The Rudolf Steiner Archive

It will be my task to-day, before we continue our studies, to present certain concepts which we shall need to use in the further development of our discussions. In this connection it will be especially important for us to come to an understanding as regards the meaning of that which we call in a spiritual-scientific, anthroposophical sense, a “physical organ,” or rather the “physical expression of an organ.” For you have already seen that we have a right to say with regard to the spleen, for example, that, as something material, the physical spleen may even be removed or become useless without thereby causing the activity of what we call “the spleen” in the anthroposophical sense to be eliminated. We must say, then, that when we have actually removed a physical organ such as this, there still remains in the organism the inner vital activity which should be carried on by the organ. From this we already see, and I beg you most earnestly to adopt this concept for all that follows, that we can think away, as it were, everything physically visible and perceptible in an organ such as this (it is not possible in the case of every organ) and yet there still remains the functioning, the activity of the organ, with the result that we must consider what then remains as belonging to what is super-sensible in the human organism. But, on the other hand, when we speak on the basis of our spiritual science about such organs as the spleen, the liver, the gall-bladder, the kidneys, the lungs, and the like, we are by no means referring when using these names, to what we can see physically, but rather to force-systems that are in reality of a super-sensible nature. For this reason, precisely in the case of such an organ as the spleen we must think, to begin with, when we speak about it from the spiritual-scientific standpoint, of a force-system not physically visible to external sight.

Let us then, in the first sketch that I shall draw here, think of a force-system not physically visible. This would represent a force-system visible only to super-sensible vision; and a system such as that in the region of the spleen, for example, would be visible only as a super-sensible force-system. Now if we bear in mind that, in the actual human organism which we have directly before us, this super-sensible force-system is filled out with physical matter, we must ask ourselves how we shall have to think of the relationship between it and that which is sense-perceptible matter.

I am sure it will not be difficult for you to believe that forces not visible to the senses can traverse space. One need only recall, for example, the following: Anyone who had never heard anything about the reality of air in a bottle would be rather surprised if we were to place an empty bottle on a table and tightly insert a funnel in it, when, on pouring water quickly into the funnel the water in the funnel is held there and cannot flow down into the bottle because the latter contains air. He would then become aware of the fact that there is, indeed, in the bottle something invisible to him which holds back the water. If we imagine this concept carried somewhat further, it will not be difficult to think that space around us may likewise be completely filled with force-systems which are obviously of a super-sensible nature, moreover, of such a super-sensible nature that not only can we not cut through them with a knife, but that they cannot be affected when any physical matter such as the kidneys, embedded within these force-systems, becomes diseased. We must realise, therefore, that the relation between a super-sensible force-system of this sort and what we see as a physical-sensible organ is such that physical matter, belonging to the physical world fits itself in and, attracted by the force-centres, deposits itself within the lines of force. Through the depositing of the physical matter in the super-sensible force-system does the organ become a physical thing. We may say, therefore, that the reason why, for instance, a physical-sensible organ is visible at the place where the spleen is located is that, at this point, space is filled in a certain definite manner by force-systems which attract the material substance in such a way that this deposits itself in the form in which we see it in the external organ of the spleen when we study it anatomically.

So you may think of all the different organs in the human organism as being first planned as super-sensible organs, and then, under the influence of the most varied sorts of super-sensible force-systems, as being filled with physical matter. Hence, in these force-systems which at different points of the organism deposit physical matter within themselves, we must recognise a super-sensible organism which is differentiated within itself and which incorporates physical matter within itself in the most diverse ways. We have thus obtained, not only this one concept of the relation of the super-sensible force-systems to the physical matter deposited in the organs, but also the other concept of the process of nourishing the organism as a whole. For this process of nourishing the entire organism consists in nothing else, after all, than in so preparing the nutritive substances taken in that it is possible to convey them to the different organs, and then in the incorporating of these substances by these organs. We shall see later how this general concept regarding the process of nutrition, which appears to be a power of attraction in the different organ-systems for the nutritive substances, is related to the coming into existence of a single human being, the embryonic development of the single human being which takes place before birth. The most comprehensive concept of nutrition, accordingly, is this: that by means of a super-sensible organism, the different nutritive substances are absorbed in the greatest variety of ways.

Now we must bear clearly in mind that man's ether-body, the super-sensible member of the human organisation nearest to the physical body, is the coarsest, so to speak; but that it underlies the entire organisation as its super-sensible prototype, is differentiated within itself, and contains the most manifold sorts of force-systems, in order that it may incorporate in the greatest variety of ways the substances taken in through the process of nutrition. But, in addition to this etheric organism, which we may look upon as the nearest prototype of the human organisation, we have still a higher member in the so-called astral body. (Just how these things are inter-related we shall see in the course of these lectures.) The astral body can become a member of the organism only when the physical and the etheric organisms have each been prepared according to its disposition. The astral body is that which presupposes both the other organisms. We have, moreover, the ego; so that the human being is composed of a union of these four members.

Now, we may picture to ourselves that even in the ether-body itself there are certain force-systems that attract to themselves particles of food taken in, and then shape these in quite definite ways in the physical organism. But we can also picture to ourselves that such a force-system is determined not only by the ether-body but also by the astral body, and that the latter sends its forces into the ether-body. If accordingly we first think away the physical organ and conceive the physical matter as cut out we have, first, the etheric force-system and next the astral force-system, which in turn permeates the etheric force-system in a perfectly definite manner. Indeed we may also conceive radiations passing down into these from the ego.

Now there may be organs which are so incorporated in the whole organism that their essential characteristic, for example, lies in the fact that the etheric currents in them are, as yet, very indefinite. We find, therefore, if we investigate the space in which such an organ is located, that the etheric portion of the human organism in this spatial formation is very slightly differentiated in itself, contains very little in the way of force-systems; but that, to make up for this, these weak forces of the ether-body are influenced by strong astral forces. When, therefore, physical matter is incorporated into such an organ as this, the ether-body exercises only a slight force of attraction and the chief forces of attraction must be exercised by the astral body upon the organ in question. It is as if the relevant substances are brought, as it were, by the astral body into this organ. From this we see that the values of the human organs here in question vary considerably. There are certain organs which we have to recognise as being determined principally through the force-systems of the ether-body; and others which are determined, rather, through the currents or forces coming from the astral body; whereas others again are to a greater degree determined through the currents of the ego.

Now, as a result of all that has thus far been presented in these lectures, one may say that especially that organic system conveying our blood is essentially dependent upon the radiations going forth from our ego; and that the human blood, therefore, is connected essentially with the currents and radiations of the human ego. The other organ-systems, with what they contain, are determined in the greatest variety of ways by the super-sensible members of man's nature.

But the reverse situation may occur when we consider the physical body per se, which, indeed, disregarding for the moment its higher members, exhibits likewise a force-system. For it represents, to begin with, what we may conceive as the combination of all the substances taken in from the outer world which at the same time have brought into it their own inner forces, even though in a transformed condition. Thus the physical body is also a force-system; also a force-system; so that we may also imagine cases in which this physical organism with its force-system works back upon the etheric, or even upon the astral, force-system, indeed even as far back as the ego-system. Not only may we conceive that the etheric force-system is seized upon by the astral- or the ego-system, but it is equally possible that there are organic systems which are specially requisitioned by the physical force-systems, in which cases it is the physical force-systems that prevail. Organ-systems of this sort, in which the physical body preponderates over the others, and which are therefore only to a lesser degree influenced by the higher members of the human organisation—while on the other hand more strongly influenced by the laws of the physical body—these are more especially the organ-systems which serve in a very comprehensive sense as organs of secretion and excretion,¹ as glandular organs or secretory and excretory organs in general. All organs of secretion, therefore, organs which secrete substances directly in the human organism, are induced to do so—a process that has its essential significance purely in the physical world—chiefly through the forces of the physical organism. Wherever in the human body there are organs such as these, existing for the special purpose of being used by the physical organism to secrete substances, such organs, when they become ill or are removed—which means when they become useless in some quite definite way—cause the ruin of the organism so that it cannot any longer continue its normal development.

In the case of an organ like the spleen, with regard to which the statement was ventured in yesterday's lecture that, when it becomes ill or in any way useless, its own function is affected less than would be true in the case of other organs, we see that it is very specially influenced by the super-sensible portions of man's nature, by the ether-body and more especially by the astral body. And we see that in the case of some other organs the physical forces predominate. The thyroid gland, which in certain disease conditions becomes enlarged into the so-called goitre, may have a very injurious influence upon the whole organism, because the activities which it especially has to manifest are such that what it brings about in the physical world as a physical process is absolutely essential to the general economy of the human organism.

Now there may be organs that are to a very high degree dependent upon the other, the super-sensible force-systems of the human organism, but which are none the less closely bound to the physical organism and are induced through its forces to secrete physical matter. Such organs, for example, are the liver and the kidneys. These are organs which, like the spleen, are dependent upon the super-sensible members of the human organisation, the ether-body and the astral body, but which are seized upon by the forces of the physical organism, and are drawn downward in their activities even into the forces of the physical organism. It is, therefore, of far greater importance for them to be in a healthy condition as physical organs in the human organism than for other organs, those, for example, in which conditions are such that the physical demands are far outweighed by what is derived from the other members, so that we have in the spleen an organ of which we can say that it is a very spiritual organ, that is, the physical part of this organ is its least significant part. In occult literature which has come forth from circles where something was really known about these matters, the spleen has always been looked upon as a particularly spiritual organ and is described as such.

Thus we have now arrived at what we may call the concept of the “complete organ.” An organ, as such, may be looked upon as a super-sensible force-system; although physical-sensible substances are stored up, as it were, in the organs through the entire process of nutrition. Another concept we must acquire raises this question: What is the significance in general of taking in something, whether it be a physical substance or what is received through the influence of our soul-activity; for example, through perception? And what is the significance of the excreting² of a physical substance?

Let us begin with the process of excretion in its most inclusive sense. We know, in the first place, that from the food taken, a large portion of the material substance is excreted. We know, further, that carbonic acid is excreted from the human organism through the lungs; that, after the blood has been sent out of the heart and through the lungs in order to be renewed, the carbonic acid is thrown off. We have, then, another excretory process through the kidneys, but also one through the skin. In this last process which goes on primarily in the forming of perspiration, but also in everything occurring by way of the skin which must be classed as an excretory process, we have those excretory processes in the human being which take place at the outermost circumference of the body, its outermost periphery. Let us now ask ourselves the question: What is the full significance of the excretory process in the human being?

Only in the following way can we be clear as to the significance of a process of excretion. You will see that, without such concepts as we are developing to-day, it will be impossible for us to get any further with our study of the human organism. I should like, in order to be able gradually to carry forward our thinking to the essential nature of a process of excretion, first to submit for your consideration another concept which has, to be sure, only a remote similarity to the excretory processes, but which can nevertheless guide us to them, namely, the concept of the becoming aware of our Self.

Think for a moment, how is it really possible after all to affirm that there is such a thing as the becoming aware of one's Self? If you move incautiously in a room and stumble against some external object you say that you have run into something. This impact is actually a becoming aware of your own Self in such a way, that the collision has in reality become for you an inner occurrence. For what is the collision with a foreign object so far as it affects you? It is the cause of a hurt, a pain. The process of feeling pain takes place entirely within yourself. Thus an inner process is called forth by the fact that you come into contact with a foreign object, and that this constitutes a hindrance in your way. It is the becoming aware of this hindrance that calls forth the inner process which, in the moment of collision, makes itself known as pain. In fact, you can easily conceive that you do not need to know anything else whatever in order to experience this becoming aware of your Self except the effect, the pain, caused by coming into contact with an external object. Imagine that you stumble against an object in the dark without knowing at all what it is, and that you hit it so hard that you do not even stop to think what it might be, but notice only the effect in the pain.

In this case you have felt the blow in its effect in such a way that you live through an inner process within yourself. You are not inwardly conscious of anything but an inner process in such a case, where you think of the blow as having taken place in the dark and of your having experienced its effect in pain. Of course, you say to yourself “I have run into something,” but this is nevertheless a more or less unconscious conclusion resulting from your inner experience of the outer object.

From this you can see that man becomes aware of his inner Being in the sensing of resistance. This is the concept we must have: becoming aware, consciousness of inner life, of being filled with real inner experiences through the sensing of a resistance. This is somewhat the concept which I have here developed in order to be able to make the transition to another concept, that of the excretions in the human organism. Let us suppose that the human organism takes into itself in some way or other, into one of its organ-systems, a certain kind of physical substance, and that this organ-system is so regulated that through its own activity it eliminates something from the substance taken in, separates it from the substance as a whole, so that through the activity of this organ the original complete substance falls apart into a finer, filtered portion and a coarser portion, which is excreted. Thus there begins a differentiating of the substance taken in, into a substance that is further useful, which can be received by other organs, and another that is first separated and then excreted. The unusable portions of the physical substance are thrust away in contrast with the usable portions, an expression here justified, and we have such a collision as I described roughly in the case of one's running against some outer object. The stream of physical matter as a whole, when it comes into an organ, runs against a resistance as it were; it cannot remain as it is, it must change itself. It is told by the organ, as we might say: “You cannot remain as you are; you must transform yourself.” Let us suppose that such a substance goes into the liver. There it is told, “You must change yourself.” A resistance is set up against it. For further use it must become a different substance, and it must cast off certain portions. Thus it happens in our organism that the substance perceives that resistance is present. Such resistances are to be found within the entire organism in a great number of different organs. It is only because secretion takes place at all in our organism, because we have organs of secretion, that it is possible for our organism to be secluded within itself; to be a self-experiencing being. For only so can any being become conscious of its own inner life, through the fact that its own life meets with resistance. Thus we have in the processes of secretion processes important for human life—processes, in other words, by means of which the living organism secludes itself within itself. Man would not be a Being secluded within himself if such processes of secretion did not take place.

Let us suppose that the flow of nourishment or of oxygen that has been absorbed, were to pass through the human organism as if through a tube. The result, if no resistance were offered through the organs, would be that the human organism would not be conscious within itself of its own inner life but would experience itself; on the contrary, only as belonging to the great world as a whole. We might, to be sure, imagine also that the crudest form of this resistance were to appear in the human organism, that the substance in question might knock itself against a solid wall, and turn back again into itself. This would not, however, make any difference to the inner experience of the human organism; for whether a flow of food or of oxygen were to pass through the organism, entering at one end and passing out at the other, being reflected back on itself as through a hose, this would not make any real difference to an inner experience of the human organism. That this is so we can at once gather from the fact that, when we bring it about in our nervous system that a concept turns back into itself, we thereby lift our nervous system right out of the inner experience of the human organism. It makes no difference why the human organism is left unaffected, whether because the streams entering from without are completely reflected or merely pass through. What makes it possible to realise the inner life of the human organism is the processes of secretion.

Now if we observe that organ which we must consider the central organ of the human organism, the organ of the blood, noting how it continually renews the blood in one direction by taking in oxygen, and if we see in this organ the instrument of the human ego, we may then say that if the blood were to go through the human ego unchanged, it could not in that case be the instrument of the human ego, that which in the very highest sense enables man to be conscious of his own inner life. Only through the fact that the blood undergoes changes in its own inner life, and then goes back as something different, in other words, that something is excreted from the changed blood, only because of this is it possible for man, not only to have an ego, but to experience it inwardly with the help of a physical-sensible instrument.

We have now enunciated the concept of the process of excretion. We shall next have to ask ourselves how it is with that excretion pertaining to the outermost boundary of the human organism. It will certainly not be difficult for us to conceive that the human organism as a whole must operate in such a way that this excretion can take place just where it does, on the periphery. For this purpose it is necessary that, confronting all the streams of the human organism, there should be one organ which is connected with this most extensive of all the processes of excretion. And this organ which is, as you will readily surmise, the skin in its most comprehensive sense together with everything pertaining to it, presents most directly to the view what we call essential in the human form. When we picture to ourselves, therefore, that the human organism can be inwardly conscious of its own life at its outermost periphery only through the fact that it has placed the organ of the skin where it confronts all its various streams, we are obliged to see in the peculiar formation of the skin one of the expressions of the innermost force of the human organism.

How shall we think of the skin-organ with everything pertaining to it? We shall see later in detail what it is that pertains to it, but to-day we shall characterise these relationships as a whole.

Here we must be clear about one thing. In what belongs to our conscious inner experience, about which we can still have a kind of knowledge through some sort of self-observation, there is not to be included that structure which comes to expression in the form of our skin. Even though we are still actively sharing in the fashioning of the outer surface of our body, this active sharing is such that we may say all directly voluntary action is completely excluded. It is true that as regards the mobility of the surface of our body, in our facial expression, gestures, etc., we have an influence which still extends to what we may call our conscious activity; but in the actual formation we have no longer any influence. It must, of course, be admitted that man does have a certain influence within narrow limits upon the outer form of his body through his inner life between birth and death. With regard to this anyone can convince himself who has known a man at a certain definite time of life, and who then sees him again after perhaps ten years. Especially is this true if, during these ten years, this man has gone through profound inner experiences, and especially those connected with the acquiring of knowledge, not such knowledge as constitutes the subject-matter of external science, but rather those which cost blood and are connected with the destiny of the whole inner life. We then see, indeed, how within certain narrow limits the physiognomy changes; how to a certain extent, therefore, man does have within these limits an influence upon the formation of his body. Yet he has it only to a very slight degree, as anyone will have to admit; for the most essential share in the forming of man is not entrusted to his volition with the help of what reaches him through his consciousness. On the other hand we must admit that the entire human form is adapted to man's essential being. Anyone who looks into these things will never for a moment imagine that what we mean by the whole range of human capacities could develop in a being having any other form than the human form as it exists in the physical world. Everything in the way of human capacities is related to this human form. Just suppose for a moment that the frontal bone were in any other position with relation to the whole organism than what it is; in that case you would have to suppose that this different position of the frontal bone, this changing of form, would presuppose at the same time entirely different capacities and forces in man. It is possible, indeed, to make a study of this in mankind as one comes to see clearly that there are different capacities among human beings having a different outer formation of the head or other organs. This is the way, then, that we must create for ourselves a concept of the conformity of the human form to man's being in its totality, of the complete correspondence between the outer form and the essential quality of man's entire being. What lies in the forces that are active in this adaptation has nothing to do with what enters into man's own activity within the compass of his own consciousness. Since, however, man's form is connected with his spiritual activity, and with his soul-life as well, it would not be possible to imagine otherwise than that the forces which bring about the human form are those which come from another direction, to meet the forces that man himself develops within his form. Here within him are the forces of intelligence, of feeling, of temperament, etc. These the human being can develop only in the physical world, as conditioned by his particular form. This form must be given to him. Whatever capacities of ours need this form must receive it already prepared, if I may express it thus, from corresponding forces of a similar kind, which, working from the other direction, first build up the form in order that these capacities may be used as they ought to be used. It is not difficult to gain this concept. We need only think of a case like the following. When we have a machine which is to be used for some intelligent activity, some activity that has a purpose, we have to do in the first place with the machine and this purposeful activity. In order, however, that the machine may come into existence, it is necessary that similar activities be carried out, which assemble the parts of the machine and give form to the whole. These activities must be similar to those which are later carried on by means of the machine itself. We must say, therefore, that when we observe a machine it is wholly and absolutely explicable on mechanical principles; but the fact that the machine is adapted to its purpose requires us to suppose that it came into existence through the activity of a mind which had thought out that purpose beforehand. This spiritual activity has withdrawn, to be sure, and does not need to be brought forward when we wish to explain the machine scientifically; yet it is there, behind the machine, and first produced it.

So likewise can we say that, for the developing of our capacities and powers as human beings, we need above all those systems of forms which lie within the moulding of our organism. There must be behind this human form, however, forces that do the forming, which we can as little find in the already fashioned form as we find the builder of the machine in the machine itself.

Through this idea something else will become quite clear to you. A materialistic thinker, for instance, might come forward and say: “But why do we need to assume that there are intelligent forces and beings behind that which gives form to our physical world? We can, indeed, explain the physical world through itself, by means of its own laws: a watch or a machine, for example, can be explained by means of its own laws.” Here we have arrived at a point where the worst kind of errors appear, on this side and that, where from the anthroposophical standpoint also, or among those who stand for some other spiritual world-conception, such errors occur. If it should be disputed, for example, by a spiritual-scientific world-conception that the human organism as it presents itself to us and which we are now observing according to its form, can be explained purely mechanically, or mechanistically through its own laws, that would naturally be going too far and would be quite unjustified. The human organism is, indeed, absolutely and entirely explainable out of its own laws, just as is the watch. Yet it does not follow from the fact that the watch can be explained by means of its own laws that the inventor was not behind the watch. This objection, accordingly, answers itself through the very fact that it must be admitted that the human organism must be explained on the basis of its own laws.

When we think, therefore, from the point of view of spiritual science, we have first to seek behind the form of a man as a whole for the form-creative beings—that is for what underlies this entire human being. If we wish to form a concept of how the human form comes to be at all, we must think of it as coming about on the one side through the fact that the form-giving forces unfold themselves, and that in the building up of this human form they at first enclose themselves within it. We have presented to us, accordingly, in the formation of the skin, the most extensive circumference spatially of that which stands for the self-enclosing of the formative forces in man. We might draw a sketch and think of of these form-giving forces in man as flowing outward and enclosing themselves within the outer form, which shall here be indicated simply by the line AB. It will becom clear to us that we shall have further need for this concept in order to understand what goes on at this outermost circumference of the human being, anywhere inside the skin. There is something else, however, about which we must be clear: that not only within the human skin do we find such enclosing, but also within the human organism itself we have the same sort of self-enclosing of the activity and fullness of being which work into it from outside. You need only reflect upon all that has been said up to this point and you will remember that we do find just such self-enclosing activity inside the human being, one in which we take no more part than in the forming of our skin-surface. We mean here those very activities which come about in the organs of the liver, the gall-bladder, the spleen, etc. That which streams into the organism by means of the forces contained in the nutritive substances is stopped by these organs. Something is pushed against it; a resistance is set up in opposition to it. In other words here in these organs the external vital activity of these substances is transformed. Whereas, therefore, in the case of the form-giving forces within us, it is necessary to think of these as being active as far as the skin, and whereas outside the skin we find no more form-giving forces, we must picture to ourselves that in the case of those forces which enter into us with the stream of nutrition or air, there is not a complete enclosing of what finds its way inward as currents from without, but rather there takes place a transformation. We must not think of these organs as stopping something, as is the case with the skin, but must rather think that the vital activity of the substances is so changed by them that the stream of food taken in by these organs (a) is then conveyed further in a changed form (b) after it has met with resistance. Thus we have here to do with a process of change, and this concerns especially those particular organs which we have characterised as the inner cosmic system in man. They change the external movements of the substances. These are forces which, in contrast to the form-forces that build up the whole organism, we may call forces of movement. Within our inner cosmic system these forces, which transform the inner vital activity of the nutritive substances, themselves become movement; so that we can rightly speak here of forces of movement in these organs.

We are now far enough advanced in our considerations to be able to say that there are forces which work from outside into the human organism, forces whose activity we cannot compass within the horizon of our consciousness. All that we can refer to as “activities” in this case takes place below the threshold of our consciousness, for certainly no one in a normal state of consciousness can observe the activity of his liver, his gall-bladder, spleen, etc. And now, since our whole nervous system is a member of our organism, the question arises: what prevents this nervous system from knowing something about the formation of the organs in this organism? This certainly does take place there; the forces that give us our form are at work in our organism, and similarly those within our inner cosmic system which change the movement and the vital activity of substances. How does it come about that we know nothing of all this?

The nervous system of our brain and spinal cord is intended, in a normal state of consciousness, to convey external impressions to the blood, that is, to take the impressions in as physical processes in such a way that these processes beat against the blood, as it were, and in doing this inscribe themselves upon the instrument of the ego, the blood, so that the outer impressions are thereby transferred to it. And just as truly the branches of the sympathetic nervous system which, with its ganglions and ramifications, stands guard over the inner cosmic system, are intended to keep the processes that go on in this inner cosmic system from approaching as far as the blood, to hold these processes back, so to speak. You have now heard something more in regard to what I have previously touched upon, namely, that the sympathetic nervous system has a function contrary to that of the nervous system of the brain and spinal cord. Whereas the latter must make the effort to convey external impressions to the blood in the best possible way, the sympathetic nervous system, with its opposite activity, must be continually holding back from the blood, from the instrument of the ego, the transformed vital activities of the substances that have been taken in. If we observe the digestive process, we have there, first, the taking in of external nutritive substances; then the holding back of the vital activities peculiar to these nutritive substances, and the transformation of these by means of the inner cosmic system of man. The vital activities of these substances, accordingly, are changed into other sorts of vital activities. In order that we need not, placed as we are in the world, continually perceive inwardly what goes on in our inner organs, this entire stream of processes must be held back from the blood by means of the sympathetic nervous system, whereas that other nervous system goes to meet what is taken in from outside.

Here, then, you have the function of the sympathetic nervous system, which becomes a part of our organism for the purpose of holding our inner processes, not allowing them to penetrate to the ego-instrument, the blood. I called your attention yesterday to the fact that the outer life and the inner life of man, as they are expressed in the ether-body, present a contrast; and that this contrast between the inner life and the outer is expressed in tensions which finally come to a climax, as we saw, in those organs of the brain called the pineal gland and the pituitary body.

