tracing all matter back to spirit, one does not deny it, because existence does not depend on not seeing spirit, but on becoming aware of the effect. Of course, the condensed spirits in matter have different properties than the spiritual beings themselves; that much is clear. It is only necessary to think these things through to the end. The confessions that have emerged from natural science since the 1960s are now directed against this basic fact of spiritual science. They only accept the sensual as the original and do not want to recognize the spiritual.

Who does not remember the two other trains of thought that confront one in today's world when what has been said is mentioned! Who does not remember what is emerging today as a monistic theory of evolution, whereby animals related to humans are not understood to have split off, but rather as if only the lower animals had originally existed, so that humans are the composite product of the individual building blocks of animals? It is pointed out: once only simple organisms existed. So now, according to the other theory of evolution, a higher being should have developed up to man. So man would then have simply arisen from the lower animal being in terms of his entire inner meaning.

And who does not remember the other thing that is said? Let us look at an object as it appears to us. What does it consist of? Of the smallest parts of matter, molecules, atoms, they say. And these smallest particles of matter are the only truly real things. All beings have come into being only through the interaction of these [particles of matter]. These two things are so certain for many people today, they are such suggestive concepts that many people cannot associate any sense with other things. They must be given their due. These two lines of thought are connected with the most fruitful lines of development in the nineteenth century.

We do not want to go back very far, but we will recall two fundamental facts of natural science, facts that are related to each other, the two great achievements of Schleiden and Schwann. Schleiden came to the conclusion in his studies of plants that they consist of the smallest parts, the cells, that every plant body is composed of cells, the smallest living organisms, and from there the thought takes hold: one has actually studied the plant when one has studied the nature of the cell, because these are the actual reality. The plant is only a composition of them. When Schwann found the same for the animal kingdom, this view that you can recognize a being by studying the parts of which it is composed, was also decisive for the animal kingdom. The wonders that opened up to microscopic research were admirable. What has been found through it is something great and powerful. But there were other things to come. The great discoveries in the fields of chemistry, physics, and biology came.

I will mention just a few: Darwin made a great impression by showing the transformability of animal and plant life. With tremendous diligence and great scientific rigor, he compiled facts that revealed the relationship between animals and plants, all the way up to humans. We need only recall how, through spectral analysis, man was able to look out into the heavens to find that the substances of the heavenly bodies are the same as those of our earth. The discoveries of Kirchhoff and Bunsen, which revealed the composition of the universe, are rightly called great. But these were also very much facts that bound these human minds to the material.

Those who can still look back a little on the development of intellectual life know how it happened, how, before Schleiden and Schwann, attempts were made to understand the whole plant by applying intellectual powers, and how it then became clear that the primeval organism was present in the cell organism that could still be perceived by the senses. The eye has conquered such wonders that man believed there was nothing more. Through such a thing as spectral analysis, the human mind had to be bound to the material. He had looked into the material events of the universe. It was not surprising that he forgot that there is also spirit in it, so that these conquests at the end of the nineteenth century in particular gave rise to atomism, the view that one only has to go to the smallest material and ever smaller, and find the explanation in the smallest material.

If this had remained a mere theory, it would not have had such a great significance for the spiritual path of humanity. But it could not remain that. With those bold minds of the nineteenth century, who unashamedly accommodated themselves to crass materialism, we see where such material thinking must lead. There we have minds such as Büchner's, Moleschott's and so on. Today they are already much maligned, but that is a half measure, not the whole. People say they have moved beyond them. They abandon the most crass assertions, but stand on the same ground as they did. They do not see that the ground has only been more consistently developed.

Only spiritual science is called upon to overcome this. We need only recall what Carl Vogt said, that thoughts are exudates of the brain, like any other metabolic process. Just as the kidneys exude certain substances, so the movement of the brain particles exudes thoughts. Something like that cannot remain a theory if it is believed. If that is the case, if a person's thoughts and feelings are products of the material movement of the brain parts, then with death, when the materials that make up the human being dissolve, all of the innermost essence of the human being disappears, and there is not the slightest possibility of speaking of spiritual and soul entities that outlast the human being. If the smallest material parts are the essence, then Vogt's way of thinking is consistent: when a person is buried, he disintegrates, and nothing should remain of him. These thinkers drew these conclusions and were basically much more consistent than some who wanted to be idealists at the time and who actually thought materialistically in their hearts. A dispute between Vogt and a Munich scholar who held on to soul and spirit and published articles in a Munich magazine in which he opposed Vogt was characteristic of the way in which the way of thinking was eaten away by materialism at the time. Wagner was the man's name, and Vogt wrote a spirited pamphlet against him. It was easy to refute the man with the spiritual doctrine and the materialistic way of thinking. For how did this Wagner roughly imagine the transition of the soul from parents to children? As if a measure is divided into eighths. That is, to believe in a soul substance, just as if one could weigh it. Something like that was easy to refute. That is what matters; not whether you have a spiritual doctrine, but whether you can really live in the spirit. Those who believed spiritually at the time could not do that. They were so firmly held in the spell of the material achievements of that time that, little by little, everything around us became an expression of the movement of the smallest material parts for people.