Now, if you put together yesterday's and to-day's discussions, you will be able to understand that everything which beats in upon us from outside, in order to stand in the closest possible contact with the circulation of the blood, strives to unite with its counterpart, with what is held back by the sympathetic nervous system. For this reason we have, in the pineal gland, the place where what has been brought to the blood by means of the nervous system of the brain and spinal cord unites with what approaches man from the other direction; and the pituitary body is there as a last outpost to prevent the approach of what has to do with the life of the inner man. There are opposite to each other, at this point in the brain, two important organs. Everything that we live through in our inner organisation remains below our consciousness; for it would, indeed, be terribly disturbing to us if we were to share consciously in our whole process of nutrition. This is kept back from our consciousness by means of the sympathetic nervous system. Only when this reciprocal relationship between the two nervous systems, as this is expressed in the state of tension between the pineal gland and the pituitary body, is not in order does something result which we may call a “glimmering through from the one side to the other,” a being disturbed on the one side by the other. This takes place when some irregularity in the activity of our digestive organs expresses itself in our consciousness in feelings of discomfort. In this case we have a raying into the consciousness, although very obscure, of the internal life of the human being, which has first been changed with the help of the inner cosmic system from the form it had in the life outside. Or in special emotions, such as anger and the like—which have a particularly strong influence on man, originating in the consciousness, we have a breaking through from the other direction into the organism. We then have one of these cases in which emotions, unusual inner disturbances of the soul, can influence in a specially harmful way the digestion, the respiratory system and also, consequently, the circulation of the blood and everything that lies below consciousness.

It is thus possible for these two sides of human nature to act reciprocally upon each other. And we are obliged to state that, as human beings, we actually stand in the world as a duality: a duality in the first place which has, in the nervous system of the brain and the spinal cord, instruments that bring external impressions to the blood, the instrument of the ego. From this whole stream of soul-life is held back, by means of the sympathetic nervous system, everything in the way of inner realisation of the life of the organs. These two streams confront each other all along the line, so to speak; but we find their special expressions in those two organs of which we spoke at the close of yesterday's lecture. From this point we will continue our considerations in the next lecture.

• 1. Absonderungsorgane. The term Absonderung is applied in these lectures to the process whereby various organs take out a portion of the nutritive matter and hold this for use (=secretion) and at the same time reject the rest of the matter (=excretion), either discharging this portion out of the body or passing it on to be discharged. The important aspect of the process, from the point of view of these lectures, is that of separation, implying resistance, through which alone man can become conscious of himself. Hence the term excretion is used for Absonderung except where secretion is obviously required.
• 2. See footnote, p. 79.

From the last lecture we were able to gather that man, as a physical organisation, separates himself from the outside world, to a certain extent, by means of his skin. When we conceive the human organism entirely in the light in which we have had to do during the preceding lectures, it becomes necessary to say that it is this human organism itself, with its various force-systems, which provides itself with a definite external boundary by means of the skin. In other words, we must understand clearly that the human organism is a system of forces of a nature so self-determined that it gives itself the exact outline of form which appears in the contours of our skin. We shall have to say, therefore, that in connection with the life-process of man there is the interesting fact that in the outer border of the form we have, expressed in a picture, as it were, the combined activity of all the force-systems of the organism. If, on the other hand, the skin itself is to be such an expression for the organism, then we should have to presuppose that it must actually be possible in some way to find the whole man, in a certain sense, in the skin. For, if man as he exists is so to construct himself that the outer skin, as the boundary of his form, expresses what he is, it must in that case be possible to find in the skin everything belonging to his total organisation. As a matter of fact, if we look into what belongs to this total organisation of man, we shall find out how true it is that everything is present in the skin, inside the skin itself, which is present as a tendency in the force-systems of the entire organism.

In all the preceding we have seen that the whole man, in his appearance as earth-man, has in his blood-system the instrument of the ego, so that he actually is man by reason of the fact that he harbours within himself an ego, and that this ego can create an expression of itself as far as the physical system, can work with the blood as its instrument. And now, if the surface of the body, the boundary of the form, is an essential member of the whole organisation, we must conclude that this whole organisation must be active by means of the blood as far as the skin, in order that an expression of the whole human being in so far as he is physical can exist. If we observe the skin—and we must understand it as consisting of several layers stretched over the entire surface of the body—we find that, as a matter of fact, fine blood vessels do extend into this skin, and we are therefore obliged to conclude that it is by means of these fine blood vessels which extend into the skin that the ego is able to send out its forces and create for itself, through the blood, an expression of the human being extending as far as the skin. We know, furthermore, that the nervous system is the physical instrument for everything which we may characterise as consciousness. And, inasmuch as the boundary of the bodily surface is an expression of the plan of the human being as a whole, the nerves must also reach out into the skin-boundary in order that man may express himself adequately in this skin-boundary. We see, therefore, spreading out close to the fine blood vessels lying within the layers of the skin, the nerve-terminations, commonly although not quite correctly called tactile corpuscles, because it is believed that with the help of these man perceives the external world through the sense of touch, just as he perceives light and sound through the eye and the ear. Such is not the case, however, and we shall see later what the facts really are.

Thus we find present in the skin what constitutes the expression, or the bodily organ, of the human ego; and we find also what constitutes the expression of human consciousness reaching out into the skin in the form of fine nerves and their projections. Then we must look around for the expression of what we may consider as the instrument of the life-process. We have already in our last lecture directed attention to this instrument of the life-process, in our discussion of the function of secretion. In this function, in which we have seen that a sort of hindering takes place, as it were, we may recognise the expression of the life-process, to the extent that a living being which wills to exist in the world is compelled to shut itself off from the outside world. This self-enclosing can take place only by its experiencing a hindering within itself. This living through a hindrance in itself is brought about by means of the organs of secretion, which may be described in the broadest sense as glands. Glands are organs of secretion; and, in so far as they are such, there takes place in them that sort of hindrance which calls forth inner resistance, in order that a being may shut itself off within itself. We must presuppose, therefore, that such organs of secretion, similar to those we have everywhere else in the organism, belong also to the skin. And they do belong to the skin; for we find, in the skin organs of secretion, glands of the greatest possible variety, which carry on this function of secretion, in other words, a life-process, within the skin.

Now, if we ask finally what underlies this life-process, we shall find there something we may call a purely material process, that is, the conveying of substances from one organ to another. At this point we must differentiate carefully between a process such as has to do with life and is a process of secretion, which creates an inner hindrance, and that process which transports substances quite externally, which causes a transference of substances from one organ to another. These are not the same. To a materialistic conception it might seem as if they were, but to a living grasp of reality they are not so. As long as we are alive we are not dealing, in a single member of the human organisation, with a mere transportation of substances from one organ to another. In the very moment, rather, when the substances of nutrition are taken in by the life-process, we have to do with occurrences such as those of the inner secretive processes. Thus we come down a step from the real life-process to the process of the physical body when we say that this process of secretion, looked at physically, is such that the substances of nutrition which are taken in are transported to all the different parts of the physical body; whereas in its other aspect it is a living activity, a becoming aware of itself, as it were, on the part of the organism in its own inner being, through the setting up of hindrances. Through the life-processes there takes place at the same time a transporting of substances, and we find this in the skin just as in the other parts of the organism. The nutritive substances are continually being secreted, carried outwards in the skin, and there also excreted through the process of perspiration, so that here also what we may call a transporting in the physical sense, a changing of the substances in the organism, is physically present.

We have thus set forth in its essence the fact that even in the external organ of the skin are present both the blood-system, as the expression of the ego, and the nervous system as the expression of the consciousness. And now I wish little by little to direct you to the fact that we have a right to bring together all phenomena of consciousness under the expression “astral body,” that is, to conceive the nervous system comprehensively as an expression of the astral body; that we have what we may call the glandular system as an expression of the ether-body, or life-body; and the actual process of nutrition and depositing of substances as an expression of the physical body. To this extent all the separate members of the human organism are actually present in the skin-system, through which man shuts himself off from the outside world. Now, we must take into account the fact that all such divisions of the human organisation as the blood-system, the nervous system, the nutritive system, etc., form in their mutual relations a whole; and that when we observe these four systems of the human organisation and have them before us in the physical body, we are viewing the human organism in two aspects, as it were. We actually have it before us in two aspects and in such a way, indeed, that we may say that the human organism has meaning within our earth-existence only if, as an entire organism, it is the instrument of the ego. It can be this, however, only if the most immediate instrument which the human ego can employ, the blood-system, is present in it.

We can state thus that the blood-system is the most immediate instrument of the human ego. Yet the blood-system is possible only if all the other systems are first existent. The blood is not only, according to the meaning of the poet's words, “a very special fluid”; it is also obvious that it cannot exist as it is except by finding a place for itself in the entire remaining organism; its existence must necessarily be prepared for by all the rest of the human organism. The blood, as it exists in man, cannot be found anywhere else than in the human organism. We shall refer, further on, to the relation of the human blood to the blood of the animal; and this will be a very important consideration, since external science to-day takes little notice of it. To-day we are dealing with blood as the expression of the human ego, taking account, at the same time, of a remark which was made in the first lecture: namely, that what is here said concerning man cannot, without further thought, be applied to any other kind of earth-being whatever. We may say then that, when once the entire remaining organism of man is constructed as it is, it is then capable of receiving into itself the circulatory course of the blood, is capable, that is, of carrying the blood, of having within itself that instrument which is the tool of our ego. The whole human organism, however, must first be built up for this purpose.

As you know, there are other beings on the earth which seem to have a certain kinship with man, but which are not in a position to bring to expression a human ego. In their case it is obvious that what appears similar in these other systems to human potentialities is built up otherwise than in the human being. To put it somewhat differently: in all of these systems which precede the blood-system there must first be present everything, in a preparatory plan, which is capable of receiving the blood. This means that we must have a nervous system exactly fitted to receive a blood-system such as that of man; we must have a glandular system which is perfectly prepared for the circulation of human blood; and the system of nutrition must likewise be thoroughly prepared for the human blood-system. This signifies in turn, however, that even from the other aspect of man's organism, for example, the whole nutritional system, which we have described as expressing the actual physical body of man, there must be present the potentiality of the ego. The entire process of nutrition must, as it were, be so directed and guided through the organism that the blood can finally move in the courses which are right for it. What does that mean?

Let us assume, since everything is absolutely determined in its formation and its particular kind of activity by the quality of man's being, that we had to draw the course of the blood (in a mere diagram, of course) in this fashion. We should then have to say that this circulation of the blood must now be received by the rest of the organism, which must fit itself into this. This means that all the other systems of organs must be directed to the very place, or to the neighbourhood, where the blood has to be. We could not have the whole texture of the blood-vessels, as this exists in our head for example, or in some other part of our organism, if what is necessary to it were not in each case directed just where the blood is to circulate. That is, the force-systems (which I here indicate by a second line) must act in the human organism, beginning with the nutritive system, in such a way that they carry all the nutritive matter to the proper places, and at the same time so form it beforehand that in these places, by means of such preparation of the nutritive matter, the blood-system can hold exactly to the form of the course it now takes, and thereby be an expression of the ego. There must, accordingly, be contained in all the impulses of our nutritive apparatus, that is, our lowest organ-system, just that thing which makes of man an ego. In other words, the entire form which man finally presents to us must be incorporated in what we call the various methods of nutrition. Here we are looking down from the blood into the organ-systems which prepare the circulatory course of the blood, far, far down, from our ego to those processes which go on in the darkness of our organism. Although our blood is the expression of our ego-activity, the most conscious activity in us, it is at the same time necessary to look down into the obscure depths of our organism and say that the way in which our organism down there is built up and formed through other processes, concerning which we do not know at all how the different substances are carried to those places where they ought to be, in order that our organism may be constructed by the several force-systems just as the ego desires to have it—this shows us that, beginning with the nutritive processes, there are present in man's organism all the laws which lead ultimately to the formation of the course of the blood.

Now, the blood presents to us the most mobile, the most active, of all our systems. We know, indeed, that even if we interfere only very slightly with the course of the blood, it follows at once another direction from the one it takes in the normal course. We need only prick ourselves and the blood at once takes another direction from its usual one. This is of infinite importance; for we can see from it that the blood is the most easily controlled element in the human body; that it has a good foundation in the other organic systems while at the same time it is the most controllable of them all, has the least stability within itself, and is more determined than any other system by the experiences of the conscious ego. I shall not now go into the fantastic theories of external science concerning blushing or turning pale from feelings of shame or anxiety; I shall merely point to the purely external fact that, underlying such experiences as fear or anxiety, or the feeling of shame, are ego-experiences which are recognisable in their effect upon the blood. With the feeling of fear or anxiety it is as if we wanted to guard ourselves, so to speak, against something which we believe will have an influence upon us: we draw back with our ego. With the feeling of shame we would best of all like to hide ourselves, to obliterate our ego. In both cases, referring only to the external facts, the blood, as an external physical instrument, follows physically what the ego lives through in itself. In the case of feelings of fear and anxiety, where a man would like to draw back into himself completely, from something which he feels to be threatening him, he becomes pale; the blood draws back to its centre, draws inward. When a man would like to hide himself because of his sense of shame, would like to obliterate his ego, or best of all not to exist, or to slink away somewhere, the blood, under the influence of what the ego may here live through, spreads out as far as the periphery. And so you see from this that the blood is the most easily controllable system in man, and that it can follow in a definite way the experiences of the ego.

Now, the further we go down into the organic systems, the less are they regulated so as to follow our ego in this way, the less inclined to adapt themselves wholly to the inner experiences of the ego. Whatever especially affects the nervous system is regulated as we know along certain definite nerve-courses, and these nerve-courses show us something relatively fixed, in their functioning, in contrast to the blood. Whereas the blood is mobile, and can be guided under the influence of ego-experiences from one part of the body to another, as happens in the case of shame and fear, we must say, with regard to the nerve- courses, that the forces which are active here must be the forces of consciousness, and that these forces cannot carry the nerve-substance from one place to another as can be done with the blood-substance. This substance of the nervous system is, indeed, more fixed than the substance of the blood.

And this is still more true in the case of the glandular system, which shows us glands that have certain definite tasks to perform in definite places within the organism. If a gland has to be brought into activity by some means or other to some definite purpose, it cannot be aroused by means of some such cord as the nerve-cord; rather it must be stimulated at the very place where it is situated. That which is contained in the glandular system, therefore, is even more fixed than the nerves; we must excite the glands where they are. Whereas we can guide the activity of the nerves along the nerve-cords (we have in this system connecting fibres also, which unite the separate ganglions), the gland must be looked for where it is located.

Still more striking, however, is this process of fixation, this process of being inwardly determined (not “being determinable”) in everything that has to do with the system of nutrition, by means of which man incorporates substances directly into himself in order to be a physical, sensuous being. For this incorporating of substances there must, nevertheless, be available a thorough preparation for the instrument of the ego as well as for the other instruments.

Thus, when we observe the human organism primarily with reference to its lowest system, the nutritive system, in its broadest sense, by means of which the substances within the organism are conveyed to all its various members, we may say that these substances must be so regulated that the formation, the external structure, of the man may proceed in a manner which finally renders possible the manifestation of the ego within this human organisation. To this end much is necessary. It is necessary not only that the substances of nutrition be conveyed in the most diverse ways, that they be deposited in all the different parts of the organism; but also that all possible provision be made to determine the outer form of the human organism.

Now, it is important that we should be clear as regards the following: in what we have called the skin are represented indeed, as we have found, all the systems of the human organism, so that we have been able to come even to the lowest system itself, the nutritive system, and to say that everything which in the strictest sense belongs to the physical system of man, considered as the system of nutrition, is poured into the skin. Yet you can easily understand that this skin as such, in spite of the fact that it has all these other systems in it, has one great defect. It does, to be sure, correspond to the form of the human organism; yet, of itself alone, it would not have this form. In spite of the fact that it has all the organ-systems in itself, it would not of itself be capable of giving to man the outline of his form. If that alone were present which is present in the skin, man would collapse, through it alone he could not maintain his upright form. From this we see that not only are there necessary those nutritive processes which make the skin a physical system, but that there must also be possible other manifold nutritive processes which determine the form of the human organism as a whole. At this point, therefore, it will not be difficult to grasp the fact that we must consider those nutritive processes which go on in the cartilage and the bones as such transformed nutritive processes. What sort of processes are they?

When the matter contained in our nutritive substances is conducted to a cartilage or a bone, it is really transported only as physical matter; and what we ultimately find in the cartilage or the bone is nothing else than the transformed nutritive substances. Here, however, they are transformed otherwise than in the skin. We must, therefore, conclude that we have, in the skin, transformed nutritive substances which are deposited in the outermost boundary of our body, following the outline of its form, for the purpose of making us into physical man; yet, on the other hand, through the way in which the nutritive matter is deposited in the bones, we must also see that there we have to do with a nutritive process which rounds out the human form but which, in comparison with that expressed in the skin, is a different transformation of the nutritive process. And now, if we follow the method of observation we used earlier in connection with the nervous system, it will not any longer be hard for us also to understand that this entire nutritive process is our transportation system for the supply of food.

When we look at the skin, which finally shuts man off from the outside world, and when we observe the nutritive substances that bring about that external enclosure which in itself certainly provides man with his surface structure, but which could not of itself produce the human form, it then becomes clear that this sort of nutritive process which is active in the skin is the most recent one in the human organism. In the manner of providing nourishment to the bones we see a process which bears a similar relation to the process of nourishment in the skin to that which we attributed to the process of the formation of the brain, as compared with that of the formation of the spinal cord. Just as the brain appeared to us to be the older organ, and the spinal cord the younger, and the brain appeared to be a metamorphosed spinal cord, so here we have a right to say: if that same thing which we see as the latest, external process of skin-formation is imagined at a maturer stage metamorphosed, we can then recognise this in the firmer, self-solidifying process of nourishment which appears in the building up of the cartilage and the shaping of the bones.

This observation of the human organism might, therefore, point us to the following conception, namely, that what to-day appears before us as the bony system, in which the process of nourishment shows us a quality of inner stability, an earthy quality, so to speak, this bony system actually did, at an earlier stage, also develop in a softer substance; and only later did it become hard and take on the form of the firm bony system. This can be indicated even by external science, which teaches us that certain forms which in later life are quite clearly bones in the human organism are in the early years of childhood still soft, have the quality of cartilage. This means, therefore, that out of a softer, cartilaginous mass the bones are formed, as a result of the depositing of a different sort of nutritive matter from that which is deposited in the mass of cartilage. Here we have, indeed, a transition from a softer to a firmer form, as this process still goes on to-day in the individual human life. If we see, then, in the cartilage an earlier stage of the bone, we may say that the whole depositing of the bony system in the organism appears to us as something representing a last result, as it were, of those processes appearing in the nourishing of the skin. First, the substances must in the simplest way be metamorphosed to the softest possible substance and driven toward the organs of the body; and, when this preparation has taken place, the nutritive process then can go on, and certain parts can be hardened into bony matter, in order that the form of the human organism as a whole may be the final result.

The nature of the bones as we see them, on the other hand, gives us the right to conclude from direct evidence that really we can find no further progress in the nutritive process beyond that in the bony formation, in so far as the human being, up to the present stage of his evolution, is concerned. Whereas we have in the content of the blood the most determinable substance in man, we have in the bony substance, in that which appears before us in the form of the bones, something which is not determinable, which has arrived at a stage of maximum fixity of form. Indeed, if we continue our previous observations, that the blood is man's most easily controlled instrument whereas the nerves are less subject to his influence, we must then consider that in the bony system, which is the foundation of the entire human organization, we have something that has arrived at the ultimate stage in its evolution so far as man of to-day is concerned, something which represents the product of a final metamorphosis. For this reason, moreover, everything which has to do with forming the bony system, in spite of the fact that this must be wholly directed toward the ego, must take place in such a way that the bones may be ultimately the carriers and supporters of an organism like this, in order that the courses of the blood may take such directions as they should, and this in turn in order that in these courses of the blood the human ego may have a proper instrument.

I should like to ask who would not look upon the human organism with the greatest admiration, and say: “I have here before me that which must have gone through the greatest number of transformations, the greatest number of stages, which must have begun with the lowest stage of a process of nutrition and finally have ascended, through countless epochs, as far as the bony system, which at length has been so constructed that it can be the firm bearer, the firm supporter of the ego!” Once we become aware of how the tendency of the ego works even in the forming of the separate bones, so that man can ultimately become an ego-bearer, who of us would not be filled with admiration before this edifice of the human organism and say: “When we observe this human being we find we have two poles, as it were, of physical existence represented in the blood-system, which is the most subject to outside influence, and the bony system, which is in itself the most solid of all, the one which has gone farthest in the state of impermeability to influence.” In this bony system of man the physical organisation has found the final expression of itself, an ultimate conclusion, whereas in the blood-system the human physical organisation has, in a certain sense and at its present stage of existence, made a new beginning.

When we look at our bony system, we can truly say that we revere it as an ultimate conclusion of the human physical organisation. And, when we look at our blood-system, we can say that we see in it a beginning, something which could begin only after all the other systems of the organisation were there first. We may say with regard to the bony system: “Its first beginning must already have been present, as a soft substance, before the glands could be given a place; for the glands had, indeed, to be supported at their appropriate places by the bone-forces; and such was the case likewise with the courses of the nerves and the blood. The bony system is the oldest of the force-systems belonging to the human organism; consequently it is the foundation of our organisation.”

If, therefore, we observe these two extremes in the human organisation, we find we have in the blood-system the most mobile element, the element which is so active within us that to a certain extent it follows every inner stirring of the ego; and in the bony system we have something almost entirely withdrawn from that over which our ego still has any influence, we can no longer reach it with our ego; yet in spite of this, the whole organisation of the ego is contained within its form. Hence, even to purely external observation, the blood-system and the bony system in man are like a beginning and a conclusion in contrast to each other. And, if we thus look at ourselves, having a blood-system which continually obeys all the stirrings of the ego, we must conclude that human life really expresses itself in this active blood. And when we look at our bony system we say: “It really is somewhat isolated; it is that which draws aloof from our human life, and serves it only as a support.” Or, to express it differently: “Our pulsating blood is our life; our bony system is that which has already withdrawn from a direct connection with our life, because of its ancient origin; has already eliminated itself, and continues merely to serve as a support, to give us form.” Whereas in our blood we are alive, we are in truth already dead in our bony system. And I urge you to look upon this expression as a leitmotiv for the lectures which follow, for it will help us to certain important physiological conclusions: “Whereas in our blood we are alive, we are in our bony system, strictly speaking, already dead!” Our bony system is like a scaffolding, the thing in us that is least of all alive, only a scaffolding to support us.

We have seen in man from the first a duality. And here this duality confronts us in yet another form: we have, on the one hand, in our blood that which is the most vitally active, the most living thing in man; and, on the other, we have in our bony system something which draws aloof from this vital activity of ours, something which really already bears death in itself. Moreover it is, in a certain sense, our bony system which is least subordinated in its form to the life of the ego. For this reason the bony system has already arrived, in its form, at a certain final conclusion, even though it still continues to grow, at that stage in a human life when the ego-experiences first begin to stir inwardly. By the time of the change of teeth the bony system has taken its form in the main; it then merely continues to develop by growth those forms which it has produced. In the forming of the new teeth, somewhere about the seventh year, we have the last productive activity of which the bony system is capable. During that very time when we ourselves still remain withdrawn from our inner vital activity, the chief development of our bony system is proceeding.

It is then, moreover, that most mistakes are made in the giving of nutrition, when the bony system is building itself out of the dark foundations and forces of the organism. The way is prepared in these years for bone-diseases such as rickets and the like, if the processes of nourishment are not properly directed. Thus we see that what is withheld from the ego works into our bony system.

It is entirely different in the case of the blood-system, which follows in active response the life of the individual human being and is more dependent than any other system upon the processes of our conscious inner life. It is a fallacy on the part of external science to believe that the nervous system is more susceptible to inner experiences than is the blood-system. I shall here point only to the fact that in a phenomenon such as blushing, where a shifting of the blood takes place, we have the very simplest form of the influencing of the blood-system by way of the ego-experiences; likewise, when we become pale from anxiety and fear, we have transitory expressions of ego-experiences clearly manifested in the instrument of the ego. The way the ego feels in fear or shame is expressed through its instrument, the blood. You can understand, therefore, if such expressions occur even in the merely transitory processes, that the more lasting, habitual experiences of the ego must certainly manifest themselves in the easily excitable element of the blood. There is no passion, no instinct, no emotion, whether we experience these habitually or whether they come to expression in an explosive way, which does not pass over, as inner experience, to the blood as the instrument of the ego, which does not there express itself externally. All the unwholesome elements of the inner life of the ego express themselves primarily in the blood-system. And so, wherever we wish to understand anything that goes on in the blood-system, it is important not merely to inquire as to the nutritive process but even more to look into the soul-processes in so far as they are inner ego-experiences, such as moods, habitual passions, emotions and the like. Only the materialist will direct his attention chiefly to the nutrition in connection with disturbances in the blood-system. For the nourishment of the blood is dependent upon that of the physical system, the glandular system, the nervous system, and the rest; and, as a matter of fact, the nutritive matter is already thoroughly filtered when it comes into the blood. If therefore the blood is to be affected from without, the organism must be already in a seriously diseased state. On the other hand all soul-processes, all processes of the ego, react directly upon what is occurring in the circulation of the blood.

Thus our bony system is the one which most of all draws aloof from the processes of our ego, while our blood-system accommodates itself more than any other to these ego-processes. Indeed this bony system is by nature, we might say, quite independent of the human ego, and yet adapted to its purpose, with the exception of one single portion which, just because it presents an exception to the characteristic of the bony system of not being determinable by the ego, has given cause for all sorts of mischief.

You know that there is such a thing as “Phrenology,” an investigation of the skull. This bone-investigation, in spite of the fact that, from a certain materialistic point of view, it is looked upon as superstition, has gradually, even where loyally fostered, taken on a materialistic colouring in accordance with the general fashion of our time. If we were disposed to characterise it somewhat crudely we might say: Phrenology is carried on in general in such a way that the expression of the inner nature of the ego is sought for in the forms in which the skull is moulded. Thereby certain general principles are set up, that one prominence in the skull signifies this, another that, and so forth. The human qualities are sought for in the light of these prominences, so that phrenology seeks in the bony system of the skull for a kind of plastic expression of the ego. And yet, if it is carried on in this way, even though it seems to look for spiritual expressions in the structure pf the single bones, it is harmful. For anyone who is a truly keen observer knows that no single human skull is like another, and that no one could ever account for this or that by way of generic elevations or depressions. Every separate skull is so different from every other that in each we find different forms.