In the field of living beings, people were not satisfied with cells; instead, they were made up of atoms. From then on, life was nothing more than a complicated process of movement of the smallest parts. Complicated movement was then the movement in our brain; and that, as this movement presented itself, was human thoughts and feelings. And even those who only studied physics and physiology in this field twenty or thirty years ago experienced something that has now become rarer, what is called the reduction of all experiences to processes of moving atoms. They said: Besides us, there is only matter. What do you call color? It is nothing more than a certain movement of atoms that vibrate. The vibrations reach the eye. One form of vibration, one speed appears to us as red, the other as blue, the third as green. Red, blue and green are nothing more than subjective impressions of what exists outside. And out there are only vibrational processes in the smallest ether particles. If you turn your eye so that what vibrates outside can reach you, you become aware of it as the impression of red, blue or green. If you turn away, then nothing else is present but a vibrating process.

Then the students were tormented with the mechanical theory of heat. That which burns your fingers is nothing more than a subjective impression. Objectively present are the vibrating atoms. Imagine a container with billions of the smallest globules of a gaseous body. They vibrate in confusion, moving, bumping into each other, colliding with the walls and back again. This tremendous, structured form of motion is what manifests itself as a sensation of warmth when we put our hand down. Nothing of what we experience is external to us, but only the motion of the smallest parts. There is no warmth, there is no light, only the motion of the smallest parts. There is no electricity, only the motion of atoms. For those people, atoms had become the only reality, the absolute existence. If we dissect a human being, everything we see is a subjective impression. The human being before us is nothing more than an enormously complicated process of motion. What remains are the atoms, which, when a person dies, merge into other motion processes and form new groups. The eternal, the immortal, became the atom!

Now chemistry had found a number of substances, some 70. These substances were characterized by the fact that they could not initially be broken down into simpler ones. Water can be broken down; oxygen cannot, so it is a simple substance. What was such a simple substance? In their way, they were something eternal; but how eternal? Each element represents the cohesion of the smallest parts. These were jumbled up in the most diverse ways in the universe, here simpler, there more complicated. But the world was always only the jumble of the 72 different “eternal” elements. These were the only reality. At most, the forces were still accepted. For those who think in materialistic terms, the following must apply: an eternal thing is the individual atom. It must have existed since time immemorial and must remain in existence into time immemorial, that is the eternal. The indifferent atom, the unconscious atom, that is the original building block. And if everything is only the jumbled confusion of atoms, it is only logical to regard everything else as appearance and vapor, as something insubstantial that rises like a fog. This is a concept that has great suggestive power. There have always been people who knew what an enormity it is to assert the eternity of matter as the cornerstone of all worldviews. Du Bois-Reymond's “We cannot know” caused a certain stir when it was spoken at a natural science conference. What did he mean by that? He said: Yes, suppose you had got so far as to know, when you entertain a thought, how the atoms in your brain move. Have you grasped why certain atoms move one way and others another? What you experience inwardly: I see red, I smell the scent of roses? — He had taken up a saying of Leibniz: From a certain point of view, the brain is a material composition of atoms. — Let us assume, says Du Bois-Reymond, we could see its composition, let us assume that the brain were so gigantic that you could walk around in it, that you could understand the whole mechanism of the brain. Imagine that someone tries to understand: If there is such a movement, what this person, to whom the brain belongs, actually experiences in his soul during this movement, whether, when the parts move in one way or another, he has this or that sensation! We see movements, we see mechanical processes! We can never perceive the transition from this mechanical process to the inner experiences of the soul.

Du Bois-Reymond went even further. He said: If a person is sleeping and you examine the movements of his brain, the fact is not present in the person: I see red, I smell the scent of roses. You can understand this sleeping person, he said. But as soon as he wakes up, scientific understanding of the mechanism ceases.

This was something where theosophy or spiritual science looked in through the window of the natural world. The spiritual researcher shows that when we sleep, our physical and etheric bodies lie in bed, and outside of them is the astral body with the ego, so that the spiritual and the soul-like human being are lifted out of the physical body. What remains, Du Bois-Reymond finds explainable. However, there is still an error in this: life was overlooked. You see, here you have the first outpost of theosophy, but at the same time something that expresses the desolation of such a scientific view: we will not know, says Du Bois-Reymond. Even if it is true that one cannot understand, there is never any other explanation than that which arises from the movements. This means renouncing any explanation of the mind.

There is another matter. A chemist, Ostwald, spoke at the naturalists' meeting in Lübeck about overcoming materialism from his chemical-physical point of view. He showed that there is no sense in speaking of matter. He made a rough comparison. If someone hits another person with a stick, it does not matter to the stick, because the stick is material. What you feel, he said, is the force that is acting on you. So Ostwald tried to establish the view that everything consists of individual forces. The force that we perceive is what matters.

What were atoms? In the past, they were the smallest parts. For Ostwald, they were a small combination of forces; when they crystallize, they become atoms, matter. There we have the first step away from atomism. A person like Ostwald is not capable of rising to the view that everything is spirit. He said that everything is force, the parts of matter clenched together out of force. That was speculation. But there were innumerable reasons for it. In those days one could remember something that had been said long ago. And it was precisely I who pointed out the following in the sharpest possible way: Goethe, who is as great a naturalist as he is a poet, said: If only people did not look for anything behind appearances! The phenomena themselves are the teaching.

For a view of the world that is held in the spirit of Goethe, the following applies: What we perceive is reality. What are atoms for such a view? What is an atom? Can we associate an idea with it? What we imagine are the properties of things. We perceive things through their properties. Does the atom have such properties? Does it have a color? According to the atomistic view: no. Color, after all, is only produced by motion. Do they smell, do they taste? No! Because this, too, is only produced by motion. Do they show a certain temperature? No. All the properties around us must be denied to the atom. What is the atom for healthy thinking without properties? A fantastic construction, nothing more. Every property is denied to that which lives in the environment. The atom is something imagined as a lump in space, but it is denied all the properties it would have to have. That is the characteristic of the atomistic theory, of this basic tenet of materialism, that this theory is the most fantastic thing one can think of, pure dreaming. What one has recognized as the eternal is invented; it contradicts all healthy thinking.

Materialism attempts to conjure up such a fantastic reality in space. Without realizing it, materialism has built up the most blatant superstition. There is no difference between fetishism, which worships pieces of wood, and materialism, which worships small material lumps. The “savage” at least sees his piece of wood; the materialists imagine billions of little idols that can never appear in experience. Atomism has set up the idolatry of the atom, built on pure fantastic thought. The 72 elements exist for us insofar as they have properties. If we imagine them as consisting of atoms, then this falls prey to the most blatant materialistic superstition. All those jumbled-up atoms, all those chess pieces are inventions, are the fantastic basis of a thought.

Now, as I said, a person like the chemist Ostwald had at least pointed out that it makes no sense to speak of a pure substance, that everything dissolves into energy. We perceive energy, we do not perceive substance at all.

That was the situation in the 1980s and 1990s. Since then, things have changed completely. Until then, despite all the efforts to overcome materialism, one had to rely on sound thinking. Now, although this is the surest way to overcome it, it does not help much in our age. Anyone who, like the person speaking to you, has had to think through all the big formulas with which, for example, the red light rays have been calculated – movement of the ether atoms – anyone who has had to watch as everyone believed that the waves of the ether move in such and such a way, and then you perceive red; when, as in a vessel filled with gas, the molecules are thrown back and forth, then this degree of warmth arises, and so on. Anyone who has seen this knows something about the physiology of these things and knows that it can be difficult to achieve anything with healthy reason and real spiritual science. That was the case in the early 1890s. Today it is different.

A saying made by an English thinker, a physicist, and a good one at that, Minister Balfour, is extremely curious. He is an extraordinarily astute physical thinker. He said: If we want to think about what an atom is according to the newer views, what is the atom? He saw in it something that solidified out of flowing electricity, similar to how ice solidifies out of water. Balfour saw something more in the atom than Ostwald did. He saw flowing currents of electricity in which the individual particles of matter arise out of condensed electricity. So atoms are actually condensed electricity. You see, we still do not have a healthy view of the physical as condensed spirit; but we are now at the point where we can hear that the physical is something condensed. Think of the tremendous progress! What was electricity just a short time ago? Atom! The little fetishes had movement and the expression of that was electricity. Now the atom had already become condensed electricity. This is the real thing. That is an interesting turnaround. What was this turnaround based on? It was not based merely on the experience of the spiritual researcher or on sound thinking, but on specific experience. Physics itself, in its progress, had forced people to think in this way. This includes the phenomena observed in glass tubes through which electricity is conducted after they have been pumped dry – Crookes tubes. These phenomena led to the realization that what flows in such a tube is flowing electricity; that electricity flows in space at all. What was previously only a property was now something real.