Now, we have stated that whereas the blood in its vital activity is the system that most of all follows the ego, the bony structure withdraws from it, follows it least of any. And yet, although the bones in general appear to be designed according to type, the skull-bones and also the bones of the face seem in a certain way to correspond to the human ego. Anyone who observes the structure of the skull knows, at the same time, that although man himself is an individual and his skull-structure is also individual, yet this wonderful configuration of the skull has been designed from the beginning in accordance with the particular human individuality and must develop just as the other bones do only in a different form for each man. How does this come about? It comes about for the same reason that underlies the development of the individual qualities of man in general; for the entire life of the individual human being does not run its course only from a birth to a death, but continues throughout many incarnations. Whereas our ego has no influence, therefore, over the skull-structure in our present incarnation, it has developed during the intervening period between the last death and the last birth in accordance with the experiences of the preceding incarnation, the forces which determine the skull-structure; and it is these forces which determine the form of the skull in this incarnation. What the ego was in the preceding incarnation determines the form of the skull in this one; so that in the structure of our skull we have an external plastic expression of the way in which we, every single one of us, again however as individuals, have lived and acted in the preceding incarnation. Whereas all the other bones we have in us express something which is common to man, the skull in its external form expresses that which we were in an earlier incarnation.

Thus the element of the blood, which is the most vitally active of all, can be determined by the ego in this incarnation; our bones, on the other hand, have already entirely withdrawn during this incarnation from the influence of the ego, with the exception of the last remaining case of the skull-bone which also, however, no longer follows the ego in this incarnation, except only as the ego carries over its own evolution from the one incarnation into the next, and so develops the formative forces in the interval between the two that it can manifest in these very bones what was our nature and character in the preceding incarnation. There is no such thing as a general phrenology; but, to sum up, we must judge every man according to what he himself is; and the structure of our skull we must look upon as a work of art. Of course we are compelled to recognise something individual in the skull-structure; yet at the same time an individual something that is an expression of the ego of a preceding incarnation.

Thus we see that even this form of bone-structure, as it appears in the structure of the skull, is withdrawn from the blood to such an extent that the ego has no more influence over it excepting only during the passing between death and a new birth, when the ego receives, after death, still stronger forces with which to overcome and shape for itself those forces that have already completely withdrawn from the vital activity in the man. When, therefore, anyone speaks about the idea of reincarnation and says: “That is something which, speaking generally, is beyond our judgment or reason,” one may answer: “You can, if you will, convince yourself by tangible evidence that the human ego was present in a previous incarnation. When you take hold of a human head you have before you the tangible proof of reincarnation!” And anyone who does not admit this, who sees something paradoxical in the fact that, because of the way in which a thing is formed externally, the way a thing appears in its outward form, one is forced to infer something living that formed this exterior shape out of its own inner life, such a person has no right to deduce in any other case a living something when he comes across a plastic structure. He who cannot admit as strictly logical the conclusion that in the form of our individual skull is expressed the configuration of our ego of preceding incarnations has also no right, if he finds a shell, for example, to conclude from its form that at one time there was a living being in it! And anyone who does so conclude dare not dismiss the logical and absolutely equivalent conclusion that, in the individual plastic formation of a man's cranium, direct proof is given of the influence of an earlier life on the present one.

Thus you see that we have here one of the means by which to throw light by means of physiology upon the idea of reincarnation. We must only give ourselves time. If we are patient and wait, we shall discover where proofs may be procured, and how to procure them. And anyone who might be disposed to deny that there is logic in what has just been stated would have to disown all palaeontology; for it rests on the same inference. Thus we see how, by penetration into the forms of the human organisation, we can trace it back to its spiritual foundations.

We have been able, in the course of these lectures, to form the impression that the different systems of organs and structural parts of the human being participate in the greatest variety of ways in the combination of processes within the organism. We have referred to various facts in this connection, and have found ourselves already compelled to ascribe as a preliminary the activities at work in the different systems of organs to higher, super-sensible members of the human organism. We had to assert, for instance, that in man the circulation of the blood bears an intimate relation to what we call the human ego, so that we had to speak of the blood as an instrument of the human ego; and, further, we have been able to attribute to the nervous system everything which as conscious life comes to meet this ego. We have at the same time shown how one special portion of the nerve-system, the sympathetic nerve-system, has a function to a certain extent contrary to that of the rest of this system, a function which consists in holding back everything that goes on in the depths of man's organisation, everything that is brought about by the activity of the members of the inner cosmic system in man, so that for the normal consciousness it does not at first force its way up to the horizon of the ego. Yesterday, moreover, we attempted to arrive at an approximate understanding of the fact that what has constructed itself into the firm bony scaffolding, withdraws itself most of all from this conscious life of man; yet at the same time we had to emphasise the fact that, even in this solid scaffolding, a quality of Being must be active such as enables man to evolve an organ for the life of his ego, namely, the circulation of the blood.

We may, therefore, draw the conclusion that the significance of the depositing of the bony system in man, as related to his whole organisation, consists in the fact that he can maintain a human form at all; and that everything expressed in the processes which take place in this solid bony system is kept in the subconscious. We have always to do with something of this kind in the human organisation, and we must be especially clear that something within it is shielded from the influences that play a part in our environment in the great world. We have stated, for example, that the seven members of the inner cosmic system, especially that most spiritual one among them, the spleen, restrain the working of the external laws natural to what we take in as nourishment; that they convey the nutritive substances into the organism in such a manner that they are finally filtered into a form which enables them to exert their powers in conformity with laws and a vital activity of their own. This shielding of the inner processes, this transforming and implanting of outside matter, is most visible and obvious in the warmth of the blood. This blood-warmth, which operates within strict limits of temperature, is regulated by conformity to its own inner laws; and, in this conformity it is, in normal life, independent of what takes place in the warmth-processes of the macrocosm, of the great world about us. Here in the stability of the temperature of the blood we have a perfectly obvious fundamental phenomenon. We must point out, therefore, that one of the most essential elements in the inner organisation of man is that something possessed of Being is cut off within set limits from the macrocosm and develops a vital activity of its own.

Now in order to advance still further in our understanding of the human organism, it will be well for us to-day to proceed for a short while from another direction, so as to direct our attention briefly to the conscious life. We know already from the preceding lectures that the conscious life of man employs the instruments of the blood and the nervous system. We have not, however, been able to go into the finer processes; for this investigation is something, we must frankly confess, still liable to startle the outside world which so depends upon present-day customary science. On the other hand, anyone who has a basis of genuine and true occultism will tell you that the tendency of modern science is leading toward a confirmation, in the course of the next few decades, of those things which we are able to bring forward at the present time, though, to be sure, only through occult observations. If I could hold lectures for half a year, instead of this short series, it would be possible out of the findings of modern science alone to bring forward all that is necessary for external proof of what must be only briefly intimated to-day.¹ As it is, however, I must leave very much to the good will of my audience. It is possible, indeed, in the case of everything stated here, to trace our way to external science which is already in a position, provided it begins with facts and not theoretical prejudices, to discover confirmation, on the basis of its present-day findings, for what may be learned in the sphere of occultism.

Now if we are to start out from our conscious life—and I beg you to understand all these discussions as having such a basis and to consider the relation of the more or less conscious soul-life to our organism—we must keep in mind, as indeed is done in ordinary physiology, all that we call our thought-activity in its most comprehensive sense. We do not need in this connection to go into all the niceties of logical and psychological distinctions, but must simply realise that we have here to do with the thought-life of man, and furthermore, within the realm of our soul's life, with the life of feeling and willing.

You will never find any contradiction among those who have a foundation of true occultism, when it is asserted that all processes in our soul-life which take place on the physical plane, and which fall into any one of the categories of our thinking, feeling, or willing life, are accompanied, in a normal state of consciousness, by actual material processes in the organism, whether endued with life or not. We may find, therefore, that for literally everything which takes place in our soul there are corresponding material processes within our organism. And it is precisely this fact that is of the very greatest interest. For it will be for the first time possible in the next few decades, as a result of certain tendencies in contemporary science, for the present still only tendencies, actually to discover these correspondences between soul-processes and physiological processes, and thus to confirm what we have attained through occultism.

For every thought-process there is a corresponding process within our organism; and the same is true in the case of every emotional process, and every process which may be denoted as an “impulse of will.” We might put it in this way: whenever something takes place in our soul-life it produces a wave which repeats itself as far down as the physical organism. Let us take first the process of thinking, what occurs in thought. And here I wish to call attention to the fact that it is best to fix our minds upon a thought process that is either purely mathematical, or one which is equally objective and which leaves our feeling and willing in a certain sense uninfluenced; that is, we shall first consider thought-processes in pure and unalloyed form. What happens in our organism when such thought-processes go on within our soul-life? Every time we fix upon a thought, there takes place in our organism a process which we may compare with another one of a different kind; by this I do not mean that what I am here stating is an analogy, for it is not an analogy, but an actual fact; and, when I say “we may compare” I mean that this comparison is to lead us to the facts of the matter. We may compare it with what takes place when we dissolve any kind of salt in a glass of water heated to a certain temperature, and by allowing this water to cool cause the salt to crystallise, thus bringing about the very opposite of the process of solution. When the salt is entirely dissolved the water is transparent; but when the water has cooled again, and the opposite process takes place in it, the salt separates itself from the water and crystallises again. There comes about a re-formation of the salt, a depositing of salt in the water. And when we observe water which at first was warm and then is brought to a state in which the salt re-crystallises in it, we see that there within the liquid a solid substance takes form. Something solid settles again, a salt-deposit. (As I said before, I have taken it for granted that these statements as to results of occult research will at first startle anyone who accepts quite pedantically, and in a purely conventional way, the facts recorded by external science.)

Now exactly the same process takes place within our organism when we think. This corresponding process of thinking is a salt-depositing process, so to speak, which is caused by a certain activity in our blood and which irritates and reacts upon our nerve-system, a process, that is, which goes on on the “frontiers” between our blood- and nerve-systems. And just as we can look at the water in the glass and observe the formation of the salt as it separates and crystallises, so we may see, when we observe a human being exercising thought, that just such a process, supersensibly perceptible in all its exactness to the clairvoyant eye, actually does take place. Thus we have here brought before our minds the physical correlative of the process of thought.

At this point we may ask what is the nature of the corresponding correlative of feeling? Here we do not have to do with a depositing of solidifying salt, which is the opposite of the process of solution; but we find that within our organism what we may call refined processes take place which are somewhat like that of a fluid becoming semi-solid. Let us imagine, for instance, a fluid which is just solid enough to take on form—about as much form as there is in very thick albumen: a coagulation, that is, or the thickening of a fluid. Whereas, in the case of thought-processes, we have to do with the direct production of a salt-substance which is deposited out of a fluid, in everything pertaining to feeling we have to do with a transition from an inwardly more fluid state to a semi-fluid one. The substance is here transformed into a somewhat more dense condition which, with clairvoyant sight, may be identified as the formation of small flakes, just as if, in a glass containing a fluid, you were to bring about through certain processes the process of a flake-formation, or an inner changing of a fluid substance into tiny semi-liquid drops.

When we go on to what we may call the cherishing of a will-impulse in the soul, we find that the physical correlative of this again is different. It is, moreover, even easier to grasp; in fact, we come here to that aspect in which the physical is considerably more manifest. The physical correlative of what conforms to will-impulse is a sort of warming-process, a process, indeed, which in some way or other produces certain degrees of heightened temperature within the organism, a becoming hot, in a certain sense. Now we may also conclude from this, since this becoming warm is connected with the whole pulsation of our blood, that it is precisely and altogether with this that the impulses of will are connected. It is not very difficult, if one has even only a moderate capacity for true observation, to be able actually to see that such processes, both in the human and also in the animal organisation, can have their physical correlatives.

Thus we may to a certain extent characterise in this way the physical correlatives which accompany the inner soul-processes. What I have just been characterising is obviously not something of a crude physical nature, but rather extraordinarily fine and minute processes, fine to such a degree, indeed, as cannot usually be imagined. With the exception, perhaps, of the processes of warmth, they are of such a nature that, in comparison with all that we know of similar processes in the outside physical world, they manifest an extreme delicacy. They are processes which the organism carries out by means of all its forces, when the ego is active, with the help of the instrument of the blood: from the process of salt-depositing to the coagulation of fluid and the producing of warmth. They are in part of such a nature that we might say the entire organism is affected by them; or, in the case of the thinking process for example that one part of our organisation, the brain or the spinal cord, is chiefly affected by them. Moreover these processes, which are the results of the influence of soul- processes, are distributed in the most varied way possible in the human organism. When we gradually learn to know that these are facts we come to the point where we are compelled to admit that what we call thoughts or feelings are actual forces, which have a real influence within the physical organisation and which express themselves in real effects; so that, as a result of purely occult observation, we are obliged to speak of a real action of the soul upon the human organism. These real effects in the finer processes will, during the next few decades, reveal themselves gradually and ultimately become entirely accessible to the more refined methods of science, even to external investigation. There will then be an end to that opposition which, arising not out of the facts of science but obviously out of certain preconceived theories with reference to these facts, combats such affirmations as may be based upon occult knowledge.

Now we have also pointed out that what we look upon as a conscious activity of the ego is after all only one part of man's being; and that, below the threshold of what enters in this manner within the horizon of our consciousness there are processes which occur in the subconsciousness, and which are held back from our consciousness, by means of the sympathetic nervous system. We have been able to indicate from various points of view that these processes which take place below the level of consciousness have also a certain kind of connection with our ego. We have said, with regard to the most unconscious part of us, our bony system, that it is organised throughout in such a way as to be able to give to the instrument of the conscious ego the basis for an ego. Thus, out of the unconscious, an ego-organisation arises to meet the conscious ego-organisation. Man is thus divided, as it were, into two parts: from one direction the conscious ego-organisation works into the organism, and from the other there flows into man the unconscious ego-organisation. We have seen that the blood-system and the bony system really form a certain antithesis; they act like opposite poles. The blood in its inner activity responds to and follows, as an instrument, the activity of the ego; on the contrary, that part which is organised as the other pole of the ego so that the ego is able to express itself in the blood, namely the bony system, withdraws itself from the quickened inner life of the ego to such an extent that the ego has no consciousness of anything that goes on within this bony system, and the processes here take their course below the surface of what goes on in the actually conscious ego-life. These are processes, therefore, which correspond to our ego-activity yet at the same time are as truly dead as our blood-processes are living; and they are, as a matter of fact, only one portion of those processes which remain unconscious to the ego, and which only gradually rise more and more up into the conscious.

If we study this bony system thoughtfully with regard to its functioning as a whole in the human organism, we cannot but be struck by the fact that it really withdraws itself, as it were, from all conscious life, and that it does this to a greater degree than any of the other systems of organs. If at the same time we go on from this bony system to the other organic systems, for example, to that inner cosmic system of the liver and spleen, the heart and lungs, etc., we are compelled to affirm that the processes within these systems are also to a very high degree withdrawn from our conscious life, although not so completely as those in our bony system. We certainly need to give far less conscious thought and attention to our bony system than to these other organs just mentioned. Some of these latter make known very clearly in their functions, in the case of some people at any rate, that they do reach up into the plane of consciousness. Just as beings which dwell in the waters of the ocean push the waves up to the surface, so does much of what goes on in the heart or the other organs belonging to these systems push its way up into our conscious life. We know how hypochondriacs, to their own injury, naturally, are partly aware of these things even though in an entirely different way, to be sure, from that in which they actually take place below. I do not here refer at all to the fact that a certain degree of illness may be developed in these organs, for then it is, of course, something quite different which causes the person to become conscious of them. I mean that one need not come anywhere near that borderline which a healthy man may designate as “bordering on being ill.” This border-line, unfortunately, gets very much displaced nowadays, to the great injury of humanity. We know, at the same time, that we are protected from becoming conscious of what goes on below by means of the sympathetic nervous system opposing these inner processes.

If we recognise in the bony system something that so builds man up, as regards his form and structure, that the blood-system can be a fitting instrument within it for the ego, we must have a certain understanding, after what has just been stated, of the fact that the other organs, for example, those organs belonging to the inner cosmic system, are in their turn in a certain sense in the process of growing to meet the conscious life of man which is destined to unfold itself as the flowering of man's organisation. We must see clearly that all of these organs, although they are not permeated with fully conscious life, do nevertheless contain that something which is growing toward our soul-life, just as we have seen that our bony system is growing toward the ego-life.

Now we must ask ourselves at this point: to what extent then, does this inner system, which we may designate as an inner cosmic system, grow toward man's conscious soul-life? If, on the one hand, it is clear to us that in the bony system we have our surest support for what brings order into the blood-system, enabling this blood-system to evolve into an instrument of our ego, and its separate parts to occupy the right places, we must admit, on the other hand, that the function of the bony system as the fundamental basis of our organisation is such that it also supports, at the same time, those organs constituting an inner cosmic system, and brings them into the right position. For the same thing in the bony system which is advantageous to the blood-system is also advantageous to these organs. And, if we make even a purely external study of these organs, we shall be especially struck by the fact that we can discover nothing in them, either in their disposition or even in their form, that is so intimately related to the outer limits of man's form as is the bony system.

We have something then, in man, which we may describe by saying that the bony system is the foundation, and whatever is disposed around it can be thus disposed only because it gives man his basic form. If we recognise in man's skin his external boundary, we must affirm that to a great extent this external skin-boundary is already forecast by the whole structure of the bony system, a fact which led to Goethe saying in such impressive words, not merely aesthetically impressive but wonderfully fine also as a scientific expression: “There is nothing in the skin which is not also in the bones.” That is to say, in the external skin-formation, by means of which man's being is expressed in form, is demonstrated what is already there as a model in the bony system. This we cannot say with regard to our inner cosmic system. Yet, on the other hand, the fact that the functioning of this inner cosmic system thrusts itself up into lower levels of consciousness shows us that it has something to do with our astral body; for the astral body is the bearer of consciousness. And the reason why the astral body as the bearer of consciousness does not consciously experience what goes on in this inner cosmic system is that the sympathetic nerve-system holds it back. This we have already mentioned.

We must affirm, therefore, that this inner cosmic system does not appear to be an expression of the subconscious self, that self which is to be found as a model deep down in the foundation of man's being but, rather, that it is so incorporated in us through the universal cosmic process, that its relation to our astral body is similar to that other relation which enables the human form as expressed in the bony system to offer a basis for the most comprehensive form of the ego. We may say, therefore, that in the bony system, but deep down in the unconscious, we have an already highly developed pattern of the human ego; and that in what we call our inner cosmic system we have the pattern of our so-called astral body. It is important to keep this disposition clearly in mind: the bony system serves as a basic model for all that we call our ego—naturally, we mean this in the sense in which we are here discussing it—and the inner cosmic system for what we call our astral body.

Of course this inner cosmic system, in its entire organisation, since it still lies almost wholly below the level of consciousness, does not in any way derive from the conscious soul-life but is implanted in us, through our external organisation, out of the cosmos. This means that something we may call a cosmic astral element merges with us in such a way that it expresses itself in our inner cosmic system. In our bony system, there is merged into our whole organism, here again out of our whole environment, that which the cosmic process is able to bestow upon us. Since this is connected with the entire form of our physical organisation, we must say that this bony system is really, as a result, the basis of our physical body so far as this appears before us within the boundary of its physical form. A macrocosmic element or, to put it plainly, a cosmic system, which has given us the physical form we have as human beings, has been deposited in our bony system; a macrocosmic astral world-system is deposited in our inner cosmic system. The ego, in so far as it appears as a conscious ego, has the blood-system for its instrument; but, in so far as it is forecast as form, as structure, there lies at its foundation a cosmic force-system which presses into the ego-organisation, into the firm ego-formation, and which sets its deepest imprint in our bony system.

Let us grasp the matter clearly from still another point of view. We know that everything which manifests itself in the ego as a thought-element comes to expression through a kind of salt-deposit, if I may use such an expression as this; for you can well understand that ordinary expressions are scarcely to be found for things which are not in the least understood by the ordinary human consciousness, yet are known by clairvoyant consciousness to be a process of salt-deposit of the finest possible kind. In our bony system, in which our ego was modelled beforehand out of the cosmos, and where it has its firmest support so that the whole organism possesses this support, there also we may accordingly expect to find that a “salt-deposit” must have been forecast for us as thinking beings, and here again through the physical process of salt-depositing. In other words we may expect to find salt-deposits in the bony system. And, in actual fact, we do find that the bones consist of phosphate of lime and calcium carbonate, that is, of salt-deposits.

Thus we have, here again, two opposite poles. Man is a thinking being, and it is the thought-process that makes him inwardly a stable being (for, in a certain sense, our thought-system is our inner bony system; we have definite, sharply-outlined thoughts; and though our feelings are more or less indefinite, wavering, and different in each one of us, the thought-systems are inserted in stable form in the feeling system). Now whereas these stable insertions of thought in the conscious life manifest themselves through a sort of animated, mobile process of salt-depositing, that which prepares the way for these in the bony system, giving them the right support, expresses itself in the fact that the macrocosm out of its own formative processes so builds up our bony system that a part of its nature consists of deposited salts. These deposited salts of the bony system are the quiescent element in us: they are the opposite pole to those inner vital activities which are at play in the process of salt-depositing corresponding to the principle of thought. Thus we are made capable of thought through influences acting from two sides upon our organisation: from one side unconsciously through the fact that our bony system is built up within us; from the other side consciously in that we ourselves bring about, after the model of our bone-building process, conscious processes which manifest themselves as of like nature in our organism, and of which we may say that they are inwardly active processes. For the salt that is here formed must again at once be dissolved by sleep, must be got rid of, for otherwise it would induce destructive processes, causing dissolution. Thus we have processes that begin with salt-depositings and then are followed by destructive processes, constituting a sort of reactionary process. In the re-dissolving of the deposits, beneficent sleep acts upon us in the way we need, to the end that we may ever anew develop conscious thought in our fully awake life of day.

If we proceed further, we can understand that all processes which occur within the human organism must take place between these two polar-extremes of salt-formation. It is with the process of salt-formation in the spiritual sense that we have here to do, but this must be conceived as I have to-day explained it. It will not do simply to say: “Thinking is a process of salt-formation”; for people will then imagine what is now popularly conceived by the untrained person as the process of salt-formation; and then it will be easy to say that Spiritual Science maintains absurdities and nonsense. Between these processes, which must be conceived only in the sense we have indicated, there lie all the other processes to which we have called attention. For, if we have salt-formation occurring in a vitally active thought-process, and the opposite pole of this in the salt-formation of our bony system which has to a certain extent come to rest, we can likewise affirm that we have all through our organs the opposite pole of what we may designate as the liquefying process, as inner coagulation, as a flocculent process, albumen-like insertions or something similar. In this case, again, it is not to be found only under the influence of our own feeling life, which takes its course more in the depths of the soul, but from the bone-building process also. In this connection we must say that all processes which are more inward in character (which belong more to the soul and to the central processes of our organism than does the bone-forming process) are involved in the unconscious liquefying processes and thickening of substances which are formed and deposited as we have described. Now the first thing we come upon here is something in which the bone-building process is actually involved, namely, those liquefying processes to be found in what is mingled with the bone-salts as the so-called bone-glue. In these processes the other pole of our bony system participates and thereby meets that which forms the physical correlative of our feeling process. The process connected with the will impulse expresses itself in a warmth process, an inner warming process, so to speak. Processes of combustion, the formation of combinations which we call inner processes of oxidation, occur throughout our entire organisation; and, in so far as these go on below the threshold of consciousness and have nothing to do with the conscious life, will-impulses and the like, they belong to that other part of our organisation which is shut off by the corresponding organs and is susceptible to influence from the subconscious life.

The human being is thus protected inwardly on one side by a part of his organism in which these processes take their course much as they do outwardly in the macrocosm; and on the other side his protection is such that these processes are connected with his soul-processes, and are of a finer kind as has been explained. And so these physiological processes take place in our organism, salt-forming, liquefying, and warmth producing processes, which are the result of our conscious life; and others which take place outside our conscious life, in such a way that they furnish the basis for what prepares itself beforehand in the human organism in order that the processes adapted to the conscious life may take place. Our organism as a whole is thus a texture woven of those processes which we must describe as belonging in part to our conscious life and in part to the unconscious. It is an extraordinarily significant fact that our organism actually does represent a union formed out of two polaric extremes: that processes of coarser nature take place in such a way that they radiate into the organism, as it were, out of the macrocosm; and that, on the other hand, there are processes of a finer sort which arise out of our conscious life.

Now, since the organism is a single whole and all these parts interpenetrate and influence one another, the situation in this organism, as we have it to-day, is such that all these processes likewise play into one another and that we cannot so separate them one from another as to fix definite boundaries between them. One process plays into another. You need consider only the blood, the most vitally active and finest element. In this element you may perceive a stimulator of the salt-forming process, the process of condensation of a fluid, and the warming process. And likewise in all the systems of organs you may perceive how these processes take their course, and how they are stimulated. Let us therefore say, for example, that when we take nutritive substances from without into our digestive canal these nutritive substances have within themselves what I have called “external vital activity.” They pass through what we may call the first stage of filtering by being taken in and digested by the stomach and what pertains to it; and they are then worked up in more special details by the inner cosmic system, and conveyed to where they can also nourish the finest instrument of the organism, the blood. Thus it is the inner cosmic system which undertakes this first filtering of the nutritive substances, which then have to be conveyed to all the other systems. At the same time, since we have recognised a series of stages in the organic systems of man, we may readily conceive that the most delicate system of all, the blood, must take into itself the most completely filtered vital activities of the nutriment, and that, when anything whatever enters into the blood, it contains by that time only the very least possible amount of that inner vital activity that was in the substances when they were taken in by the stomach. When the substances enter into the stomach they still contain a considerable part of their own nature and essential character, their own vital activity. But when once they are in the blood they must have surrendered all this, in so far as they are nutritive substances that have been conducted into the blood, and must have become something new. The blood is thus something which shields inwardly, in the highest degree, all its processes, something that carries on its processes in the greatest measure independently of the outer world. Such is the blood from he one point of view.