Of course, it didn't all happen in one go. For the humanities scholar, heat is just as real as electricity, and light as well. Matter comes into being just as much through the solidification of light and heat as through the solidification of electricity. In twenty years, it won't be nonsense to say this. They will speak of what heat and light are, they will no longer claim that these little fetishes of atoms are the original, but solidified properties, solidified perceptions. What is around us is an emanation, a manifestation of the mind. Today this is still nonsense to the physicist, in twenty years it will be a fact.

This is the way to gradually arrive at the realization that all matter is solidified spirit. Physical thinking is moving directly in this direction, which leads to seeing spirit as condensed matter. This direction continues in this way. It then causes materialistic thinking to rack its brains. But it must be said: today, for materialistic thinkers, spirit does not so easily break away from the atomistic way of thinking. People have noticed that when chlorine and copper are mixed, something strange happens. In their view, chlorine is an element consisting of vibrating atoms; and these atoms would be something original. The copper atoms would be something original again. When the compound is formed, the atoms are pushed into each other, and then chlorine copper is formed. But now something strange happens. When chlorine and copper really combine, it happens with a fire effect. Heat occurs. This is something just as real as copper and chlorine. That it is something very real is shown when we want to separate the chlorine copper again. Then we have to reintroduce the heat, the same amount that was taken out.

Certain people who cannot get away from materialistic atomism have considered this. They came up with the following: Now, if we have chlorine on its own and copper on its own, which consists of atoms, then we have to think of these atoms as sacks that are puffed up by heat; and now, when we bring chlorine and copper together so that they combine, the heat is expelled, and now the empty sacks are pressed together in a jumbled fashion. When the bodies are put together, the sacks are squeezed out. When the elements are driven apart, the heat inflates the sacks.

You see, the atom has already disappeared, heat has become something very real. If we don't want to talk about sacks – the materialists did that themselves, we might have used the image of a balloon – then we have to say: if you separate the shells again, they will be filled.

What we see here is that what actually makes up the atom has already melted down to a very small size, to the shell. What gives the atom size is the heat it absorbs. This is extremely interesting. We are not far from a time when the skins will finally have been removed. For why should we not be able to imagine that if heat can puff itself up, it can be dispensed with altogether? Why should it not be conceivable to imagine the atom as frozen heat? We will come to that. Let us consider further. Even more interesting is the next step that science has taken. After the point where the atom had literally dissolved into flowing properties, came what begins with Becquerel's discoveries, which led to the magnificent and powerful discoveries in this very field, to the discoveries about radium. What do we have before us with this? We do not want to decide whether the ideas to which the physicists have been led are correct. It is our responsibility to establish that the physicists were forced to a crossroads by the phenomenon of radium. Radium emits various types of rays, electrical and so on, the effects of which can be seen on a photographic plate. But above all, it emits what is called emanations. These emanations have certain properties, properties that differ from radium itself, but are similar to it again, that dissipate over time, so that the emanation merges into something else. It throws parts of its own substance out of itself. These lose their properties and become something else. Physics has even had to accept that it has been proven that this emanation transforms into helium. Oh, what do we have now! Something flows out of the element radium and has different properties, something flows out and turns into an element again. This led chemists to say: the atom itself decays, decays into something completely different, so that it can turn into a completely new atom, even into a different element!

Imagine what that means! The parts of an element, which are called atoms, should be the most solid. Now, however, the experiment shows that these atoms crumble under our hands and become something completely different. This is something like the realization of the alchemists' dreams, that one substance can be transformed into another! Today, all this is still in its early stages, but already scientists are forced to say to themselves: the atom is not something original, it has come into being and will dissolve again. Long ago, atoms did not exist at all, although people spoke of them as the smallest fetishes. Gradually they came into being and will pass away again, as radium shows by the way it gradually crumbles its atom. Today, the physicist's atom disintegrates at our very hands. We shall no longer be able to speak of the atom in the old way. This is something different from what Ostwald brought. He still relied on conclusions; today the facts already speak; today the world of facts itself destroys the fantastic structure of the “atom”.