But we have already indicated that this blood is like a tablet which is equally exposed on its two sides, exposed, that is, to impressions coming from both directions. It is turned on the one side to the subconscious processes in the deeper regions of the human organism, where the nutritive substances, after going through filtering processes, come up and force their way to the blood. The influence of everything occurring there is diminished by the sympathetic nervous system, so that it does not reach our consciousness. And the other side of the tablet must be turned by the blood to the experiences of the conscious life of the soul. Not only the unconscious activities of the ego, which work up from the bony system, but also the conscious soul-activities, belonging to the other ego, must penetrate into the blood. They must be able to metamorphose themselves by the time they reach the blood, in order that they then may become the expression of what we have about us in our environment as physical-sensible world; for of course that which is woven into the plant world as ether-body, for example, is not visible to normal consciousness. It is the physical world, first of all, that we have around us; and, for the normal consciousness, we ourselves belong only to the physical world. Thus we expose this other side of our “blood-tablet” to the physical-sensible world which then becomes the content of our consciousness. The entire soul-life, as it is stimulated into thought through the impressions of the physical-sensible world and as it flames into feelings and is stirred into impulses of will, must find its instrument in the blood-system in so far as it is conscious ego-life.

And what does this signify? Nothing other than this: that not only are we able to have in our blood that into which the nutritive substances have been changed, when they have been driven upward from the subconscious and filtered to the point where they may lead a life of their own in the blood, shielded from all macrocosmic laws; but also that there must be inscribed on the other side of the tablet of the blood all that occurs in the physical-sensible realm, in the lifeless matter of the physical-sensible world, which is known to us through sense-impressions and appears to our consciousness, at first, in the form of everything that can make impressions. For whatever goes to make up life can become known to the normal consciousness only through combinations of physical sense-impressions. In reality it becomes known only through the next higher super-sensible member, the ether-body. Thus the blood must be capable of being also related to the physical-sensible world just as this immediately surrounds us.

We may, accordingly, expect to find that something is incorporated into the blood which, we might say, does not manifest itself there as if it were due to the influence of processes working up from the lower depths of our nature, but rather as if it were due to the influence of external macrocosmic laws and vital activities. We must have in our blood, therefore, something that is similar in character and action to direct external processes, which take their course outside of us in the same way in which they gradually come later to take their course within our organism. That is, there must be physical, chemical, inorganic processes which take their course within our blood, which are necessary to enable our ego to take part in the physical world. Thus we shall have to seek in the blood for processes wherein substances can act through their physical-sensible character, in accordance with what they are in the macrocosm. And this we do find, as a matter of fact, in that something is presented to us in the red corpuscles which shows us that it is just beginning to live, and is at the point where it passes over to the state of lifelessness. And from the other side of the tablet something is incorporated into the blood which we may call a process easily comparable to an external process of combustion. In short we have in the blood, disposed on the other side, and recognisable even physically, everything that makes man a physical-sensible being through the fact that in the blood he has an instrument for his ego which is living in this physical-sensible world.

Thus, even concerning the organisation of the blood, physical chemical research itself can show us how significant, how illuminating, occult premisses may be for what is presented to direct inquiry into the physiology of man.

From all the foregoing we may say that we have in the human organism, in the first place, processes which are stimulated by the blood-process in so far as this is related to the outside world, and which constitute physical-sensible processes of the outside world; but that we have also other processes which reach as far as the blood-system from the other direction, and are fitted into this system after they have been filtered to the last degree. Only when we clearly perceive this will the blood appear to us the truly important organ it is. We shall see that it has on the one hand turned its entire being, so to speak, toward life in the very lowest and most basic forms that we know round about us, so that it almost becomes a material substance which tends continually to evoke physical chemical processes in order to be able to serve as an instrument for the ego; and on the other hand that it is the most completely shielded of substances, which carries on inner processes that could not be carried on anywhere else, because everything which is pre-requisite to those processes is dependent upon all the other processes that fit themselves into the processes of the blood. In other words the finest and highest processes which are stimulated out of the depths of our organism unite, within the circuit of our blood, with the other, the physical chemical processes, which obey the laws of the external world. In no other substance does the physical-sensible world come into such direct contact, as does the blood, with something of an entirely different character which, for its very existence, presupposes the activity of super-sensible systems of force. In fact, this blood is something in which the lowliest that man can see in processes around him is blended with the loftiest that can take on organic form within his nature.

It will be entirely clear to us, therefore, that in these blood-processes we have before us something which, if it becomes irregular, unrhythmical, must cause irregularities in the greatest measure in our entire organism. And since the blood is the expression of the whole collection of organic processes we shall have to consider carefully, in connection with irregularities of the blood, where abnormal phenomena are manifest, difficult to distinguish individually, to which particular course of processes we must attribute these irregularities. If, for instance, they are to be found in those processes in the blood-channels which follow the pattern of physical chemical processes in the outer world, we shall then have to be quite clear that these irregularities, which we must learn to recognise and not confuse them, must be dealt with from the side of consciousness, in so far as this consciousness is associated with the physical plane. And here a field is opened, a therapeutic field, which we may think of as one by way of which we shall learn to see whether certain irregularities in the circulation of the blood are connected with such processes as we may call in the true sense of the term physical chemical processes. We shall then be able to intervene by means of such external impressions and appropriate control of external sense-impressions as we can evoke in dealing with a human being, in this case such external impressions as can produce physical chemical processes, that is, through everything which we can convey to the physical organism from without. By this we mean not so much the soul and spiritual impressions we can employ, though these are also included, as all those especially which we can effect through a control of the breathing process, through watching over the breathing process and also over the reciprocal action of the human organism and the external world through the skin.

Then again we can also see in the blood-organism the most delicate organic processes working from the other direction. And we shall have to understand, with reference to this blood-organism, that it represents the third stage in the refinement of our nutritive substances. If the blood-organism, because it evokes those delicate processes of salt forming, liquefaction and warmth under the influence of external impressions, is thereby predetermined from without in its physical chemical course by the soul-processes themselves, we may ask how this process as a blood-process is determined from within. We must distinguish the function belonging to the blood by reason of the fact that it is blood; but we must also understand that it needs to be nourished just like any other organ: we must consider it in the same way as any other organ that needs to be nourished. And on the other hand we must also recognise it as the organ standing at the highest stage of organic activity. With regard to this activity we must consider especially what we call the inner support of human life. The blood, which is the opposite extreme, so to speak, from the bony system, must be most of all protected in order that in our thinking it may create, as the instrument of thought in so far as this thought has ego-consciousness—that it may be able to create the process we have called salification. This protection must proceed from the blood itself; therefore the blood must above everything be capable of calling forth, spiritually as it were, a spiritual bony system, must be able itself to cause the process of salt-forming. This is a task to which the blood must so devote itself that it can be independent of the other organs, and need only receive from the other organs the least possible support for its own work. Least of all do the vital activities of the other organs play into this salifying process of the blood, so that in respect to this process of salification, in relation to thought, the blood is what most of all makes the organism an inner one.

And how can we fail to recognise this, since our thought is the most inward thing we have, that in which we most completely interiorise ourselves to our normal consciousness? Whereas in our feelings we are, to our normal consciousness, at the border-line between the inner and the outer, and in our will-impulses we come into such strong contact with the outer world that under ordinary circumstances the human being no longer recognises himself in his will-impulses! Man recognises himself always in his thoughts, but not in his impulses of will. This may be seen from the fact that there has been so much controversy in the world over the question of the freedom or absence of freedom of the human will, as well as over its other qualities. In our thought-system, which has its physical correlative in a process of salification, we have the innermost aspect of what the blood has to accomplish as an instrument of the ego. And since the process of salification must be completely interiorised and protected against the other organs, this capacity of the blood may be most of all hindered by abnormalities within it. When we note that the blood is so hindered that it no longer manifests its capacity in this direction, we must understand that it needs to be stimulated to that sort of activity which has fallen below a certain border-line in its own particular life.

But the other situation may come about, in which the inner vital activity of an organ, let us say, in this case, the organ of the blood, whose inner vital activity is destined to develop a life of its own, passes beyond a certain limit, exercises unduly this life of its own. Among all occurring human irregularities this is by far the most serious, since it has most of all to do with cases of illness. Only very seldom have we to deal with the opposite condition. It is generally the case that certain parts of the inner organisation are too little protected and therefore too intensely stimulated. When the blood shows itself to be most highly stimulated, when it shows an excessive tendency to develop this activity, it then becomes necessary to counteract this. We can remedy this by introducing the appropriate vital activities from without. In other words, we co-operate in the process of salification, of salt-depositing, by the therapeutic introduction of such substances as contribute to bring it about. This leads us at once to see that a kind of system may be introduced into the way in which we have to deal with the irregularities of our organism.

We may now proceed still farther in this direction. When the organs of our inner astral world, our inner cosmic system, spleen, liver, gall-bladder, etc., are excessive in their inner vital activity, as regards the special character of their functions, how can we deal with them? Here we must call to our minds, above all, that these organs are appointed to a work which goes on all the way up to the circulation of the blood; that they have to prepare beforehand, so to speak, the entire organism, have to direct the nutritive substances as far as the blood by taking them over as they are conveyed into the digestive canal and leading them, with their vital activities transformed, to the blood-system. Hence they are the mediators between these two systems. Just as the blood-system manifests the greatest quickening of inner activity, in so far as it constitutes the thought-system, so it takes on an activity that manifests a connection with our life of feeling, in the way we described when we said that in the process of condensation, of inner liquefaction, the blood-system is supported by what radiates from our inner cosmic system. The blood is left almost entirely to itself in so far as it is the instrument of the element of thought in us; it is stimulated by what radiates upward, by that in which the organs of the inner cosmic system participate, through their own action—so that we have here to call attention to an activity which goes even beyond the individual life of the blood and directs us to the individual life of these organs belonging to the inner cosmic system.

Now, when the functions of these organs, liver, gallbladder, kidneys, lungs, and the rest, develop too intense a vital activity, an overflow of life, we are then concerned with the question how we may in similar fashion deal therapeutically with these processes. We have to paralyse the inner vital activities by introducing something which is adapted to maintain the activity, the vitality, of external cosmic life and thus to paralyse the exaggerated inner vitality. Just as we combat the excessive inner vital activities of the blood, paralyse them, so to speak, by introducing salt-containing substances, so we may also reduce the excessive activity of these organs by introducing substances which develop their own inner vital activities and work in opposition to those of the organs concerned.

Thus the question now arises for us, how we can work on these organs and also on the lowest organs, which have a still lower function: on those digestive organs, namely, which have to do with the preliminary preparation of the nutritive substances for the inner cosmic system. In other words, how shall we deal with the individual organic systems when we consider their gradual upbuilding, stage by stage? In tomorrow's lecture we shall answer the question, “How does the picture of a diseased organ appear to us in the light of occult physiology?” And we shall also show how other organs are incorporated, for example, the system of muscles. And we shall bring our reflections to an end by showing that what confronts us in the already evolved organism is quite plainly connected with the becoming organism, with the human germinal life, indeed, it is precisely here that this is so very distinct, if we are able to presuppose occult principles. It will then become clear to us, quite of itself, how the remaining members participate in the work of the human physical organisation.

• 1. See Grundlegendes fur eine Erweiterung der Heilkunst nach geisteswissenschaftlichen Erkenntnissen, 1925 Philosophisch-Anthroposophischer Verlag, Dornach.

It will be my task to-day to blend into a sort of picture, though naturally only a sketchy one, our reflections of the last few days regarding “occult physiology,” in which the endeavour has been made to present (though in part likewise only sketchily) much that pertains to the processes of the human organisation. Through this picture it will be possible for us to have a vision of the quickening life which weaves and works throughout the human organisation. Here again our best procedure will be to start from the most common and everyday side, the reciprocal relationship between the human organisation and the outer world, our earth, in the process of taking in nutritive substances.

It is these substances, as we know, after they have been taken in and have passed through various stages of change, that are conveyed through the most diverse actions of the organs to the separate members of the human organisation, to all the individual systems constituting the physical being of man. Indeed it requires no special effort to see that, fundamentally considered, what the human organism succeeds in doing with the nutritive substances is what really makes the human being into the physical man as he stands before us in the physical world. To be sure, there is a certain difficulty in taking such a view. But anyone who is serious about the principles that have here been applied in our reflections regarding the human being, must say to himself that everything else to be considered in connection with the human organisation, apart from this impressing of nutritive substances into the organism, is, fundamentally viewed, something super-sensible, invisible, the actions of hidden force. If you banish from your mind for a moment everything by way of nutritive substances which fills out the human organism, you retain as a physical organisation even less than a mere physical sack, if I may be permitted this trivial expression; indeed, you retain nothing whatever of a physical character. For even what exists in the form of skin and outer covering exists solely by reason of the fact that nutritive substances have been driven to particular areas of action of super-sensible forces. Cancel then from your reckoning the nutritive substances and what is produced out of them, and you have to conceive the human organism as a system of super-sensible forces working behind it in such a way that these same nutritive substances may be conveyed in all directions.

If you hold to this thought you will see that one thing must be presupposed before any nutritive substance whatever, even the tiniest particle, is taken in; for these substances could not be taken in from the outer world in just any chance form and conveyed into just any being, in order that those processes should occur which do occur in the human organism. It must be, then, that this human organism confronts the very first nutritive substances taken in with an inner co-ordination of forces coming from the spiritual worlds; the organism must really be “man,” as such, in this inner co-ordination of forces. In all occultism, this which first confronts the purely physical matter that is to fill out the human being and which must, therefore, always be conceived supersensibly) is called, in the most comprehensive sense of the expression, “the human form.” If, therefore, you descend to the nethermost boundary of the human organisation, you have to conceive the primary super-sensible human form which, as a force-system born out of the super-sensible worlds, is destined, not like a sack or a physical bag but as something superphysical, super-sensible, to take in what alone renders possible the physical-sensible manifestation of the human being. Only by reason of the fact that this super-sensible form incorporates the nutritive matter does the human organism become a physical-sensible organism, something that our eyes can behold and our hands can grasp. That which thus confronts the external nutritive substances is called “form” in accordance with the law that is operative throughout the whole of nature, an identical law termed the “principle of form.” Even though you descend to the crystal, you find that the substances which enter into it, if they are to become what is manifest as the crystal, must be seized as it were by form-principles, which in this case are the principles of crystallisation. Take for example kitchen salt or sodium chloride: here you have, according to our present-day physics, the physical substances chlorine and sodium, a gas and a mineral. You will readily see that these two substances, prior to their entrance into the entity which lays hold upon them in such a way that, in their chemical union, they appear crystallised into a cube, have nothing in them that can indicate to us such a form-principle. Before they enter into this form-principle they possess nothing in common, but they are seized upon and yoked together by this form-principle and there is then produced this physical body, kitchen salt. They presuppose this, we may say. And so everything which enters into the human organism as nutritive substance presupposes the nethermost of super-sensible being, the super-sensible form.

Now, when the nutritive substances enter into that sphere which, by means of this form-principle, is externally bounded as the human being, they are first taken in by the alimentary canal. When they are thus taken in, from the moment they enter the mouth, one might say, they at once undergo the very first change, indeed the alimentary canal itself causes a metamorphosis. This could not be produced if there were not present as an integral part of the human organism, something which would so metamorphose these nutritive substances—entirely neutral in relation to each other when first taken in and possessing no living inter-relationship—that they are evoked into life. We must think of the metamorphosis of the nutritive substances in their passage through the human alimentary canal as similar to that of plants when they take their nutritive substances from the soil, although, of course, the process is quite different in the human being because it takes place at a different stage. We must picture to ourselves a nutritional stream, taken in by the life-process, or, as we say in occultism, by the ether-body. The moment the nutritive substances enter the human organism they are worked over by the ether-body: that is, the ether-body first provides for their metamorphosis, for their being made a component part of the inner vital activities of the organism. We thus have to look upon this nearest super-sensible member of the human being, the ether-body, as the stimulator of the first process of metamorphosis in the nutritive substances. After these substances are sufficiently metamorphosed to have been taken up into the life-process, we must understand clearly that they are still further worked over—in just that sense, and in the same way, which we have described in the preceding lectures. They must be still further adapted to the human organism, be so worked over that they are able little by little to serve those organs which are the manifestation of the higher super-sensible principles, the astral body and the ego. In short, the work of the higher processes clearly is to send their own peculiar kind of inner vital activity down as far as these metamorphosed nutritive substances as they are when they have come through the oesophagus, the stomach, the intestines, etc. At this point the nutritional stream, in so far as it has been metamorphosed by the alimentary canal alone, is confronted by those seven inner organs already known to us which represent, as we say, the inner cosmic system of man. To sum up, the nutritive substances are taken in, at once metamorphosed in the most diverse ways in the alimentary canal, and then confronted by the liver, kidneys, gall-bladder, spleen, heart, lungs, etc.

If we further understand that these organs are designed through their corresponding force-systems to work further over the nutritive substances, we may say with regard to the meaning of this metamorphosis that, if the nutritional stream were worked over only to the extent to which this occurs in the alimentary canal, man would have to lead a plant existence; for he would not have attained to the formation of such organs in the physical world as could become the instruments of his higher capacities. Thus the seven organs further metamorphose the nutritional stream, and what they do is prevented by the sympathetic nervous system from entering human consciousness. We have consequently, in the sympathetic nervous system and the seven organs, that which confronts the nutritional stream. We have now gone far in penetrating from the outer into the inner side of the human organism. For everything that goes on within there, as the mutual concern of the seven organs, is something that could never go on anywhere else in our terrestrial world; and it can take place here only because this inner world is shut off from the outer world, and because its activity is provided for beforehand by the alimentary canal. Thus in our reflections we are already in the inner human organism.

And here we must take note of something peculiar. Now that we are within this organism we find that it must again inwardly organise and differentiate itself. For the performance of its manifold undertakings it must work as a multiplicity of organs; and it is precisely for these inner functions that a very great deal is needed. Whatever more is now to be attained can be attained only in the following manner; and we shall understand this if we first imagine how it would be if there were only this metamorphosis of the nutritional stream by means of the seven organs, the inner cosmic system, and imagine also that this process were concealed from our consciousness by the sympathetic nervous system. That would mean that man would never be able to unfold into a being possessed of consciousness; he would never have even the dimmest form of the consciousness which he now possesses. For everything occurring there is withheld from him. A connection must be established between this system of organs, built into him, as it were, from without, and everything else in the interior of the human organism. This connection is actually established through the fact that everything provided by the nutritive process as a whole causes the entire form of the organism to be interwoven with what we call tissue, in the broadest sense of the term. Tissue, one of the very simplest forms of organisation, is woven through all the separate members of the human entity. And out of this tissue the most diverse organs form themselves. Certain kinds of tissue, for instance, change themselves in such a way that when they have added to their composition other special kinds of cells they are transformed into muscles. Then again, other kinds change themselves by hardening and, through the appropriation of suitable substances, by depositing bone-cells. Thus, in the single organs which form themselves so as together to fill out the form of the human organism as a whole, we must think of something as underlying this organism: in other words, we must think of tissues woven throughout the body, and active everywhere, bringing forth out of themselves the individual organs.

But this tissue, no matter how much it might grow, and no matter how many individual organs it might put forth out of itself, would still constitute basically nothing more than something plant-like; for the essential nature of the plant lies in the fact that the plant-entity grows, that it produces organs out of itself and so on. Since however in the case of man we are to go beyond the plant nature, an entirely new element must present itself by means of which man becomes capable of adding to what exists in plant-life, that which elevates him above it. That is, man must add consciousness, the simplest form at first, that dim consciousness by which he is aware of his own inner life. So long as a living being does not consciously share in its own inner life, is not in position to mirror its own inner life and thus share it consciously, we cannot say that it has risen above the plant nature. Only through this fact that it does not merely have “life” in itself, but mirrors the flow of its inner life and raises it to conscious life, does any being rise above the plant-like state. It is at first, then, an inner experience, an experience of the inner life-processes.

How does conscious inner life come about?

We have already forecast a conception of this. In the earlier lectures we have shown that conscious inner life comes about through the processes of secretion.¹ For this reason we shall have to look for the basis of inner experience, of that dim experience of consciousness which permeates the inner life-processes, in the processes of secretion. We shall have to presume that everywhere, out of tissues, out of all that underlies the human organisation, processes of secretion are taking place. And these secretory processes again do manifest themselves when we observe the human body externally and see how substances from all parts of the tissue and the organs are continually being taken up by what we call the lymph vessels, which permeate the whole organism as another kind of system parallel to that of the blood. From all regions of the human organism those secretions which mediate that dim inner experience enter this system. Thus we might in abstract thought banish from our minds for the moment the whole system of the blood, in which case indeed we should conceive the tissue as though it possessed no blood-like character. This is quite conceivable, and the fluids in the lower organisms do actually have such an appearance. We should thus have to imagine our blood-process as one higher than that which takes place when secretions from every region of the organism enter into the lymph-channels which, we know, accompany the blood-channels which join them later. In these secretions the human being dimly feels, as it were, his animal existence in the physical body, dimly mirrors his organisation. And, just as everything is held back by the sympathetic nervous system which comes to life through the digestive and nutritional process as far as the seven organs, just so through the reflection of the activity of the sympathetic nervous system, through the association and reciprocal action between this system and the lymph-channels, there is formed for the present-day human being a dim consciousness which is outshone by the clear day-consciousness of the ego. This dim consciousness is, as it were, the obverse side of that consciousness which utilises the sympathetic nervous system as its instrument. It is outshone, as a powerful light outshines a feeble light, by all that lives in our souls under the influence of the ego.

Now let us suppose for a moment that we had evolved the human organisation only to this point, to the formation of the bodily tissues and the first organs that must be formed in order to render possible all these processes; for you can see that certain muscles have to be incorporated to enable such processes to take place as, for example, the secretions into the lymph-channel. A man thus organised would be able to maintain a dim consciousness of his inner life in the physical world, mediated to him by means of his organism; but he would not be able to attain to that ego-consciousness which can be present only when man does not merely have an inner experience of himself as a being, but also opens himself to the external world. It is this opening again outward, so to speak, to which we must here call attention.

We have already spoken indeed of this reopening outward. We have shown how the human being opens himself again to the outside world in his breathing and so forth, in order to enter into direct contact with the physical world. We may now go even further, since we have seen how hard it is to apply ordinary concepts to these things, and say that, so long as we confine ourselves to the inner man, we can go only as far as the alimentary canal; for, inasmuch as the extensions of the seven organs reach into the alimentary canal and show themselves there (the liver empties through the gall-bladder into the duodenum) and show their influence in the digestion, we at once disclose, through the impact of this inner cosmic system on the alimentary canal, something which amounts to the reopening of ourselves to the outer world. Thus it is really an opening outward when the human being declares himself ready to receive nutritive substances from without; and hence we need reckon the inner man only as far as the boundary of the alimentary canal. Then we have also another opening outward through the breathing, on the one hand, and on the other hand through the higher organs which serve the functions of the soul.

Thus we see how man, in so far as he has the stage of the dimly conscious inner life as something basic in him, so to speak, reopens himself in order to form a connection with the external world. Only in this way can man become an ego-being. For it is not merely in the process of sensing the resistance in his own inner world, in his processes of secretion, but through the fact that he opens his inner world and senses the resistance of the outer world, that he is able to evolve his ego-consciousness. Thus it is really wholly in the fact that man reopens himself outward that we find the basis for his physical egohood. At the same time, however, he must also possess the capacity to develop the organ of this egohood in the most manifold ways. And we have seen how the organ for the ego here fits itself into the circulatory course of the blood, which in fact passes through all these inner organs, in order to serve throughout the whole human organisation as an instrument for the egohood. Just as the egohood permeates soul and spirit in the whole man, so does the circulatory course of the blood physically permeate his entire organisation. And this organisation thereby evolves these two sides, so to speak: the inner human being in the seven organs, the sympathetic nervous system, the system of tissues, and predominantly in the digestive apparatus, etc.; and the other side that again opens outward, coming into connection with the outer world, a real “circulation” in the highest sense of the word.

We must now give still further attention to the individual phases of this circulation. And what concerns us here, first of all, is to follow once more the nutritional process, the taking in of nutritive substances which become a living stream in the human organism through the fact that they are taken up by the ether-body, or, rather, are grasped by the force of the ether-body. The inner cosmic system, consisting of the seven organs, then meets these substances; and it does this because, as we have seen, the human being would otherwise not rise above a plant-existence. The higher stage of man's being requires that these seven organs should go out to meet the digestive process. So that it really is what comes to life in the astral nature of man that works upon the nutritional stream: this stream comes from without, and that which constitutes the inner nature of man goes forth to meet and work upon it. First of all the ether-body meets the nutritional stream, and metamorphoses its substances all along the course of the digestive system; then the astral system goes forth to meet them, metamorphoses them still further, and makes them so much a part of the inner world that they more and more become inner vital activities. And now, since everything in the human organism constitutes a co-operative unity, the entire nutritional stream must in addition be taken hold of by the forces of the ego, by the blood itself. That is, the instrument of the ego must extend its activity down to where the nutritional stream is taken up. Does the blood do this? Can we verify that which occult perception compels us to affirm?

Yes, we can; for the blood is actually driven down into the organs of nutrition, just as it is into all other organs. In this nutritional organisation, as elsewhere, it goes through the entire process whereby it is capable of being the instrument of man's ego in the physical world. We know that the blood, as the instrument of the ego, passes through the transition from red blood to blue, so that here, too, it meets with resistance. Thus the ego, by means of its instrument, reaches down even to the nutritive processes, since this transformed blood, in order to be the expression of the ego, works upon almost the first beginnings of the nutritive process. This occurs through the fact that the system of veins discharges into the liver, and that out of this modified blood the gall is prepared, which then comes into direct contact with the nutritional system.

We thus have a wonderful union of the two extremes of the human organisation. The nutritional stream, on the one hand, is taken into the digestive tract and this represents the external matter which enters our physical organisation. The ego, on the other hand, together with its instrument the blood, constitutes the noblest endowment which man possesses in the terrestrial world. It establishes a direct connection with the nutritional stream in that it comes to the very end of the blood-process, and there, at the end of the blood-process, in turn brings about the preparation of something which, we may say, directly confronts the nutritional stream. In other words, the gall is prepared by the instrument of the ego, the blood, through the roundabout way of the liver; and in the gall the ego opposes the nutritional stream. For at this point the activity of the blood has come to an end and, before acting upon the nutritional stream, it is able to prepare the gall.

Here we see the one working downward, as it were, into the other. And whoever has the will to do so can see in this very fact something that leads in a wonderful way into many, many mysteries of the human organisation. He can follow these processes still further, including abnormal processes, which take their course, for example, in a reverse discharge, a congesting and reverse discharging of the gall into the blood. He might thus quite easily form an opinion about “jaundice,” for example, its cause and effect; but it would take us too far afield if we were also to discuss such things as this to-day.

Thus we see how the seven organs reach as an actual fact down into the action of the ether-body and have taken into themselves, from above, the influence of the ego. In the gall we have the ego setting itself in direct opposition to the nutritional stream. If, now, the gall is to meet this nutritional stream, which has already become a living stream in the alimentary canal, it must itself likewise meet it as a living substance; otherwise a truly continuous process could not come about. The gall must be enabled, as a living substance, to meet the nutritional stream. This occurs through the fact that the very organ in which this gall is formed is one of the seven organs of the inner cosmic system, which vitalise the inner life of man in order that it may as inner life meet the outer life. We pass from the gall-bladder back into the liver itself, and the liver in turn we find connected with the spleen.

When we more closely observe the liver, the gallbladder, the spleen (this follows quite naturally out of our previous reflections, for the spleen has been fairly accurately considered in this connection and used as an example) we must affirm that it is these organs that directly confront the nutritional stream and so metamorphose it that it is capable of advancing to the higher stages of the human organisation, and also of caring for those organs which open themselves to the external world. Those which open outward are the heart (through the lungs) and, of course, the alimentary canal itself; but, most of all, the organs in the head which serve as the organs of the senses.

We must now understand clearly that all inner perception, all inner experience, must have something to do with processes of excretion. It is for this reason that we have given special consideration also to these excretory processes. Liver, gall-bladder, and spleen have nothing to do directly with processes of excretion; the fact that they secrete their own nutritive substances is a different matter; but they do not excrete anything with respect to the organisation as a whole. They signify the ascending life, which turns away from a mere being alive and directs itself to the organisation of consciousness. Since, however, the heart is added as a fourth member to this organisation, and since the heart opens itself to the outer world, man attains through this opening outward his ego-consciousness. Yet he would not be in a position to experience this ego otherwise than merely as something which faces the outer world. He would not be able to bring this outward-looking ego into relationship with what he experiences by means of his inner organs as a dim corporeal life within him. He must add to the secretional processes of the inner organisation still another process which makes possible for him an experiencing of his inner being by that ego which has its instrument in the blood. At first man realises his inner life only in a dim consciousness and we have seen how this manifests itself in the organisation through the fact that the processes of excretion are taken up by the lymph-ducts from the liver, the gall-bladder, and the spleen. In the same way something must be excreted from the blood, if man is to rise to a really conscious ego. And it is in this excretion that he becomes aware that, as an inner entity, he confronts the outer world. If man did not have these inner excretional processes he would, in his realisation of inner life, so face the outer world that he would inwardly lose himself; or he would at most realise dim inner processes but would not know what is outside him, he would not know that what is inhaling the air and taking in nutritive substances is the same as the being which is working in him. It is possible for him to know this through the fact that he excretes the modified blood through the lungs, in the form of carbonic acid gas; and that, through the kidneys, he excretes the metamorphosed substances which must be removed from the blood in order that he may have an inner perception of his own entity.

Thus we find our assertion justified, that the organs which represent an ascending process, the liver, the gallbladder, the spleen, as well as those representing in a certain sense a descending process, the lungs and the kidneys (although the lungs, in that they open themselves to the outer world, are at the same time the means of an ascending process; the individual organs are constantly in living reciprocal relationship, and we must not establish any hard and fast classification) we see how all these seven members of the inner human cosmic system are bound up with man's realisation of inner life, and with his opening of himself to the outer world. These seven members completely metamorphose, on the one hand, the vital activities peculiar to the nutritive substances into inner vital activities; and with these metamorphosed substances they provide for the human organism. They make it possible for man to reopen himself to the outer world. But, in addition to this, they bring it about that what he evolves as an excessively strong inner vital activity, which would not harmonise with the vital activity that penetrates into him from without, is brought into balance with this outer vital activity by being thrown off through the excretional processes of the lungs and the kidneys. So that we have before us the complete and regular control of the inner vital activities in this inner cosmic system of man. And in fact this entire relationship manifests itself in such a way that the best picture occultism can give us is to conceive the heart standing as the sun, at the centre, and caring for the three bodies of the inner cosmic system which signify the upward rising and upward bearing process. In the same way in which the sun is related to Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars in the planetary system, so is the inner sun, the heart, related to Saturn, spleen; Jupiter, liver; and gall-bladder, Mars, in the human organism. I should have to speak, not for weeks but for months, if I were to explain all the reasons why the relationship of the sun to the outer planets of our planetary system may really be declared to be parallel, for an exact and intimate occult observation, to the relationship which the heart sustains in the human organism to the inner cosmic system, i.e., to the liver, the gall-bladder, and the spleen. For it is an absolute fact that the relationship existing in the outer cosmos has been so adopted into the organism that what goes on in the great world or macrocosm, in our solar system, is mirrored in the reciprocal action among these organs. And those processes which go on between the sun and the inner planets, working inwards from the sun to our earth, are again reflected in the relationship of the heart-sun to the lungs as Mercury, and to the kidneys as Venus. Thus we have in this inner human cosmic system something which mirrors the external cosmic system.

We have already indicated, how, when we delve clairvoyantly into our own inner organism we can perceive this interior of ours; and that we then cease to perceive our inner organs in the way they manifest themselves merely to the external observation of the physical eye. We then go beyond the fantastic picture of our organs conceived by external anatomy, for we rise to the observation of the real form of these organs when we bear in mind that they are systems of forces. External anatomy cannot possibly establish what these organs really are, for it sees only the nutritive matter stuffed into them. And no one can doubt, when he goes more deeply into the matter, that external anatomy sees only the stuffed-in nutritive substances. That which lies at the basis of these organs as force-systems can be seen only by clairvoyant observation. And what we see justifies our nomenclature, because we discover the outer cosmic system duplicated in our inner cosmic system.

We stated yesterday that the organism may develop too strong an inner vital activity. Each separate organ may develop too strong an inner vital activity. This is then manifested in the irregularity with which the organism acts. I indicated yesterday that when, by reason of this excessive inner vital activity, there appears in the inner organs a self-willed life of their own, it is important that something should be set in opposition which will subdue these inner vital activities. That is, when the inner organs transfer too vigorously the external vital activities of the nutritional substances, transform them too much, when they provide an inner product too strongly metamorphosed, we must then set in opposition to them from without something which will dam up, as it were, will subdue the inner vital activities.

How can this be brought about? By introducing into the organism something from the external environment which possesses a vital activity contrary to those of the organs and is capable of combating them. That is, we must endeavour to discover those external vital activities which correspond to the peculiar vital activities of these organs. To contemporary man, who sometimes comes upon such things in the mangled writings of the Middle Ages yet cannot look upon them as anything but a jumble of superstition, it sounds quite amazing when he hears that for thousands of years occult science has not only examined, profoundly and thoroughly, the correspondence between the vital activities of these organs of the inner organic system, and certain external substances possessing the opposite vital activities; but that also, through countless observations made with the clairvoyant eye, there has resulted the knowledge, for example, that when the inner “Jupiter” oversteps its limit it can be checked if confronted with that external vital activity manifest in the metallic substance tin. The inner vital activity of the gall-bladder, we combat by what is manifest in the metallic substance iron. And we ought not really to be surprised to learn that the gallbladder is the very organ to be combated by iron. For iron is that metal which we require particularly in our blood, and which therefore belongs to the instrument of the ego; and we have seen that in the gall-bladder we have the very organ which brings about the connection of the ego with the densest matter deposited in the human being through the digestive process. In the same way the spleen (Saturn) has its correlative in lead; the heart (Sun) in gold; Mercury has its own name: that is, the metal mercury (or quicksilver) corresponds with the lungs; and the metal copper corresponds with the kidneys.

Now, when we introduce into the organism such vital activities as exist in these metals, in order to combat the excessive vital activities of the inner organism, we must realise that everything in the organism is more or less interrelated with everything else; and indeed that the individual organ-systems were formed in a mutual parallelism one with the other. For it is not as if there first existed in a finished state what we have here merely sketched in our drawing, i.e., what we may call the headless man; but rather the brain and the spinal cord form themselves simultaneously with the other organs, so that the blood-process extending downward extends also upward. And, just as we have pointed out that there are these two circulatory courses of the blood, so we have similarly an upward action of the lymph-system toward the head, and have, therefore, a dim consciousness apportioned also to the upper parts of the organism. This is true because of the fact that what is incorporated above in the upper blood-stream corresponds in a certain way with what we have described as the incorporated lower blood-stream.

From this we now see that certain of these metals to be found on the earth have their respective kinship with the organs or members which we find embedded in the upper blood-organisation. That which, in the lungs for example, opens itself upward into the larynx, thus becoming an organ of the higher human organisation, and which otherwise presses down into the gall-bladder as dim life, acts correspondingly as a Mars- or iron-system in the larynx which contains the upper part of the lungs. These things are, of course, hard to differentiate; but I should like, nevertheless, to point out some of them. In the same way the upper part of our head containing the brain-formation corresponds, as regards its position in the upper course of the blood, to the position of Jupiter-liver (tin) in the lower course of the blood; so that we have here a correspondence between the fore part of the head, in the upper course of the blood, and tin, or Jupiter; and, in the same way, between the back of the head and lead, or Saturn. And so it is with the organs which may be looked upon as embedded in the upper cosmic system.

We have been able in this way to extend our reflections to that which is incorporated in the circulatory course of man's blood, as having a connection with this, but also as determining it as the organisation of the seven members of the inner cosmic system. And we have been able to take into consideration the connection with the external world as regards both the normal and the abnormal condition of life. In this correspondence between the metals and the inner organs we have a most interesting fact. And if all that which is contained in manifold form in the statements to be found in our books dealing with therapy is ever assembled and compared, not in chaotic manner but systematically, this picture that we have formed will one day, quite of itself, burst into view as a result of the external facts. We can always affirm, when we work creatively in the right way with the help of occult sources, that we can quietly bide our time, that the facts themselves will one day confirm all this for mankind!

When we introduce into the organism the substances of these principal metals—and they are all metals that pass over at a certain temperature into a sort of vapour in which there is active something resembling little smoke-like globules—the particular quality of the respective metals acts upon what is in these seven organs. And just as the metallic element acts upon these systems of organs, so anything in the nature of a salt acts upon the blood-system. Only, we must introduce the salty substance into the blood in such a way that it enters from outside, through the air, through air with a saline content, or through a salt bath; or again we can introduce from another direction, through the digestive process, what constitutes salt or builds up salt, so that we are in a position to bring about from two directions this process which results in the formation and depositing of salt.

When you recall what I explained yesterday as the physical effects of the inner processes of soul and spirit, you will understand that everything which meets the processes brought about by these metals as metals, processes which embed themselves in these systems, forming tiny globules, as it were, is what I designated yesterday as the physical effect of the feeling-processes.

Thus the dim feeling-processes and the higher feeling-processes are bound up with that which constitutes inner liquefying processes, on the one hand, when it develops the right inner vital activity, but which, on the other side, can be checked if something is introduced from outside, if the appropriate substances which have their external counter-activities embed themselves in these systems from outside.

When, by reason of excessive digestive activity occurring where the nutritional stream is seized by the ether-body, this body develops a too insistent inner vital activity of its own so that it contradicts that from without—when this process of a self-willed inner vital activity gets the upper hand, we can work in opposition to it through the process of introducing salt in so far as salt works as salt. In the case of an intensified inner vital activity of those very processes which go on where the external nutritional substances are seized upon by the ether-body, signifying too intense a taking up, a sucking up of salt out of everything, the process is combated through the external vital activity of salt.

Then we also have processes which occur outside us as processes of combustion or oxydation, when something or other combines with the oxygen in the air. When substances which readily combine with the oxygen in the air are taken into the organism, they radiate their inner activity most extensively throughout the inner organism. Whereas salts act only when introduced into the organism through the digestion or from without into the blood, and hence can get only a limited access to the inner organism; and whereas we can, with metals, work in as far as the inner cosmic system we have, in the external vital activities of the substances that readily unite with the oxygen of the air, something which radiates through the whole organism, even into the blood: something which is capable of radiating through all the systems of organs. We shall thus find it comprehensible that through such processes as develop too strong an inner vital activity in warmth, which is the outward manifestation of the development of the will, we find ourselves inwardly aroused, as it were, in our entire organism. Such is not the case if we direct our attention to those other processes which constitute the organic processes of thought. We feel there that the actions which, in yesterday's lecture, we connected with salt can take place only in certain organs. From this we see how complicated an apparatus the human organism is, and, at the same time, how complicated is its relation to the external world. Moreover, we see that we have now for the first time set the human organisation with its inner vital activities over against a mineral, inorganic Nature which has not yet been given life, into relation with what salts are, what the particular quality of a vaporising metal is, and what readily combustible substances are.

A polarity of the same sort exists between the human organism and what constitutes the vitally active forces in the external plant world. When we take up a plant into us in such a way that it simply gives off some particular substance, which is taken up by us as lifeless matter and acts as such in us, the real plant-nature may then be left out of account in the human being. On the other hand, the plant element may also be taken up by the human organism in such a way that it goes on working in its own peculiar character as plant, that is, the external vital activity of the plant continues to work as the same sort of external vital activity which works in the plant. In this case that process cannot take effect which otherwise always goes on at the border line between the physical nutritional substances and the ether-body. For the ether-body is akin to the plant; and the plant is “plant” precisely by reason of the fact that it has an ether-body. The plant-nature is simply caught up at the point where the nutritional stream is seized upon by the ether-body, so that whatever of the plant-nature works into the human organism cannot be taken into account so long as it is in the alimentary canal, but only in those organs involved in the processes to which the ether-body already has its relationship and into which the astral nature of man also works. For this reason the external plant-activity begins its work only when it reaches the inner cosmic system and the sympathetic nervous system and, in so far as it is involved with these, also the lymph-system. The plant-nature no longer extends to the point where the human being opens himself, through the blood, to the outer world. The plant-element is fitted to the central, more inward part of the human being; so that whatever may be sought in the plant-nature in the way of vital activities, capable of combating the excessively strong inner vital activities of the functions of our organism, cannot have any effect at all upon whatever belongs to the material substance in the seven organs of our inner cosmic system and in the corresponding organs of the head, and which nourishes itself in these organs; it can act only upon whatever pertains to the activities, the functions of these organs. When these functions are disturbed, when they act abnormally, without our being able to say that they are over-nourished or under-nourished, then the vital activity of the plant-nature comes into question. Hence, when an excessive activity of the organs is manifest, we can combat this with something taken out of plant-nature but capable of working in only as far as the seven organs, as far as the boundary of the lymph-system and the blood-system.

It is impossible to go further into the combating of irregularities in the human organism, not so much because we should in any case have insufficient time as because it is better for the Anthroposophist to hold aloof from everything which is at present still involved in partisan strife. What we have thus far set forth is not involved in conflicts where there is far too much fanaticism. For at most people can take it for pure nonsense, in which case it will share the same fate which for many is to be that of Anthroposophy in general: namely, that it has no worth whatever. Anthroposophy would have to keep silent if it wished not to speak about those things which appear nonsensical to people who are not willing at the present time to accept it. But, if it were to proceed further and investigate the effect of the animal element upon the human organism, we should very quickly become involved in strife.

One thing, however, you will have perceived: that this human organism is a complicated system of individual organs and instruments which stand at various stages of evolution, these stages differing very greatly among themselves, and which are connected in the greatest possible variety of ways with the organism as a whole. What it is that works into this physical organisation of man, which we see with our eyes and grasp with our hands, in order that the nutritive substances may organise themselves suitably, may be ordered according to the various organs, this cannot be seen with the external eye but it is disclosed to the spiritual eye of the seer. Everything that has displayed itself before us in the human organism we must look upon as one single system, wherein appears both what is young and what is old. We have brought out this fact in individual examples, for instance, in the fact that the brain shows itself as an older organ and the spinal cord as a younger one; and in the fact that the brain was once a spinal cord and has transformed itself out of that. Then, too, we have seen that our complicated digestive system forms, together with the blood-system, one single system which is old and has been metamorphosed; whereas in the lymph-system which cannot take up substances from without but can as yet open only inwards to the material supplied by the inner tissue, we have a younger system in comparison with the combined digestive and blood-system, just as we have in the spinal cord an organ that is younger than the brain. And this, again, is a very important viewpoint. When we look at our lymph-system and all that goes with it we have before us something which, if it were not embedded there as a lymph-system, and did not remain shut off but opened itself to the more advanced stage of its evolutionary process, would progress to a digestive system and blood-system as the spinal cord evolved to the brain. Thus the digestive-blood-system presents to us a lymph-system that has been metamorphosed out of the substances and tissues of the body, substances and tissues which, as we know, have to be changed in the body before they can take on the form which they have inside the man; whereas the lymph-system, as we have it, is employed to take up the substances that are produced inside. In the lymph-system and what pertains to it, we have a simpler digestive system and a simpler system for mediating consciousness. On the other hand, a system more complicated than the lymph-system, opening not only to the inner but also to the outer world, is what we have in the metamorphosed lymph-system, the digestive and glandular systems.

Everything that appears later, during the course of evolution of any living creature, is laid down beforehand in the germinal plan. What I have here explained to you as the complicated human organisation exists potentially in the germinal plan of the human being as it builds itself up, when once it is produced through the process of impregnation. If we retrace the course, so to speak, from this fully-formed man to the germinal plan, we are able to discover that inside this same life-seed or germ complicated systems of organs in miniature, scarcely visible at first, even to microscopic examination, are present, as the very first plan; present in such a way indeed, that the organs even at that time already reveal just how they are related to one another.

Once we observe that the outermost enclosure of the human being is the boundary of the skin which leads us on to the sense-organs embedded therein, and observe also how these sense-organs are organised so as to extend inward to the nervous system, we shall realise that everything present in the outermost boundary of man must have been transformed out of something else, for this is already very complicated in itself. (The brain, for instance, belongs to this system; to imagine a brain which is not first prepared through other organs, and transformed out of these, is impossible.) We must think therefore of the outer sheath of the human being as it appears to-day, as the product of a transformation from those organs which are its groundwork, as having passed through a transformation similar to that of the brain out of the spinal cord, and to the digestive-blood-system with all its accessories, out of the lymph-system.

Now, it is precisely in everything which we have observed as the brain, that we have a transformed spinal cord system. But here again this spinal cord system shows itself to us at the present time in such a way that we can see that it is an organ in a descending evolution, so to speak. In those organs, accordingly, which represent earlier stages, we have organ-systems formed later and at the same time in a descending evolution. This we must apply also to the lymph-system. In that which confronts us in the human being as the lower man, thought of spatially, we have, in the antithesis, lymph-system and digestive-blood-system, something which transforms the lymph-system into the digestive-blood-system. We must understand clearly, to be sure, that the blood-system itself is such a complicated inward-coursing system that it reveals, even in its very configuration, the fact that it is itself the product of a transformation of a still earlier state, the product of a twofold metamorphosis. On the other hand, that which reveals to us that it has gone through its transformation only once, an opening outward, is the digestive canal. We may therefore say that, if we were to move the digestive canal more inward, we should keep this whole organic system shut up inside, as far as the activity at present characteristic of the lymph-system through which only that is taken up from the inner product which is secreted by the tissues.

Thus in the outer boundary of man, the skin-system, we have the metamorphosis of another system; and in the digestive system likewise we can see the transformation of another organ-system out of which it has developed, and which is itself to-day in a descending process of evolution. According to the whole nature of the organ-systems as they present themselves to us we have to seek, therefore, for their first or primal plan in such a way that we feel everything we see as the germinal design containing the skin- and the sense-organs and nervous system—to be the redisposition of another system which is to-day inside the organism and in a descending evolution, just as the digestive system in its design is a redisposition of another inner system which is now in a descending evolution. Thus we have, at the present time, both an ascending and a descending evolution already indicated in the “life-seed” of man.

And so we may trace the whole human organism back to a scheme or plan where everything in the separate organs is prepared in the germ. And, in fact, we do see in the human germ which comes into existence through the process of impregnation that in the four superimposed germ-layers (the outer germ-layer or exoderm, the inner germ-layer or entoderm, and the outer and inner middle layers or mesoderma) the four principal systems of the human organism are actually already present, pre-modelled in this germinal plan. Furthermore, in accordance with our evolution we shall have to consider the outer germ-layer, which, in contemporary anatomy or physiology is called the skin-sense layer, as the product of a metamorphosis which reveals to us its original plan in the outer middle layer. In the outer mesoderm, that is, we have as an embryonic plan in a descending evolution, what appears at a higher stage in the skin-sense-layer; and in the inner middle layer we have in a younger formation and in a downward evolution, what appears in the inner layer or entoderm as the intestinal glandular-layer. When we observe the human germ in its evolution we have in the two middle germ-layers, in what external physiology calls the mesoderma, the original plan of the human being still recognisable; whereas the two external germ-layers, exoderm and entoderm, are layers which have undergone a metamorphosis. The two middle layers reveal to us the original state, whereas the two others reveal higher evolutionary stages of this state. And it is only an illusion when external microscopic research does not accurately state the facts of the case.

Now we know that this germinal plan, this life-seed, is formed through the flowing together of two tendencies, the feminine and the masculine, and that the complete germ can only come into being through the living interaction of the two. In both these germinal tendencies, accordingly, there must be included all the processes which, through interaction, form the one single embryonic plan for the complete human organisation.

What does occultism reveal to us regarding the interaction of the male and the female germs?

It shows us that the female organism, under the conditions of our age, is capable of producing only such a human germ as would be unable, if it were to follow a completely isolated evolution, to develop what we call in its broadest sense the “form-principle.” That which leads, therefore, to the final stage of the bony system, thus giving complete firmness to the human being, and which also brings about the final unfolding into a skin-and-sense-system as we have it to-day, could not be supplied through the female contribution. The contribution of the woman is such as to justify one in saying: “What it would bring forth would be too good for this earthly world as it is to-day; for there are not present in our external world all the processes which could serve such an organism, if it were to evolve itself in accordance with the tendency of the woman's contribution to the whole human organism.” It should not be necessary for the human organism derived from the woman to proceed so far as to be of this earth, as we may say, which is the case in the dense deposit of the bony system; it should not be forced to unfold itself in a way that enables it to look out into the present physical world through the senses. On the contrary, it should be enabled to have its inner support in softer material, as it were, than our solid bony system. It ought, furthermore, to be free not to open its eyes so wide toward the outside world, or to open its other senses outward, to the same degree as is the case with the human being of to-day, but to remain with its perceptions more enclosed in its inner life. This represents the female portion of the common human organism: a germinal plan which tends to shoot forward beyond the limit of what is possible in our present earth existence. And this simply because, in the physical earth-conditions of to-day, we have not the requirements essential to so refined an organism, one so little adapted to be of this earth, in the way the bony system is, or to unfold itself outward. Such an organism, under natural conditions, is from the very beginning predestined to death. That is to say: by reason of that which the woman's organism is of itself unable to imprint upon the human embryo, this embryo is from the beginning doomed to death.

The other portion which is added to the germinal plan is the male element, and this is in exactly the reversed situation. If the male germ alone were to bring forth the human being, the progress of that organisation which lives its life in an opening of itself outward, as is the case in the skin-sense-system and in the powerful development of what leads to the solidification of the bony system, would overshoot the mark in the opposite direction. The male organisation would be just as little able as the female to create of itself an embryo capable of living. Of itself alone it would just as certainly create a dead embryo as would the female organisation because that which it could create, which it could contribute to the germ-plan, would be so organised, if it were to unfold its forces of itself, that it would have to vanish in view of the conditions actually existing on the earth at the present time; for it would unfold forces which are simply too powerful for such conditions, so that it could not exist as organic life within the confines of this world. That is to say, the male element of the germ does not really come into existence at all; it can act only through co-operation with the female germ. That which stimulates the female germ-plan too intensely, carrying it too far beyond what is possible on the earth, leads the male germ-plan too far downward, below what is possible on the earth. Whatever is destined to death in this female germ, through the excess of those forces which, if they could find any approach at all to the sense-world, would ultimately lead to a breaking up, a failure to grow together with the external world, this balances itself with the male germ through the process of impregnation. The forces that are compressed into the male germ-plan, if these were ever to accomplish their growth alone, would lead the whole thing immeasurably below the earthly, would bring the human organisation to a far greater terrestrialising of the bony system, and to an entirely different unfolding of the senses and taking up of the outer world, than is the case to-day. These two organic tendencies must in their very first beginning blend and come together; for, under earthly conditions, either one of them alone is from the first predestined to death, and only the living interaction of what otherwise gushes over the limits in both directions gives us that human embryo which alone is suited to earthly life.