This brings us to an important point. Imagine the consequences of the atom being scattered, this firm support. It dissolves not only in thought, but in appearance, in space, in fact. The atom ceases to be before our eyes what it has been presented as. As ice melts again, so does the atom. Today, materialistic thinkers cannot go far enough; they can imagine that electricity accumulates; but the path leads to seeing that the original is the spirit. That is what the first step taken today is towards.

Thus, today, natural science, if it wants to understand itself correctly, stands at the beginning of the way of thinking that leads directly into spiritual science. It cannot help itself. When the mantle falls, the duke falls after it. What has led to the materialistic theory of evolution are thoughts that could not get away from matter. It sees human beings as a composite of animal species. Once we can grasp that what happens outside in the physical world comes from the spirit, then we will also be able to comprehend the way of thinking that was discussed at the beginning, of the spiritual primeval man who has become denser. Comprehension depends on our thinking habits. Physicists will force people to see spirit condensed in all material things. Then, when it is known that the atom is not eternal but has come into being and is changing into spiritual substance, it will also be possible to understand that man comes from spirit and goes to spirit. All this will lead to such a conclusion. What is happening today in the world of natural science must be viewed from within. Those who speak of it cannot yet renounce this tendency of development, which is afflicted by materialistic ideas.

But the facts guarantee that natural science will lead to spiritual science, that both will celebrate reconciliation. Spiritual science is something that must be presented to people in order to proclaim the spirit as the cause of the physical. Spiritual science will be needed when natural science can no longer go forward on its own; then natural science will be ready to merge into spiritual science. The latter is the outpost that establishes what people will need to know when the facts are ripe to unite with the spiritual-scientific facts. By itself, natural science would lead to the incomprehensible. At most, one would see solidified electricity in the atoms. To understand the final consequences, spiritual science is needed.

When we look back over centuries of thinking and feeling, we have to say that a hundred years ago, what we call natural science was just on the way to descending into the coarsest materiality. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the lowest level had been reached. In Vogt's saying that thought is a secretion of the brain as bile is a secretion of the liver, it had reached the point of extinguishing all spirit and explaining it as subjective appearance. Natural science was on this path; it was not ripe to turn its gaze up to spirit. Where was spiritual science a hundred years ago? It was immersed in abstractions, in concepts that shine deeply into the spirit. But there was one thing it could not do: bring down the great concepts of the spiritual world to the level of direct comprehension of what appeared externally.

Today we have a natural science that has plunged into the material, where the atom itself speaks, a natural science in which the atom disintegrates at our hands. We have spiritual science in theosophy, which descends to the most concrete facts, which shows that something has emerged in the physical body that the astral body, the etheric body, the I, has formed. We have natural science that reaches up to the boundaries of spiritual science, and we have spiritual science that has descended to the boundaries of natural science. That is the course of development.

A hundred years ago, looking at two currents – a natural science that did not reach up to spiritual science, and a philosophy that did not reach down to natural science – Schiller said: Oh, you are called to go one way, but for the time being you must still go separate ways so that each one becomes strong enough to help the other. This has been quickly fulfilled. In a way, natural science is strong through its weakness, in that it overcomes itself through its own facts. It will lead upwards. And spiritual science is strong because it can embrace the material. What Schiller recognized and hoped for seems to be coming true. Hopefully there will soon be many people who, with the one spiritual eye, like the woman in the fairy tale told at the beginning, no longer have to take the external beings and hurl them away because they tell them nothing, but there will be people who take every stone in their hands, lead it to a spiritual eye and recognize it as an expression of the spiritual world, because all matter is from the spirit and proclaims it. For materialism there was only matter; nothing was found there and things were thrown away. Spiritual science united with natural science will give man a spiritual aspect in every material thing. We will grow to love everything again because everything is an expression of the spiritual world.

Natural science is at a crossroads. It must either go to one side and be lost, or to the other, where it will stand united with spiritual science as the one world view; so that the two together lead man up to a way of life in which the spirit permeates life, so that in this union - which is brought about by facts themselves - a great goal for the good of humanity is achieved. We see it before us today. Let us try to visualize more clearly what we see before us by cultivating spiritual science. Then we will see that we are not doing it to satisfy mere curiosity, but to free ourselves inwardly from all doubts and to make us strong and vigorous and healthy for life. That will be the fruit of the union of natural science and spiritual science: health and strength and security in life!