Thus we see that we have been able, although only in a sketchy way, to comprehend things as far as this point, where the human being is capable of bringing forth his kind. We could go much further by throwing light also upon all the details of the embryonic process. And the more profoundly we should illuminate these, the more we should see that the most minute as well as the most glaring facts, including what has been said here regarding the super-sensible force-systems in the germinal plans, verify themselves in the outward expression of these force-systems, in what the human being develops in order that his race may live over all the earth so long as it is going through its present processes.

We have seen at the same time, however, that the earth gives us its densest terrestrialising process, so to speak, in what we call the tendency to the bony system, and its most vitally active process in what we call the human blood-system. And it need be added only very briefly that everything which goes on on the earth in the external physical human organism, in so far as this is visible, forces its way up as it were, into those processes which take place in the blood. And these processes are warmth processes. We have, therefore, in these processes the direct expression of the activity of the blood as the instrument of the ego, of the highest level, that is, of the human organism. Below this are the other processes; uppermost is the warming process, and in this there takes hold, directly, the activity of our soul and our ego. It is for this reason that we feel, with regard to so many activities of the soul, what we may call “the transmutation of our soul-activities into a kindling of inner warmth,” and this may extend its effects even to a becoming physically warm in the process of the blood. Thus we see how, from out the soul and spirit by way of the warmth-process, there takes hold down into the organic, into the physiological, what is directed from above. We might show, in connection with many other facts of the external world, how the psychic-spiritual comes into contact in the warmth-process with the physiological, with what occurs behind the physiological. In the warming process, accordingly, we have a transformation of the organic systems in their activities. We find the most manifold transformations in the complicated apparatus of soul and spirit in man; but this physical human organism reaches up as far as the warmth process.

Does this transformation cease at this point? Does that which confronts us as the inheritance of the bony system, proceeding from below upward, extend only thus far? Everywhere, below the warmth process, we have transformation; from below upward it reaches as far as the warmth process. What then follows can here only be indicated and then left to the further reflection and feeling of the listeners.

What the organism produces in the way of inner warmth processes in our blood, warmth processes which it conducts to us through all its different processes, and which it finally brings to expression in a flowering of all other processes, penetrates up into the soul and spirit, transforms itself into soul and spirit. And what is it that is most beautiful about the psychic-spiritual? The most beautiful, the loftiest thing about it, is the fact that, through the forces of the human soul, what is organic can be transformed into what is soul nature! If everything that man can have through the activity of his earthly organism is rightly transformed by him after it has become warmth, it then transmutes itself in his soul into what we may call an inner living experience of compassion, a sympathy for all other beings. If we penetrate through all the processes of the human organism, to the highest level of all, to the processes of warmth, we pass as it were through the door of the human physiological processes, above the uppermost heights which are formed by these processes into that world where the warmth of the blood is given its worth in accordance with what the soul has made out of it: in accordance with the living sympathy of the soul for everything that has being, and its compassion for everything around it. In this way we broaden our life, if our inner life carry us on to a kindling of inner heat, beyond all that is earthly being; we make ourselves one with all earthly being. And we must note the marvellous fact that the whole of Cosmic Being has taken the round about path of first building up our whole organisation, in order finally to give us that warmth which we are called upon to transmute through our ego into living compassion for all beings.

In the Earth's mission, warmth is in the process of being transmuted into compassion.

This is the meaning of the earth process; and it is being fulfilled, since man as a physical organism is embedded in this earth-process, through the fact that all physical processes finally come together in man's organisation as their crown; that everything therein, like a microcosm, in turn, of all earthly processes, opens again into new blossoming. And, as this is transmuted in the human soul, the earth-organism, through man's sympathetic interest and living compassion for every kind of being, attains to that for which warmth had its intended use in the organism allotted to him as Earth-Man. What we take up in our souls through living sympathy, which helps us to broaden our inner soul-life more and more, we shall take with us when we shall have gone through many organisations such as enable us to use to the full, for the spirit, everything that the earth could give us as kindling heat, burning warmth, flame of fire! And when, through innumerable incarnations, we shall have taken up into ourselves all that there is of this fervour of warmth, then will the earth have reached its goal, its purpose. Then will it sink beneath us, a great corpse, into indeterminate cosmic space; and there will arise out of this earth-corpse the united throng of all those earthly human souls who, through their different earthly incarnations, have realised the worth of the outpouring warmth of earth-organisms by transmuting it into living compassion and sympathy, and into whatever can be built upon these. Just as the individual soul, when the human being passes through the portal of death, rises to a spiritual world and gives over the corpse to the forces of the earth, so to the forces of the cosmos will one day be surrendered the earth's corpse, when it shall have given to us that burning warmth we needed for the compassion which was the foundation-stone of all our higher activities of soul. This corpse which will be given over to the cosmic system, just as the individual human corpse is given over to the earth-system, will be able to see rising above it the sum of all the individual human souls, now one important stage nearer perfection as a result of earth existence, and these will then press onward to new stages of existence, to new cosmic systems. Just as in the earth-system the individual human being, after he has passed through the portal of death, advances to new incarnations, so does the throng of all the individual souls, after the earth-corpse has fallen away, advance to new planetary stages of existence.

And so we see that nothing in the cosmic system is lost, but that what is given to us in our organism up to the final blossoming of heat is that “material” which, when we have used it up as burning warmth, helps us to find the way to a new and higher stage leading to eternity. Nothing in the world is lost, but what the earth produces, through human souls, is carried over by them into eternity!

Thus does spiritual science also permit us to connect the physiological processes in the human organism with our eternal destiny. And thus will this science, if we view it as something which must so implant itself within us that it is not mere theory or abstract knowledge, fill us with all those forces which show us that we as human beings do not, after all, stand only upon the earth, but in the whole cosmic system! If we learn to think thus about the lofty and eternal destiny of humanity, how man takes the forces of the earth in order that he may work on into eternity, we then receive through spiritual science what must be wrung out of it, not only what we may attain for the sake of knowledge but for our whole man. And if those human beings who divine or already possess this high ideal of knowledge come together in a true brotherhood, harmoniously united in striving toward the highest of all, who understand each other, that is, in their innermost being, this means that there are present on our earth, in its process of becoming, human beings who have the right to be conscious that they bear within themselves seeds which are developing, which can be fruitful for the further evolution of earth and humanity. In all modesty may anthroposophists come together and unite their feelings with what is highest, most universal, in man. And, when men gather in such a spirit, they understand one another in their deepest being; for they acknowledge one another, not merely as individual earth-men and in their earthly destiny, but rather in their eternal destiny.

It was in this spirit that we came together here; and it is in this spirit that we shall go away again, to live in the outside world and perhaps to pass on to others much of what it has been possible to give here as an incentive, even if only in outline, and thus to bring it to new flower. We shall at the same time strive so to work when we are scattered that, although physically separated, we shall be in harmony with one another in living thought, in feeling, and in all our willing. Then shall we be rightly united in that Spirit which ought to be brought to mankind through Anthroposophy. In this Spirit we are about to separate after having been together for a while; in this Spirit we shall remain united in soul; and in this Spirit we shall meet again when it is meant to be.

• 1. See footnote on p. 79.

It is a grievous time in which we live, a time more of effective actions full of courage and sacrifices, on one side, a time of severe ordeals for the human souls, on the other side. To stimulate some sensations just in view of our destiny-burdened time may be my task at the end of these considerations. Since we are allowed to be together in such a time, we want to let culminate our sensations at the end of our considerations according to this time. I may start from something that can spread light just about various matters which speak significantly to our souls in this time.

Since we started considering the world spiritual-scientifically, we call the four members of our human nature: physical body, etheric body, astral body, and ego. We know that the ego or rather that in the human being which we name ego by which we express the ego which is the youngest, but is also for us the most significant member of the human being. If the human being only consisted of physical body, etheric body and astral body as the result of the Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions, he would not be a human being. The human being is a human being because he received his ego from the spirits of the higher hierarchies during the earth evolution. He develops this ego in the course of his successive incarnations in different human communities, through peoples and periods, until the earth arrives at the goal of its development and the human being also arrives at his goal developing his ego. However, we also know that there are higher spiritual beings—we use for them the word “higher,”—who belong to the higher hierarchies which stand as it were above the human being. We speak of the hierarchy of the angels or angeloi, of the hierarchy of the archangels or archangeloi, the archai or spirits of the age and so on, upward rising. We call them with these names, we could use other names just as well, but the names are introduced in the West.

How have we to imagine, actually, these spiritual beings of the higher hierarchies in relation to the human being here on earth? We go out from the surroundings of the human being. We know, it is the mineral realm, the plant realm, the animal realm, and the human being has to consider the human realm as the highest after all he can observe. So that we can say: if we take the visible realms on earth, we have the realms of the minerals, the plants, the animals and that of the human beings. Above these realms, as it were, as a continuation upwards, the realms of the angeloi, the archangeloi, the archai et cetera appear. We can simply imagine that the realms are not closed with the human realm, but also extend farther upwards, only that the higher realms cannot be seen with the outer senses.

It could seem remarkable if we go upwards from the realms of nature to the realm of human beings that above the human realm invisibility begins at once. However, this will be remarkable only as long as one does not think that the animals do not see the human being in such a way as a human being sees the other. That is completely clear to somebody who is able to transport himself into the animal view. If the animals could speak, they would only speak of visible realms, of the mineral realm, the plant realm, and the animal realm. They would consider themselves as the highest visible realm. The fact that the animals see the human being like a human being sees the other is only a prejudice.

We are human beings of a supersensible, ghostly existence to the animals; and if the animals had only such a perception as we have it, they would not see the human beings, but they would be as invisible for them as the realm of angels for the human beings. Only because they have a certain kind of dreamy clairvoyance, the animals see the human being as a ghost, as a supersensible being. The human being can have no idea directly of the image which an animal has of him. In return, the animals see something also downwards, or properly speaking, perceive something downwards that the human being does not perceive any more. Since the animals perceive not only like the human being perceives the mineral world, but still perceive—the lower animals most intensely—something else. If an animal, for instance, a snail creeps on the ground, and then it perceives the whole peculiarity of the ground. This would disturb the human being perpetually if he, while he goes on the surface of the earth, perceived this in the same way as a snail or a tortoise. With the higher animals which have warm blood it is somewhat different, but just the lower animals really perceive the whole peculiarity of the ground on which they creep. They perceive the whole peculiarity of the air; they perceive everything that is round them in another way as the human being. The animal knows whether it is on a soil which is marshy, or whether it moves on a sandy soil, because it perceives the whole peculiarity of the soil. Namely this is as similar as we hear the things in our surroundings. The whole mineral world is infiltrated with forces which make it shake and which the human being does not perceive. The animal perceives this fine shaking, these forces in such a way that it feels something as sympathetic, something not. If the animal turns back, for example, from one soil type to the other, it is not so that the animal sees it like the human being, but because something is a little bit painful to it, because the fine movements go on reverberating in it, because it feels as if it belongs to it. This is a kind of instinctive hearing like a hearing of that which takes action in the ground or this is like smelling. So that we can say: the animal perceives an elemental realm, and the higher hierarchies begin already with the human being for it.—We are put in the middle in the world which we know as the external sensory world, the external realms of the sensory world, and the world of the higher hierarchies. We call the lower visible hierarchies the realms of nature; we call the invisible ones the higher hierarchies.

We also know that such a being of the higher hierarchies, for example, an angel, once also experienced the level of humanity. This took place, while the earth went through the old Moon evolution. There the human being was not yet a human being; for he had no ego; he was on the preparatory level of humanity only and had the astral body as his highest member. The beings who belong to the hierarchy of the angeloi went through their human level during the old Moon evolution. The spirits to whom we turn as the guarding spirits of the individual human being are these beings of the hierarchy of the angeloi. To each of them, as it were, a human being is assigned. “Spirits of your souls” are those who stand immediately in the hierarchy above the human being who really spread out their protecting wings, symbolically spoken, over the human beings namely over the individual human being.

We come then to the hierarchy of the archangeloi. They also were human beings once. During the old Sun evolution the beings we call archangeloi today were on the human level. They were not so formed as the human beings today, of course not, they were formed quite differently, but they were on their human level in that time. We are not allowed to imagine that during the old Sun evolution the archangeloi looked as the human beings today, but concerning their development they were on their human level. The spirits of personality or spirits of the ages were on their human level during the old Saturn evolution.

Now, we pick out the spirits we call archangeloi. There we have such spirits as archangeloi who went through the human level during the old Sun evolution, ascended to the level of the angels during the Moon evolution, and today they have ascended to the level of the archangeloi. We leave these spiritual beings put before our souls at first, as it were, standing two levels above us; later we will come back to them. Then we have the spiritual beings who were human beings during the old Saturn evolution, today they are spirits of the ages, they are three levels above us. We let them put again. Now we want to look at our relation to these both types of spiritual beings.

When the human being goes through an incarnation, then stand above us the spirits we count to the hierarchy of the angels, then the spirits we count to the hierarchy of the archangeloi, and those we count to the hierarchy of the archai, spirits of the ages or spirits of personality. However, they also develop. Let us pick out the archai, the spirits of personality or spirits of the ages. We go through our incarnation, and then we go through the gate of death, come into a spiritual world after death, go through a certain purely spiritual development between death and a new birth and come to an earth existence by a new birth again. Now we can ask: what does this depend on that we move down to the earth again after a certain number of years? In public talks this question is often put. Then one can already give an answer from certain points of view, but intimately speaking in our branches we can give a more objective answer pointing to reality.

While we live here in the physical body, the spirit of the ages has a certain level of development. He does something that is connected with the development of the human beings on earth, and he experiences a development on his part. If this spirit of the ages has come in the course of a development so far that we all let flow into ourselves that which he has worked through on his part, then we are ripe, as it were, to come down to an earth incarnation. If he has advanced to a certain level and we have developed by the spiritual worlds up to a certain level, we can enter an earth development again. Let us understand well in this regard and refrain from our own development first of all. Let us look at the spirit of the ages developing in a very long period.

I may say the following. If we consider the development of the earthly humankind in such a way that we go back to the foundation of the ancient Rome, about eight hundred years before the Mystery of Golgotha, we find that there a certain spirit of the ages started his development. Another spirit of the ages was leading and steering the destiny of the earth before. This spirit of the ages who took over the leadership of the spiritual earthly development in those days was leading up to the 16th century. A spirit of the ages leads the destiny of the earth for such a period. Since the 16th century, another spirit of the ages is there. We deal with two spirits of the ages. The human being who was, for example, in the third century before the Mystery of Golgotha in any incarnation on the earth experienced that which this spirit of the ages caused for the earth. For the time after his death if this human being has died in the third century or also in the second century, the spirit of the ages can give him nothing at first. He gave him what he could give him. Now the spirit of the ages must go through a number of years again, until he is able to give something new to the human being. This human being comes again down to the earth who was between death and birth in a spiritual world, when the spirit can give him something new.

Now, however, it is arranged that way that the human being comes down several times on average, because the spirit of the ages is not able to give the human being everything that he could give him because of the imperfection of the human beings. That is why the human being comes down repeatedly in the time in which a spirit of the ages develops. But basically it depends on the fact that the spirits of the ages regulate the successive incarnations of the human beings. Now, however, the spirits of the ages regulate this whole course of the human destiny, as it were, by their subordinates. These are the archangels. Such archangels govern in subordinated positions for a much shorter time than the spirits of the ages.

While the spirits of the ages rule as long as I have stated just now, we can assume a spirit of the ages from the foundation of Rome up to the 16th century, the spirits we count to the hierarchy of the archangels rule only for three to four centuries. They alternate in such a way that about six or seven come one after the other, while a spirit of the ages is ruling. So that we have that archangel we call Oriphiel in the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. Then Anael, Zachariel, Raphael, Samael, Gabriel rule successively; and now since 1879 we have the government of that archangel we call Michael. So we have, if we look at the spiritual worlds, the higher government of the spirits of the ages and subordinate to them, the successive governments of archangels. Because the human being cannot take up everything that the spirit of the ages would give him, he does not take it directly from the hands of the spirit of the ages, but from the hands of the less powerful archangel. Keep in mind: our personal guardians belong to the hierarchy of the angeloi. Above them there are the spirits who regulate the interrelations of the human beings. Above them there are the archai or spirits of personality or spirits of the ages.

If I talk in such a way, it always concerns those beings who went through their development properly. But not all the spirits develop regularly. There are spiritual beings who were archai already during the Saturn evolution who lagged behind, however, on the level of the archai at that time, the level of humankind. They have not gone beyond their Saturn level during the earth development. They did not ascend to the level of the regular development. They maintained their human character, are supersensible Saturn beings on one side, however, are on the level of humankind. There are also beings of the hierarchy of the archai who stopped on the human level during the Sun evolution and stand there now in the supersensible world still as human beings. We term these beings that lagged behind the luciferic beings or ahrimanic beings with collective names. We cannot get involved in the difference between luciferic and ahrimanic beings today. These are spirits who lagged behind.

We have now to answer the question: how does the human being conceive, here in his earthly incarnation, the influence of the spirits who have properly progressed, the spirits of the ages, the archai, and the archangeloi who are their servants? These beings are supersensible; the human being cannot get a relationship to them like to the sensory world. Hence, the human being does not know as a rule if he only relies on the sensory world that he has been put in a development which is directed by the archai and archangeloi above him. He does not know it; but these supersensible beings intervene in his whole nature. Also those spiritual beings we call folk-spirits who lead whole peoples are among the archangeloi, the archangels. And in so far as we have the people to which we belong to thank for that which we are, we have to look at that what the nation's being gives us as a gift of the corresponding being of the hierarchy of the archangeloi. It is the inspiration of the archangeloi which comes to us because we are put into a people. Now we only need to think what it means for the human being to be put into a people. In the people's being there flow mental qualities, but also customs; a certain configuration of the being flows into the human being. One cannot imagine at all that somebody would have become that who somebody is in an incarnation because of the gift of the folk-spirit, in reality of the gift of an archangel.

Except that we stand within a people and receive, inspired by an archangel, certain configurations of our whole being, we stand in the development of the whole humankind. There we are exposed to the intuitions into which the spirit of the ages of the hierarchy of the archai leads us. Imagine that we receive something today in our present spiritual culture that goes beyond any national differentiation; what we have because we live from the 19th to the 20th centuries what we would not have had if we had lived during the Roman or Greek times. We have the spirit of the ages to thank for this. You can strictly make a distinction between the gift of the spirit of the ages and the gift of the folk-spirit. If only this were there which is a regular development of the human being, of the angel, of the archangel or that of the spirit of the ages then we would receive, every individual human being, the gift always from our spirit of the ages and from our corresponding folk-spirit and would develop by means of this gift. The human beings on earth would develop side by side. All members of the different peoples would receive the gift of their folk-spirits in such a way, as if five pictures would hang completely differently from each other in a gallery which would show miscellaneous things, but which would not disturb each other in the slightest.

Thus individual human beings would receive the gift of their folk-spirits on earth side by side. They would not disturb each other if their development had proceeded regularly. But there are beings who lagged behind. Among the guiding archangeloi are those who began their development properly on the Sun and have become right archangeloi up to the earth evolution, but also those who stopped on the Sun level who are basically only on the level of human beings. These beings are on the same level as the folk-spirits, and, nevertheless, they lagged behind them, have the qualities of invisible supersensible human beings, not those of archangels. They make the same claims to the world like the archangeloi in a certain way, but they have not reached the level of the archangeloi on earth. Hence, they must work with the same forces as on the Sun. The result is that they do not seize the human beings as the archangels do directing them from above, but penetrate them as invisible human beings. They do not lead the human being from above, but go into the human nature. These spirits, who compete with the really leading folk-spirits, cause that the nations feud with each other, do not live in peace with each other.

The human being would not be tempted at all to identify his personality, his humanness with his nation, but he would look at the person as something that feeds him spiritually. However, he would not stand up as a fighter for his nation, not identify his person with it. The human being would not say, I am of this or that nationality, but: nationality is there, and I have to get my spiritual food indirectly via this nationality into which I have been born. But while the archangel stimulates him to think that way, the other comes who is on the level of humankind, actually, and is basically a luciferic spirit, and leads him into his nationality.

The result is that the archangel-like does not come down as a gift to the human being, but that the human being identifies himself with the nation like with a completely personal affair, and thereby this quarrel of the nationalities comes into being on the earth. That must absolutely be clear to us: because we were not only exposed to the influence of the leading archangel, but also to the influence of the retarded archangel, we identify ourselves with the nationality as we do on earth. That is just the spiritual-scientific feeling that we as human beings are able to rise above the only national to find access to the general humanness. Then we can be national in the most remarkable sense. As well as the one human being may do that or the other may do something different as art, and the former doing his art does not need to be the adversary of the other, one did not need to be the adversary of the other concerning nationality if there were no retarded archangels who cause the identification. One has to presuppose that if one generally speaks about the basis of the human development with reference to the national or other differentiations.

Concerning the spirit of the ages you will still see further details, in which way the luciferic element works into the regular element if we consider the following. A spirit of the ages works for a certain time. Since the 16th century a new spirit of the ages is there. This spirit of the ages has a particular task. He has the task to add the whole materialistic skill and understanding of the world to the former impulses of development. Hence, materialism made so big progress since the 16th century in the world. Therefore, we do not need to look at the materialistic understanding as something more inferior to the former kind of understanding if we identify ourselves not only unilaterally with it. What will somebody who looks at the matters that way say about the government of the different spirits of the ages? He says: we are now controlled by the particular spirit of the ages; before we were controlled by another spirit of the ages. The human beings had other ideas, other impulses then. If the human being now were able to be influenced by the properly developing spirits of the ages, he would say: we must now adapt ourselves to this spirit of the ages, while we penetrate more the laws of the evolution of the world, of the materialistic thinking. Then another spirit of the ages comes after a time; he causes another attitude of mind in the human thinking.

I emphasised it often that we as supporters of spiritual science must say: today we announce spiritual science using particular words, ideas and concepts, but it is not correct that we believe, that what we say today holds good for the whole earth future, but it changes. When two thousand years are over, our knowledge of spiritual science today is announced with other words, just as we talk differently than in the Greek epoch; nothing remains of the kind of our words. We do not rely on anything that externally remains but we know that one spirit of the ages replaces the other and that they all stand equally side by side.

Somebody who is influenced by the retarded spirits of the ages of the Saturn and identifies himself with their influence says: at that time all the other human beings were silly; this was the nursery of humankind. We have advanced so far today; we have found completely valid truth for all future.—One becomes humbler, more modest in the field of spiritual science. Somebody who identifies himself with the spirit of the ages says: Copernicus found the right thing finally; something different was once believed. Now the human beings will say forever: the earth and the planets move in ellipses around the sun. The sun is in its centre.—Spiritual science already knows today that this is a one-sided teaching. It is very good for our materialistic time to imagine the world, but it is wrong. It is not true at all that the sun is in one focus of the ellipse and the earth moves around. It is, actually, a materialistically calculated apparent movement. In truth it is in such a way that the sun moves and the earth and the other planets run after it in a helical movement. Because certain positions originate in this helical movement, the earth stands once here, another time there. That appears as an ellipse. In truth it is another line. The time will come when the external science knows this, too.

One becomes more modest if one knows that truth is announced in a certain way for certain times. We never state as correct supporters of spiritual science: from now on into all future all human beings say, the human being consists of physical body, etheric body, astral body, and ego. But the future speaks quite differently, because everything is developing. The ideas of yesterday are as justified as the ideas of today. We can be controlled not only by a spirit of the ages who leads us to believe that all previous knowledge was a pack of lies and we have advanced so wonderfully far. With reference to the spirit of the ages you see people possessed by the luciferic spirit saying: how wonderfully far we have advanced. How imperfect everything was what one thought and said about the world once. What we have found since the 16-century remains as eternal truth.

The folk-spirit is basically a complicated being on the whole. He is the regular folk-spirit who floats above us and if we only followed him we would follow in such a way that we take up his gifts because we are in his sphere. But he is impaired perpetually in his effectiveness by his luciferic companion who obsesses us and induces us to identify ourselves as individual human beings with the whole nationality. However, the individual human being does this differently. It is very important that one really sees that in the middle of Europe a people has to develop that has another relationship to its folk-spirit as the peoples have in the periphery of Europe. We have to learn this insight. What takes place under the surface of the human consciousness and what depends really on the spiritual beings of the higher hierarchies is extremely important.

The materialistically thinking human being regards it still an insanity if one says that such impulses go out from the spiritual beings like this is one in Central Europe who stimulates the unaware people to such a feeling towards the divine or—because in Central Europe Christ is working—to the Christ Impulse. So that the Central European human being learns to feel Christ in such a way as He speaks to the core of the soul. This came nowhere else into being as in Central Europe. Still during the Roman time of the Christian development one understood, for example, Christ as a being who came to earth and worked for the human beings. Indeed, the advanced human beings and partly those who thought already in such a way, as we think today who we are in the possession of spiritual science felt as Paul thought: “not I, but Christ in me.” However, it is a difference compared with a feeling as we find it with Master Eckhart, with Tauler, with Angelus Silesius and similar minds. How these spirits took up the Mystery of Golgotha. We only need to ask Angelus Silesius; and he answers us with the nice saying:

Were Christ born a thousand times in Bethlehem
And not in you, you would be lost forever.

It depends on the commiseration of the Mystery of Golgotha in the own soul. These Central European human beings tried to internally experience something that is an internal picture, an internal expression of the Mystery of Golgotha. And how wonderful is it when Angelus Silesius says once about death: everything that happens in me happens in the end because God is in me and carries out the matters in me. And if I die, I do not die, but, actually, God dies in me.—Imagine what a wonderfully intimate idea of immortality already is given when one says: God dies in me.—Since God is immortal, of course. If God dies in me, death is only apparent; then one feels like Angelus Silesius felt: God dies only apparently in me, because God cannot die. So is death not that it seems externally, it is only a fact of life. Because God cannot die—but dies in anyone,—one already feels immortality with it.

This most intimate being together with God whether one feels it as something divine or as something Christian was prepared for long times in the course of the Central European development. There the Central European folk-spirits worked, so that it found an external symbolic expression, a real symbolic expression. Except in Central Europe nowhere anybody says “ich,” if he means his own self, his own being. The whole development was led by the folk-spirit who manifests himself as a spirit of language in such a way that the own being was expressed with the word ICH. But ICH, “I-Ch,” is Jesus Christ. It lies in Jesus Christ. Because in “ICH” Christ Jesus is expressed in His initial letters, it is expressed allegorically what in the Central European spiritual being is as it is connected with the most intimate experience. Whenever somebody pronounces “Ich,” he pronounces the initial letters of “Jesus Christ.” If one turned the spiritual eyes only once to such matters which are really considered even today as fantastic, somebody would already think that the spirits of the higher hierarchies work unconsciously in the human development, and would then find something significant in the matters which one takes for granted today.

I want only to mention a really significant fact. One calls a certain group of European human beings Germanic people or Teutons. And while one speaks in Central Europe of Germanic people (“Germanen”), one includes England, Holland, Norway, Sweden and still others. One expands the concept of the Germanic people. I do not talk out of agitation, but out of that which is given in the language. The English do not speak of themselves as Germanic people, because they call only the Germans Germanic people. The German calls himself “deutsch,” and if he speaks of Germanic people, he encloses a bigger group of human beings. The English apply the term Germans only to the Germans, to those who are not like “him.” This is a tremendously significant fact. It is something that is in the deepest sense typical for the kind in which way on the one side and on the other the folk-spirit works; he works in Central Europe to embrace a bigger entity and the folk-spirit of the English people takes care to put away that and only to apply it to the other.

That will be obvious to the human beings gradually in a wonderful way which the language teaches as the outflow of the effective folk spirituality. Now one is little understood if one speaks about the different European peoples as I tried it some years before this war—not caused at all by the war—in the cycle The Mission of the Individual Folk-Souls in Connection with the Germanic-Nordic Mythology. This is understood in such a way, as if I wanted to express any value judgments. But I do not want to express value judgments, but only a characteristic. We can now characterise the West-European peoples expressing exactly what I expressed in this lecture cycle.

We know that the soul of the human being consists of the sentient soul, the intellectual soul or mind-soul and the consciousness-soul, and the ego which works in these three soul nuances. If we look at the Italian nation with its folk-spirit, we find the peculiarity that there the folk-spirit inspires the sentient soul. This is the typical of the Italian people, that the folk-spirit inspires the sentient soul. If now something is possessed by the luciferic folk-spirit, it is also the folk-spirit. Imagine that on one side the brilliant aspect of the Italian people is based on the fact that the sentient soul is inspired. Think of Dante, of all the great Italian artists. But this people also identify themselves, on the other hand, with something superhuman that lagged behind luciferically in all the passionate impulses of development which appear within the Italian people. I do not pronounce any value judgment, but I characterise it only.

We can see everywhere with the French people the folk-spirit inspiring the intellectual soul or mind-soul.

With the British people it is the consciousness-soul. The consciousness-soul is for the present human cycle that which connects the human being mostly with the external physical world. Hence, this nation which is inspired in the consciousness-soul is entrusted above all with the task of furthering the materialistic civilisation. No value judgment is expressed again, but it is characterised only that just the British nation has a vocation to get the consciousness-soul inspired. In so far as the individual human being belongs to his nation, in so far as he is inspired by the luciferic folk-spirit, he identifies himself with the purely materialistic civilisation of the present. We find this really in the British culture. Like the individual human being positions himself in the British nation, this comes out what is just the materialistic spirit of the British nation, this peculiar spirit who waged thirty-four wars of conquest from 1856 up to 1900 and made fifty-seven million people new British subjects, and who pretends to stand up for the liberty of single human groups in our time.

If we consider such a time like ours, we must absolutely be clear to us that just this time teaches people very much to feel like an admonition what one puts up now as the contrast of the single national groups of Europe or of a big part of the earth. The members of thirty-four nationalities—apart from minor tribal differences—are in war with each other. One should regard this as an admonition to refrain really from that which one has called history up to now. But this approach is used just for the time being still up to nonsense. We find it really driven up to nonsense what the individual nations of Europe reproach each other for everything. One weighs up the single external facts to discover the causes of this dreadful war. But just this war will teach people that one finds nothing in its external causes, but at most external symptoms of that which exists deeply hidden in the human groups by the guidance of advanced and retarded spiritual beings. The ordeals of this time force us to appeal to the spiritual subsoil in which the causes of the external events in the world can be found today.

From the most different sides one can show how in the subsoil of the consciousness that works which appears externally. I want to point, although most of the friends already know this example, once again to the fact that the whole map of Europe was determined towards the end of the Middle Ages by the Maid of Orleans who intervened in the war between England and France. Everybody who looks understanding at our external history has to recognise that the map of Europe would have turned out quite differently if at that time England had not been defeated by France because the Maid of Orleans intervened in the fight. But the Maid of Orleans was not a qualified strategist; she was no one who stood at the summit of education. She was a simple human child—a farmer girl. But the spirits of the higher hierarchies worked through her in the way as they had to work in this time. It has been absolutely necessary up to our time that these spirits worked in the subconscious because the human beings could not yet understand what must now be understood spiritual-scientifically.

The intervention of spiritual beings in the subconsciousness is often nicely expressed in legends. And rightly, not because of superstition, but because it really corresponds to facts, one set particular store by the time when the external world has withdrawn mostly from the year, the time from Christmas up to the sixth January. If one does not want to attain spiritual knowledge in the way, as we do today using the instructions given in How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?, but in a more elementary way, one could be inspired in these thirteen nights. This is expressed, for example, very nicely in the Norwegian legend of Olaf Åsteson. This legend relates that Olaf Åsteson goes to the church before Christmas; that he falls asleep before the church and sleeps during thirteen nights. He wakes up at the Epiphany day and is really able to tell his experience. What he tells there figuratively in a clear, but primitive way corresponds to that we call the passage through the soul-world and the passage through the spirit-land. Olaf Åsteson experienced that in the time in which Christmas was rightly put. This makes it clear to us that the clairvoyance of a nature child could be developed best of all during these thirteen nights from Christmas till Epiphany.

Because the Maid of Orleans was such a nature child, one could assume that she would have experienced the world in these thirteen nights in a sort of dreamy state of which she spoke when she led the French army against the English that she would have been inspired in these thirteen nights. This happened in a peculiar way. Every human being experiences a sleeping state, a state when the senses do not yet speak, namely in the body of the mother, before he sees the physical earth light. This is still a kind of sleeping state, and the ripest state is that during the last thirteen days before birth. This is the great thing and fills our souls with such amazement: the Maid of Orleans is born on the sixth January. She went through the inspiration actually in the thirteen nights, but before she opened her eyes to the earth light. That is why the sixth January is noted as the birthday of the Maid of Orleans intentionally in our calendar. We have to understand that in its big world-historical connection; since it can say to us how mysterious the connections are in the world and how mysterious forces work in the world. Mysterious powers worked in those days on the sixth January, because people gathered in the little village where the Maid of Orleans was born in the morning; where the animals themselves behaved so wonderfully. On this sixth January, an inspiration could be finished. In thirteen nights a being could be inspired which was disposed by its own karma. Of course, not everybody who is born on the sixth January is disposed, but karma has to coincide with the other conditions.

I wanted to give this example of the Maid of Orleans which shows us so surely how subterranean powers intervene in the historical development. Indeed, the materialistic development of the following centuries came then. It is completely comprehensible that this had to consider such tips to historical backgrounds as insanity. This does not harm; even it does not harm at all if today people still look at this spiritual science like insanity. This spiritual science will be accepted finally.

But such significant events, within which the human beings of the present time live and in which they themselves incarnated to take part in them in one or another way, do not always mean the same in the historical development. Today these destiny-burdened events mean an admonition to the human beings. Such a flood of literature has been written about this war, but in everything that appeared in books, pamphlets and so on we do not yet find this from which one has to assume, actually, that it is found and that it must be found bit by bit. One often hears: one can talk about the causes not really, maybe after the war, maybe people find the true causes of this war from documents only after decades and know who was to blame for it.—You can read this in every third newspaper. But that does not concern, it concerns that which one finds—and just as a result of this time—that the real causes are not to be seen in these external occasions, but that one has to look for the causes in the spiritual world. One will find that this war was the significant karma of materialism which must be experienced, so that the human beings take up a sum of convictions in them leading from materialism to spiritualism. Humankind must experience this ordeal.

What does happen basically today in such a distressing way round us?—We know, when the human being goes through the gate of death, he leaves his physical body behind in the physical world. He enters in the spiritual world with his etheric body, astral body and ego. He soon takes off the etheric body which is given to the remaining world. Then he goes with astral body and ego through the soul-land, through the spirit-land. But imagine now that today a big number of human beings goes through the gate of death in relatively short time and with a particular consciousness; that they take off etheric bodies which could have supplied, so to speak, their lives normally still for decades. If a human being dies between the twentieth and thirtieth years, he takes off an etheric body which could have supplied his physical body for sixty to seventy years. The forces are in the etheric body, because nothing gets lost also in the spiritual world. All human beings, who go today in the prime of life through the gate of death, hand over to the world etheric bodies which could still have maintained their lives for a long time. These forces are there in the spiritual world. How are they there, these forces?—I may give you an illustrative example of the significance of such a phenomenon which is taken from our circle itself.

Last autumn, a family belonging to our anthroposophical circle lost a little son, a dear boy of seven years. The external circumstances were exceptionally tragic ones. The father had been called up to the army as a German citizen; he just fell ill and was in the military hospital. One evening, even as a lecture took place in Dornach where our construction is built, somebody informed us that the little seven-year-old boy was missing. He had not come home since the evening. I have to mention that the family has settled down in Dornach as a gardener family. I had come from Germany to Switzerland shortly before. The boy had already met me before the construction and shaken my hand; it was a sunny very dear child. In that evening, we were informed that the boy was missing. Now one could imagine nothing else, as that a removal van, which had brought pieces of furniture for our members, had toppled over and fallen on the boy near the construction. You must also take into consideration that since countless years no removal van went at that place or since that time. You must think further: the boy lived with his mother who manages the garden. He was such a dear boy that he said to his mother when the father had to go; now he would muck in, because the father is not there any more.

That evening, he had been sent to the so-called canteen to get something for his mother. It was not far at all; it is only a short way between the canteen and the flat of the mother. On this short way is a crossroad, so that the removal van had to do a bend. Now the boy intended to leave, actually, ten minutes sooner, was detained by somebody who wanted to go with him. If he had left sooner and through the door through which he was used to leave, he would have passed the carriage sooner and on its left side, while he went now on the right. Because he left later, through another door and on the right side of the removal van, the carriage when it tipped over fell just on the boy. People had looked at this, also those who were busy with the horses. Nobody anticipated that the boy had got under the carriage. Then one said: The carriage is too heavy to lift it still this evening, tomorrow we do this.—Between five and six o'clock p. m. this had happened. We had definitely to lift the carriage a quarter past ten o'clock. At twelve o'clock it was lifted; and we recovered the dead child.

The first thing I would like to mention is that just such an example is suited to show how wrongly people think concerning life. I would like to give an often used comparison for this wrong thinking. Assuming, you see a person in some distance who goes along a riverside. Suddenly you see the person falling into the river. You run to that place and you find a stone at the same place. Of course, you say, the person tripped over the stone, fell into the water, and found his death that way. However, the matter can be completely different; it could be the other way round. The man could have experienced a heart failure. He fell into the water, because he was dead before; and he did not find his death, because he fell into the water. This mistake is done any minute, in the natural sciences in particular. One does not notice it, of course, if it is well hidden.

That was also the case concerning this child. The karma of this child had run off. The removal van went there because of the child. The spiritual beings who exist behind the secret arranged the matter in such a way that the child could find its death. The boy was seven years old. The rather youthful etheric body would have supplied life for many decades, its forces were there. Now, I will always confess what it means that since some time our Dornach construction is embedded in the enlarged etheric body of the little boy Theodor Faiss. The etheric body is increased—it grows after death,—and the etheric body of this little seven-year-old Theo forms something like an aura of the construction since that time. If one deals with the construction, if one needs to find ideas for the construction which put himself rightly in the spiritual world, since the death of this boy he knows that he is co-inspired by the etheric body which is involved in the aura of the construction, the etheric body of the little Theo Faiss.

Of course, no longing to appear original could inveigle me into denying that a lot is co-inspired by that which contributed to the construction since that time, because the aura of this etheric body is round the construction, and one has, as it were, this help that this unused etheric strength works in favour of the construction. Imagine which important internal facts are behind the external facts: a family moves their residence near to the construction. There is a boy, especially gifted by his soul-being; he sacrifices his etheric body, so that the construction is wrapped up in the strength of this etheric body. There we have such an example at which we see that unused sacrificed etheric bodies have their task in the world.

There only that begins basically which should flow as the sentient content from our spiritual science. That one knows, the human being consists of physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego, that one goes through different lives on earth—one knows that in theory, it does not matter really. But it matters that which is inserted in our real experience by these views. One tries to bring life also into our movement and to overcome the difference between the living and the dead not only theoretically by teaching, but by life. When recently a very dear assistant, Fritz Mitscher, was snatched away from us just in his thirtieth year, and I had to hold the address at the cremation in Basel, an important word consisted in the fact that I turned to this soul, I would like to say, begged him to continue working among us after death. For we do not only need the so-called living, but we need the cooperation of those who have gone through the gate of death. They will co-operate in a double way. On one side, a big number of etheric bodies co-operate in the next time which the human beings have taken off going through the gate of death in the destiny-burdened events.

Youthful unused etheric bodies form a big aura in which we live. On the other side are the individualities themselves who work on from their etheric bodies. We can look at the unused etheric body at the example of the little Theo Faiss where the etheric body becomes the inspirator for something that was achieved in the construction. I would look at the individuality of Fritz Mitscher in my address. It is the task of our spiritual science to feel how the abyss between life and death is filled. It must become conscious content of our earth times not only to know in theory, but to penetrate vividly that which the dead are to us like the living that the dead give something like the youthful, unused etheric bodies. In these etheric bodies, which belonged to the human beings who have now found their death as a result of the big destiny-burdened events, the echoes live of everything that is felt if one considers death as a sacrifice for the events demanded by this time—more or less consciously. This goes into these etheric bodies.

Looking for death, or properly speaking, foreseeing death and nevertheless knowing that this death has a meaning, this will be the case with the numerous human beings going through the gate of death in the present. One can be a materialist; if one exists in such a way, one may say: folk-souls, folk-spirits are only names for something that in the abstract holds together a group of human beings of the same language and the same characteristics. Speaking of folk-spirits as of real beings is a weirdie.—Some people going now through the gate of death may speak that way according to the words; because they go through death they agree unconsciously to that which spiritual science has to say that a folk-soul, a folk-spirit is a real being. For what would it mean if folk-spirits, folk-souls were not real beings and the human beings stand on all sides in this bloody war?

Provided a materialistic world creation it would be impossible to imagine that. If the individual human being sacrifices himself for the folk-spirit, if the folk-spirit is a real being to him, it has the deepest sense that such events have befallen the human beings. Thus we will feel the next time in which many unspent etheric bodies float in the spiritual atmosphere admonishing everybody that there is something spiritual. These etheric bodies are good assistants in future to deepen the human world view spiritually. The human beings have only to feel the dead calling in their souls. When again peace holds sway over the fields on which now the dreadful events take place, the human beings who live then will work much better if they hear the voices of the dead. But this is meant not only symbolically. The unspent etheric bodies are calling. The world cannot exist in future without the human beings feeling their connection with the spiritual world. Humankind of the future would turn out lifeless if it were not able to hear the admonitions of the dead.

In physics, everybody admits that energy does not get lost; one speaks of the transformation of energy. That also applies to the spiritual realm. The forces the unused etheric body carries through the gate of death do not disappear; they will be there. They can be taken up in the souls of the future, and these souls can receive strength and confidence for their spiritual work from the connection with the soul leftovers which remained from unused etheric bodies.

Beside many things this war can say to us, it is for us as supporters of spiritual science above all that we already look up in spirit at the atmosphere of the unused etheric bodies. However, here below souls have to be who have a feeling for the admonitions of the dead. It belongs to our task as supporters of spiritual science to bring about that. We must already find a spiritual point of view also towards such events, not the point of view of an abstract thinking. But we must really imagine the future population of the earth in such a way that below souls exist who are in the physical bodies, and from above forces of unused etheric bodies work; and that these souls below can say: we have no doubts that better times come for the spiritual cognition, because the unused etheric bodies help us with their forces.—If we take this specifically, not in the abstract, we have understood something of the admonitions which this destiny-burdened time can give us in particular as supporters of spiritual science. It must take place that way, because real effects in the human development are necessary. We would have to work on for long times if we had to intellectually convince people of that which the spiritual-scientific world view wants to give. With the Maid of Orleans a subconscious initiation took place. In the future, spirituality works in another way in the human development. The unused etheric bodies support us and also those who as individualities want to work on the physical plane.

It is sometimes strange what people can understand also today. On account of the given example you will admit that at the time of the Maid of Orleans the strategists, the generals did not bring about that which was brought about. I have sometimes given another example: when at a determining hour the army of Constantine marched against Rome, these were not also the generals who brought about the victory and defeated the five times stronger army of Maxentius who led his armies before the gates of Rome against Constantine. Constantine followed not his generals, but a dream that said to him, he should make his armies carry the monogram of Christ. Dreams and Sibylline oracles brought the armies together at a particular place and decided everything in those days. However, because Constantine was victorious, the map of Europe got its corresponding appearance. Who steered the events in those days taking place under the threshold of consciousness? It was the Christ Impulse, but the Christ Impulse, as it was real, not as human beings understood it.

We do not get to know the Christ Impulse listening to the squabbling of the theologians. The Christ Impulse did not work in that which the human beings accomplished consciously which the human beings understood; but it worked in joining together the events with Constantine and Maxentius, and later again with the Maid of Orleans. Also in this time one experiences something, even in little facts. You can compare the little thing with the big one sometimes.

An excellent philosopher wrote a longer article about the spiritual-scientific world view represented by me some years ago in a South German monthly magazine. This article had a big effect; it was written in an opposing way, infiltrated with many a benevolent judgment about theosophy on the whole, even some acknowledging notes. For example, I got the advice instead of using my talents for such matters to find out finally whether Mickiewicz¹ is really the reincarnation of the Maid of Orleans and so on. Nevertheless, on the whole, the article was very suitable to show how our spiritual-scientific world view has to be regarded so that an inadequate impression was aroused.

The philosopher who had written the article was regarded as a great Platonist, as a great logician. He himself said that he devoted himself to no other task than to announce the truth, and, therefore, he would be able to know the truth. The editor of the magazine seemed to be very satisfied to publish such authoritative an article about this spiritual science. This was already some years ago. Then the war came. The person concerned does not belong to those who sympathise with Central Europe, but he sympathises in determined way with England and France and even with those who also fight on the side of England and France. Now what happens? He writes a number of letters to the same man, the editor of the magazine. This editor of the mentioned magazine also publishes these letters because they are too typical, in another magazine, the South German Monthly Magazine. He even reminds of the fact that he is the same man—it is Karl Muth—who publishes the magazine Hochland and printed the article about the “Steinerean theosophy,” as he says. In these letters, a West-European minded person rants at the Central European population as much as he can do. Among other things, this man explains: black people are free aristocrats compared to people who do not know anything they are fighting for. One had to compare the British Empire with Central Europe, the former were established like the Catholic Church by God and would never have done anything but what is according to the divine world order.

Printing this letter is a matter of course. The mentioned editor adds to this: in whole Central Europe nobody could be found except in madhouses who could support such a view.—Now the dear Mr. Muth admits that the man whom he had chosen to let him loose on our spiritual-scientific world view is ready, actually, for the lunatic asylum. Of such a quality are the objections generally which are raised against our spiritual-scientific world view. Only Mr. Muth would already have had to know in those days that the man is ready for the lunatic asylum. But he needed the admonition of the war. His view had to be challenged only by that which he could easily see now. Some people who are ready for the lunatic asylum walk around and criticise our world view, only it does not come to the fore so absurdly.

I said that this example shows that the reason which people have today would limp for a long time if it concerns the spiritual-scientific world view and that one must say: not only the living but also the dead are necessary that a certain quantity of spirituality comes into the world. Those belong to the best helpers who had to stand up with their souls and lives for the course of our present destiny-burdened events. That is why we would want that such considerations remain not only something theoretical in the souls, but become a deeply honest feeling, the feeling that we may bear witness of spiritual science in such a way that we know attentively that there are admonishing voices in the spiritual world saying to us: let us dead be a landmark of the spiritual deepening which must come to the human beings, because we have gone through this death with consciousness—not for our matter, but for that which is independent from us, so that we have thereby confirmed the confession of something that goes beyond the individual material human life.

If among the supporters of spiritual science those are who anticipate, feel or know the serious murmur of the dead, then something real is achieved that has to be achieved by spiritual science in the feelings of the human souls; in other words, if souls are inspired by spiritual science who know to turn their senses to the realm of spirits, because a lot is said to the human beings from the realm of spirits in the times to come.

It is this that I wanted to suggest to you for your feelings, because the circumstances were such that we can be together just in this time also in a branch meeting. One would want that at such meetings not only a knowledge as a germ is given, but that that which is spoken in such meetings would work like a living germ which is planted in the ground of the feeling soul. What you carry on from such a consideration, this is the central issue.

That is why we want to close these considerations, while we think of that which might be assigned to us from the destiny-burdened events of this time:

From the courage of the fighters,
From the blood of the battles,
From the grief of the bereaved,
From the nation's sacrifices
Will grow up the fruits of spirit
If souls aware of spirit turn
Their senses to the spirit-land.

• 1. Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1855), Polish poet, stood up for the liberation of the Polish people from the Russian rule.

When we gather at such an occasion at which an own room is dedicated to our efforts which we can give a spiritual character commensurate with our spiritual-scientific feeling, it is good to think of the big viewpoint which we want to get as supporters of spiritual science towards the world and its phenomena, its tasks, its big riddles. How should our time, our distressing time full of ordeals not urge our souls to get a more far-reaching viewpoint? In particular in our time, one has to long for a viewpoint that reaches farther than the external life and external human efforts.

Out of the tasks and the efforts of our spiritual-scientific world view we put up a sculptural group at an important place in our new Dornach construction. This sculptural group should explain that which our souls should feel in the most intimate and also in the deepest sense. This group contains a central figure. One may call this central figure Christ; one may also call it the divine in the human being which tries to position itself in the right way in the world. One may call this middle figure the “human being,” the cosmic human being, expressed in an earthly personality as Christ was expressed in the earthly personality in a temporal-historical life by Jesus of Nazareth.

But two other figures will be on the sides of this middle figure, the one on top like on a rock, winged, but falling off from the rock. Because of the peculiar posture of the hand of the middle figure, expressing neither hatred nor power, but inner firmness a strength is achieved by which the figure on the rock on top, the winged figure, breaks the wings and falls down into the depth. This breaking of the wings—this must be well expressed in this sculpture—is not achieved because the human being, who stands in the middle, the Christ-human being, breaks the wings, but because he stretches out his hand in his spirituality, the other, the winged being, does not endure that, and because he finds that unbearable for his being which lives below, he himself breaks his wings by internal strength and falls off. You have to record the fact that this being throws down himself that he is not thrown down by any adversary.

Below inside the rock we see another figure tied up in chains. This is eager to turn up the earth from below. But he does not cope in his striving with that which flows out from the downwards directed hand of the middle figure. He writhes because he is thrown back by his own nature and by the strength of the middle figure.

You anticipate that in this group is expressed what we call the Christ-principle of our universe in the middle figure, the luciferic principle in the angel falling off from the rock, and the ahrimanic principle in the figure in the cave which strives from below upwards. I endeavoured to design the three figures as very similar portraits—we may express such a matter in this intimate circle,—so that one really gets an impression of the form which Ahriman takes on appearing to the human being in such a connection, and also of the physiognomy of Lucifer which he takes on appearing to the human being. Until our days, the western religious world view lacks the knowledge that Ahriman and Lucifer work in the whole world interrelation.

Publicly one can only indicate the matters because today people still recoil from precisely expressing these matters. However, we remember that even in the yesterday's public lecture I said that the human being is led by meditation, on one side, to a region where he feels lonesome in his innermost nature and helpless, on the other side, to a region where he feels being penetrated in his nature with fear and powerlessness. What threatens us if we strive unilaterally only for freeing ourselves from the material, what threatens us if we strive for the spiritual in the abstract this is that we are seized by the luciferic principle. What threatens us if we only strive down for the material if we live longing for the material where we appear as fossilized—as I have explained it in the public lecture yesterday—this is the ahrimanic principle. And the human being stands between the luciferic and ahrimanic principles.

This must be recognised. But we have also to recognise correctly that it is not sufficient for us to say: we have to remove anything luciferic and ahrimanic from ourselves.—All the emotions of hatred and fear which we summon up against the luciferic and the ahrimanic elements are not good, actually, for our human nature. We have to realise that Ahriman and Lucifer have their justification in the whole universe. That is why it is indicated in the sculptural figure that Christ does not want to overcome Lucifer and Ahriman because He hates them or wants to harass them, but that Lucifer and Ahriman overcome themselves. It is wrong to develop feelings in us, as if we had to reject Ahriman and Lucifer, as if we had to fight against them directly. Even the normal divinity permeating the world did not order in its wise guidance of the universe that Ahriman and Lucifer are not allowed to exist in the guidance of the universe. They are there.

If we ask ourselves where the luciferic principle does exist in the human development even today, then we have to look at the East. In the East, in Asia and in the European Russia, Lucifer prevails in the culture. Although the Russian element has a vocation to develop the spirit-self in future, as I explained in the series of talks on the mission of the folk-souls, the threat exists that the Russian culture is entangled by Lucifer. It is on the way to experiencing that. The luciferic principle consists of the fact that good spirits lag behind. In the Greek-Orthodox Church was a good spirit until the sixth, seventh centuries. But a spirit that is good at a certain time changes into a luciferic spirit if it is detained beyond this time. Adhering to the orthodox religion means “to be in Lucifer's claws.” And that is much more the case with the spiritual forms that develop in the East that were justified in ancient times. Because they preserve themselves, they run into in the luciferic element. Everywhere in the East, we find many people who have to go through something in the luciferic element. Everywhere in the West, we find the souls imbued with the ahrimanic element, in America above all. In America the trend exists to develop a civilisation which is imbued completely with the materialistic ahrimanic element which is infiltrated with purely material views, even where one strives for spiritualism. Even where one strives for spirituality, one wants to seize the spirits, as it were, with the hands like the spiritualists. This tendency becomes stronger and stronger, and the longing for the material becomes bigger and bigger. It will also seize the west of Europe gradually. There the mission is fulfilled to introduce the ahrimanic element into civilisation.

These are the big points of view I had in my eye: that we see how we are roped in between the luciferic principle of the East and the ahrimanic principle of the West in Central Europe, but that we have a vocation to rise toward the forces that are shown by the Christ-principle. This principle makes Lucifer break his wings by overcoming the feeling of powerlessness, and, on the other side, emits forces against Ahriman which push back any fear of knowledge of the spiritual world. Because you cannot hold up the ahrimanic element pulsating through the world, it is there. Also Central Europe is seized by this ahrimanic element. People must only know how they have to position themselves to it, because the course of the ahrimanic element is the course through materialism. This course through materialism must be, and it has a deep wisdom-filled reason why this course through materialism must be.

Imagine that there is a one-sided religious movement—I expressly say “one-sided” religious movement, also in Christianity, and manifests itself in the element of Jesuitism the strongest. Think that it always turns against the real scientific progress. Nevertheless, the Catholic Church did only acknowledge the Copernican world view in the 19th century. The one-sided religion combats the external science, of course, this cannot be different. Two impulses are in this fighting against the external science. One impulse is that the one-sided religion may feel: in science which is done only in view of the external world Ahriman shows himself. This aspect of the quarrel is justified. Ahriman cannot be kept away from the external science if it does not look up to the spiritual world view; this is justified. However, the impulse of the one-sided religion against science is not justified.

This one-sided religious world view itself is inspired, is ensouled, so to speak, by the luciferic element in particular. Since striving for religious deepening and hating the scientific investigation of spiritual worlds is that Lucifer wants from the human beings. Lucifer could not arrive better at his goal, if all human beings were only religious. This religious attitude has a tremendously strong selfish impact. Imagine only how the human beings who do not strive for spiritual knowledge understand their religion. They want egotistically to become blest, live egotistically after death, as they imagine it. They want egotistically to be embodied only once in the world. In the one-sided religion, egoism has reached its peak, egoism of the soul, not only of the body. The best religious aspirations which surround us are in this egoism. The most pious people who touch us by their devoutness—Lucifer is he who controls their religious feelings. Lucifer prefers to get a lot of devout souls who have a sense for the spiritual, for the good they aim at egotistically. Because he does not want criminal souls, he wants to lead just the devout souls into his realm.

So we have, on the one side, the justified scientific element, which stands just at the threshold to the ahrimanic if it does not look up to the spiritual world, on the other side, the luciferic element which would be enslaved by selfish religiousness also in Central Europe unless the spiritual world view brought in a spiritual knowledge. This will be the progress of Christianity. It is exceptionally valuable to our souls if we penetrate ourselves with the knowledge that we stand between that what must be there, to the luciferic and ahrimanic elements from which we cannot escape which lose, however, their power if we recognise them. This is the characteristic of the spiritual world: if we recognise it, it loses the power through which it makes the human beings obsessed. Lucifer and Ahriman are invisible. If we get an idea of them in space and time, they lose their power over us.

You must not believe that if a person has a premonition of a bad spirit because of his clairvoyant capacity but does not behold it, the person does something worse when he represents the bad spirit pictorially or plastically. On the contrary, the following is correct: the spirit loses its power as a result of the sensory view. People will no longer become nervous by spiritually putting a figure, but the spirit as an invisible power loses its significance as an invisible force, and we consciously position ourselves in it. As God Himself uses Lucifer and Ahriman to put the world from East and to West back to the right track, so that the world does not experience an irregular development, but advances like by a pendulum movement, in the same way the world government lets the luciferic of the East, the ahrimanic of the West be effective.

However, it also poses the difficult and big task for us in Central Europe to look at this pendulum movement correctly. This pendulum is, actually, a small boat, as if a small boat were appended to a pendulum clock. In this small boat the souls of Central Europe are sitting who strive rightly for spirituality. These souls really have to dive in it and know that they have to grasp the right balance point. They have to recognise what is behind the threshold of the everyday consciousness; they have to take up it in their consciousness. Our present grievous days are admonitions above all to those who already anticipate a little bit of that which approaches the world in future.

It does not concern that within the war an external victory is won by the one or the other side, but it concerns how people live after this victory. Imagine that the Central European nations were victorious, however, on the field of this victory the purely materialist-ahrimanic world view would spread out and this would be detained by the luciferic element. If the East, on one side, and the West, on the other side, penetrated the Central European spirituality, an external victory would also not be salutary for this Central Europe. Since centuries, the human beings are penetrated rather strongly by the ahrimanic-luciferic element without noticing it. Imagine only that it was necessary to reject the oriental-luciferic element in our Central European theosophical movement. For that which we got as theosophy from the East was infiltrated by Lucifer and led also in its extreme to the recognition of an external human idol, a physically reincarnated Christ. This was the quarrel we had to have about the unjustified interpretation of the theosophical world view.

But we must be clear to us that we have to recognise correctly in Central Europe how we have to imagine what approaches humankind in future. We learn to see just by that which spiritual science can be to us that materialism, the materialistic world view is not allowed to extend about the area prepared for Central Europe. Those have to strive to prevent it who anticipate a little bit of the fact that a spiritual world view really spreads out, floating over Central Europe and radiating from there to the whole earth. It would be imaginable, externally imaginable as a hypothesis that this Central Europe would serve a materialistic civilisation after a victory. Then Ahriman would reap the fruits of this victory. This must be prevented.

Think only of such a tragic figure like Ernst Haeckel. Goethe wrote a theory of evolution. Since 1884, I attempt to make it clear to the people that it is a theory of evolution which is spiritual in the highest sense. But people cannot understand it in the deep way in which it is given there. When Darwin put it up trivially, people understood the teachings which could flow into their hearts and souls. The teachings had got a materialistic colouring. Take such a tragic figure like Ernst Haeckel. He got any thought, any fiber of his scientific life from England. Huxley, Locke, Darwin were his masters. Today Ernst Haeckel is somebody who turns mostly against England, he is one of the most furious fighters—as far as he can be it as an old man. He stood at the head of those who sent back their medals, certificates and honourings to England. However, it does not matter to send back medals and honourings unless the English coloured Darwinism is sent back.

And still some other things are there. The souls are prepared for materialism best of all if they are in a half-sleeping state for the external life, so to speak, if they are still childish souls. One does not notice that one can bring into the souls ideas which prepare them best of all to accept the materialistic view as a matter of course. Ahriman accomplished this, while he let a very effective spirit come into being who planted the tendency of materialism in the childish souls, unnoticed by the British people, without the human beings being aware of it. This is the exceptionally ingenious author of Robinson Crusoe. If anybody plants the ideas of Robinson in the childish souls, they get the propensity for materialism. In the book even religion comes into being of its own accord, as well as cabbages grow up. Nowhere is reflected on anything that should flow in from the spiritual world. See only Robinson moving through the world. There was a time of the literary development in Central Europe when imitations of Robinson existed in many languages. So many translations of Robinson are there. One cannot count them at all. So deep is this there inside. But the Central European culture has to show the way to spirituality again. And really a higher guidance inspired the brothers Grimm to collect fairy tales. If we give these fairy tales to our children instead of the ahrimanic Robinson, we bring them the propensity for spiritualism.

One is painfully affected if one—all that is symptomatic—experiences the following: a very significant philosopher of Austria, Ernst Mach, wrote a book, Analysis of Sensations, which was of great importance for many who want to think philosophically today. On the third page, he speaks of self-knowledge. We know that self-knowledge is exceptionally important, as I have often explained. Ernst Mach gives a proof of the fact that self-knowledge is rather difficult even for the external world. He tells: I passed a shop window where I saw my own picture, my own figure meeting myself. I thought: what an unpleasant, disgusting person meets me there. I myself was it.—Thus he said. He himself was it who has known himself so little that he said to his mirror image: what an unpleasant, disgusting person. And to make that clear completely, he adds: when he was already a professor, he had once returned from a trip at night and had got in a bus. When he got in, he saw in the mirror a man getting in and said to himself again: what a down-and-out schoolmaster is getting in there? So he adds: I knew the appearance of my type better than my individual appearance.

If it is already so difficult for a person who does not often see himself in a mirror—this speaks for Ernst Mach that this has taken place—to recognise the external figure, then one will get an inkling how difficult it is to get self-knowledge in the soul. It is just this, however, what is necessary: attaining self-knowledge in the soul. I would like to say, it affects somebody almost tragically if one reads up in the same book even farther, and Ernst Mach speaks of the education of his son and says from really serious soul: thanks to God—no, he does not say that, but something that is commensurate with it—never did my children read any fairy tales. So they were not introduced in a spiritual world by fantastic ideas resulting from reading fairy tales.—There we see that nesting in the souls of the present which wants to lead the Central European culture to Ahriman. One has to say: that does not concern to be victorious, but that the right attitude of mind is victorious on the basis of the victory.

We are also heavily burdened in Central Europe, even in the case of a victory. Because we are connected with something that is infiltrated very luciferically. It was once a benefit for Europe that from South Europe the Arabian, Moorish culture spread out. For the past, it was justified, but today it has become ahrimanic. We are heavily burdened with the alliance with the Ottoman Empire.¹ We have to find the correct standpoint and not believe that we can arrange our sensations according to external political viewpoints.

The life of the external world is not suited to prevent Ahriman. The external banal literature leads directly to the ahrimanic principle and pours scorn on the attempts to clearly see the powers working into our world. That is why that must appear as a big warning, which appears to us under the sign of blood and grief; to make the present souls inclined to get the gifts of the spiritual life. Our souls have to tend to that which was prepared in the Central European culture especially expressing that we are put pendulum-like between two powers permeating the world and that we must find the balance. We have to realise that, on the one side, the world strives for ahrimanic hardening, strives to get solidified in the fire of the purely material; that it strives, on the other side, to ascend egotistically to an abstract spirituality.

Following the one or other side would ruin the Central European human being. Following only the science engaged in the external senses would persuade us to tear the roses from the cross and only to look at that which solidifies. We would gain a world view gradually which would completely deflect the human being from looking at the spiritual. It would allow to only looking at that which has solidified ahrimanically. Try to imagine the ideals of the ahrimanic science: it is a world of whirling atoms, a purely material world creation. One wishes to throw everything spiritual out of this world-picture. One wants to imagine, and one teaches it already the children at school, that once whirling gaseous masses were in the universe from which the sun formed which then again pushed off the planets. One makes it clear to the children at school, while one does an oil drop in water, pushes a small round paper sheet at its equator through it, pierces it with a pin in the middle and turns the pin then. Small drops are split off that way; a small planetary system comes into being. Of course, it is proved what one shows in such a way, but one forgets the most important fact that the teacher must turn the pin. In truth, however, you have to conceive a big Mr. Teacher turning the whole matter in space, if you want to imagine it honestly. But the thoughts, the sensations and feelings, which tend to Ahriman, are those which imagine the creation of the sun and the planets in the just described way. That also influenced the historical view. Herman Grimm² says once: a bone of carrion around which a hungry dog is circling is a more appetising sight than this world view which is based only on this Copernican world view.

This is a threat to tear the roses from the cross and to have only the black, charred cross. The other threat is to tear the cross from the roses and want to strive only for the spirit, despise what the divinity has put in the world development, not to want to dive affectionately into the thought that the phenomena of the sensory world express the godhead. This is the unilaterally religious world view which despises the science which only wants the roses and which tends unconsciously to the luciferic element of the East. In the same way, science, which wants to tear the roses from the cross and to keep only the charred cross, tends to the West. We, however, in Central Europe, we have a vocation to have the roses on the cross to have this what is expressed only by the connection of the roses with the cross, the roses on the cross. Looking at the stiff cross we feel that that which has come as a stiff material to the world entered the world from the godhead. It is, as if spirituality created a circle in the material for itself: ex deo nascimur.

We also feel that if we understand it correctly we may enter the spiritual world not only with Lucifer, but that we die, while we are united with that which descended from the divine higher Self to the world: in Christo morimur.

And uniting the cross with the roses, the material world view with the spiritual world view, we feel that the human soul can awake in spirit: per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus.

Therefore, the cross wound around by roses was the symbol of Goethe who positioned himself in the spirituality of the Central European culture. It must be our symbol. That is why we will remind—as far as we can be present in future, gathering in this room—of that which must be our ideal out of the big tasks of the earth development: winding roses around the cross, neither tearing the roses from the cross and holding only the cross in our hands, nor only estimating the roses and ascending by means of the roses to the spiritually blossoming, sprouting life in the abstract. It is expressed to us in our symbol, in the rose cross, what we want to take up more and more in our souls, in our feelings when we come together in a room dedicated to our attempts. Then we can be sure that the spirits who lead the earth development in good sense exist invisible among us; that our words, that all our thoughts and feelings, while we dedicate ourselves to the spiritual-scientific attempts that all this is really supported in such a room by the spiritual powers guiding our attempts. We can feel, cultivating our spiritual-scientific views, as if we are constantly inspired by the spirits who exist invisible in such a room. I would like to call on these spiritual powers that they are always present with the souls if they strive in serious truth, honestly and affectionately in this room. If that comes true, we can be sure that this spiritual-scientific world view finds the way to the gods as it was always found.

Today we come together in such rooms. They are separated from the efforts of the external world. The external world considers the events in our rooms as something sectarian, something superstitious. And thus we are gathered as it were underground compared with the intellectual culture of the present. This intellectual culture, which is deeply infiltrated by Lucifer in the East, by Ahriman in the West, is above ground. There we remember repeatedly in order to strengthen our hearts, to invigorate our souls that in another epoch the western world view ascended from underground to the surface. There was the world view of the Roman Empire, the world view which had taken up the distinguished philosophy and the artistic world view of the Greeks. There were basically brilliant minds among those who lived within this ancient Rome and its surroundings with this old world view. They were deeply despised who cultivated a quite new teaching underground in the catacombs. However, those who cultivated the new teaching, separated from the world view above ground justified at that time, knew that they had only to hold on the contents of their striving and to retain what had entered in the world as a result of the Christ Impulse.

They strove in the catacombs and knew: those lived above ground who were out to kill them who pursued them who did not understand them.—After we have got these conditions of the ancient Roman Empire clear in our mind, we look at the human development a few centuries later. What was above has disappeared. What lived underground in the catacombs has ascended; it passes triumphantly through the West. It already lived in the souls of those who were striving for that which should then conquer the world although they were repelled, despised and mocked living underground in the catacombs. We must feel that way, my dear friends, as if we were still spiritually outcast and mocked and pursued by those who cultivate the so-called justified world view today. But in such a way as it happened in the first epoch of the western Christian development, it will go on. What one would best destroy—not like once, while one covered human beings with pitch and burnt them, but while one mocks them—it will gain acceptance. What jeers and mocks there, what wants to conquer the earth only with an ahrimanic and luciferic world view this will have disappeared, like the ancient Roman culture, the ancient world view disappeared in a certain way. However, what is cultivated in our catacombs—they are spiritual catacombs, the world has progressed, nevertheless—what is felt in these catacombs, what is imagined, what is reflected, what penetrates our souls: it will ascend and arrive triumphally at the culture of the next epoch. We may keep in mind that at every moment when we pass the gate to such a room. And staying in it, we keep in mind that we are still like in a submarine which will take the direction upwards—and absolutely will take it if we become engrossed strongly in this with which we have learnt to connect our souls. With this vow that we want to penetrate ourselves strongly with the spiritual Christ Impulse which is developing a further level, with this attitude, with this vow we really will enter this room. We enter in the sense of these feelings that everything is dedicated to the spiritual powers, to the spiritual individualities who permeate our movement, as we can know, who spread out their blessing and protecting hands about us. We want to keep in mind that when we come together here in future.

• 1. the Ottoman Empire entered the First World War on the side of the Central European powers in 1914.
• 2. Herman Grimm (1828–1901), in his Lectures on Goethe

Notes from a lecture given in Prague^*

Given the large amount of literature available, it is always possible to learn about the findings of spiritual science, particularly when anthroposophical groups work together. Since we are together now, I would like to discuss some guiding ideas out of spiritual impulses, ideas that continue in a more esoteric way what we spoke about more generally in yesterday's public lecture.¹

Many people today still believe in the contrast between faith and knowledge, faith and cognition. They say science can tell us about the world outside us, the only one we can know of with certainty. However, concerning the spiritual world, we must have faith. This attitude appears to contradict spiritual science, which strives to give us real knowledge of and insight into the spiritual world. In fact, it has to enter souls in our time in just this form, as insight and knowledge. In earlier incarnations our souls were in a completely different condition than now. They were more primitive, but in those times there were great individuals and many people connected with them. Those individuals conveyed ideas of the spiritual world, which we can still find in certain tribes and peoples and trace to individuals such as Hermes, Zarathustra, Moses, Buddha, and Krishna.² Spiritual ideas had to be poured into people's souls.

In the physical world life is not just toil and work, but slaving and drudgery. Most of this toil and work is not in the sense of “it's been a hard day's work,” but in the sense of unconscious occurrences caused by our thinking—in fact, our whole soul life as it takes its course.

We are all much more alike when we are born than we think. We do not resemble each other in our appearance, but in our structure. The forces at work in a child are active at an unconscious level. The spirit takes hold of the body and structures it. Only then does the sculpting and elaborating of the nerves begin. This happens independently of our mind, at a time when we are not yet able to use it. Then we become aware of ourselves as an I. That is when the wisdom we have brought with us from the gods, from the spiritual world, ceases.

In the first period after birth, we have only life forces, so to speak; our life then is nothing but a continuation of the spiritual world. Death in infancy is due to external bodily causes, and the child's soul plays no part in it.

Then we begin to deplete our physical bodies with every thought, every feeling. We must sleep to make up for what we have depleted during the day. If we did not thus eat away at our physical organization, we would have a budding and burgeoning life. Our etheric body always wants to bud and to sprout, but the astral body needs to consume what the etheric body builds up, and thus suppresses it. When we are sleeping, compensation for what has been eaten away and killed off flows into us from the spiritual world to reestablish the balance. The normal amount of sleep replaces exactly as much as has been depleted. If we decided to sleep more, as some retired people do, we would sleep too much. Of course, that is no objection to sleeping a lot. Since intellectual work takes a lot out of our physical organization, people doing that kind of work need much sleep. But if we sleep too much, we have too many new life forces and these then begin to proliferate; the human being then abounds with life forces. This surplus of life forces leads to illness. So if we want to do more than merely make up for what we depleted through our daily work and advance spiritually, we have to consciously take what we need from the spiritual world.

The founders of our religions believed it was their task to lead their people, to use up life forces, which will then be compensated for. However, what has to develop within us for the progress of humanity must be consciously drawn from the spiritual world so that it will not die in our physical existence.

That is why the founders of our religions provided ideas they had received from the spiritual world. These truly spiritual thoughts nourish our soul and maintain it. It would be the death of our soul if it always had to live in thoughts taken only from the physical world. In earlier times, religious beliefs were such spiritual thoughts human souls need. That phase of our development has been completed, and we live now in a time when we on earth will gradually lose the ability to take in what speaks only to our emotions, our faith. We can still preserve this faith for a time, galvanizing it, so to speak, but we cannot keep it for the future. The principle “I believe” has to be replaced with “I believe what I know.” People will begin to feel that this new principle must be applied. Otherwise we deny ourselves any possibility of knowing something about the life between death and a new birth. Then we would return to pitiful conditions in our next incarnation. Enthusiasm for other ideals, all clearly justified, is certainly a good thing and has to exist. However, in comparison with the foundations of spiritual science, these ideals cannot be put into practice directly. Lacking its knowledge, they can only be precursors of spiritual science.

As we progress in our spiritual research, we will feel the need to remain silent rather than to speak. If we speak nevertheless, it is out of insight into the conditions necessary for our time. Knowledge alone will make us free, and it is the task of the future to win the freedom of the human soul.

Thoughts of great spiritual power came from the founders of our religions. They were thoughts of faith that could wonderfully illuminate the region beyond death. These ideas were transformed into a true, spiritual light that revealed the environment beyond death to human beings. But the time will come when we will have to live in freedom. And even if new religious leaders were still to proclaim the old teachings of faith with the voice and the power of the gods, we would no longer understand them. We are experiencing this now. The sciences concerned with the outer world have arrived, as they had to. A great contemporary scientist, Max Müller, said that if an angel were to come down and proclaim news of the spiritual world, people would not understand or believe him.³

That is the development of humanity. It seems to lead inevitably to the loss of our ability to imbue ourselves with thoughts related to the spiritual worlds. That would mean we would have less light after death to illuminate our spiritual environment by ourselves. After all, no sun will shine from the outside on the world around us then, the light has to come from us. We then take the place of the sun and illuminate our surroundings after death. People unable to do this will have to return and repeat life on earth to assimilate thoughts and ideas that are fruitful for their existence after death. When we understand this, more than the usual enthusiasm for spreading spiritual science will loosen our tongue and prompt us to speak. Believing in what we know—that will be the need of humanity in the future.

In ancient times, religious ideas, myths, and fairy tales gave souls light for the spiritual world. It is easy to say that myths and fairy tales developed in the childhood stages of the human race. Of course, people did not physically meet the angels that myths and fairy tales speak about. But thinking based on philosophy will be of little use in the spiritual world where such knowledge has no meaning. It is easy to say fairy tales are not based on truth. Spiritual researchers are not so naive, and know that fiery dragons do not really fly through the air. However, they always knew it was necessary to form the Imagination of the fiery dragon, for when it lives in the soul, it casts light on the spiritual world. These are powerful Imaginations. That is the principle behind all myths; they are not intended to reflect external reality accurately, but to enable us to live in the spiritual world.

Materialists say myths and fairy tales originated in the childhood stage of the human race. But in its childhood, humanity was taught by the gods. In the process of our evolution, myths and fairy tales are gradually lost, but children should not grow up without them. It makes a tremendous difference whether or not children are allowed to grow up with fairy tales. The power of the fairy tale images, which give wings to the soul, becomes apparent only at a later age. Growing up without fairy tales leads later to boredom, to world-weariness. Indeed, it can even cause physical symptoms—fairy tales can help to prevent illnesses. The qualities that seep into our soul from fairy tales later emerge as a zest for life, enthusiasm for being alive, and an ability to cope with life, all of which can be seen even in old age. Children have to experience the power of the content of fairy tales while they are young and can still do so. People who cannot live with ideas that have no reality on the physical plane will be dead to the spiritual world. Philosophies based only on the material world are the death of our soul. Physical evolution leads to the death of the spiritual world. We must reach a view of the world based not on appearances, but resting solidly on its own inherent structure. We have to move toward the principle: I believe what I know.

We have to learn to pay attention to the symptoms of our cultural life. For example, I once gave a lecture in a town in southern Germany, and afterward two Catholic priests came up to me and said that I was only speaking to educated people, while they spoke so everyone could understand them. In reality, the opposite is the case. Anthroposophy can reach everyone provided we find the way to the simple, ordinary people. The farmer would understand it much better than the so-called educated person if only the way were not blocked by social conventions. In these matters, we must be able to leave ourselves completely out of the picture and not ask what we think best. Instead, we must ask what human souls require in a given era. So I replied to the priests that while their feeling tells them they speak to everyone, the facts will tell them they do not, because not everyone comes to hear them. And it is to those who do not come to them that I speak.

On earth we gain knowledge and insight through our physical and etheric bodies. Let us examine carefully how much of what is in our soul comes from the physical world. Light, for example, reaches us through the eyes. The process of seeing is one of deterioration right from its start in the eyes. The deterioration starts directly at the retina. The process detaches itself from life. In the morning, after sleep, our eyes have been restored and are filled with pure life. However, as we perceive, something forms in the living tissue that is no longer alive but only mineral. And we perceive the outer world, which is mirrored in us, because this process continues in the nerve tissue. Thus, insofar as the physical body is the bearer of these processes, it is not alive.

The etheric body is the bearer of thoughts that are also mirror images. People could easily discover that our thoughts reflect the super-sensible. Thoughts will never lend themselves to inspection under the microscope because in reality they live in the etheric body. They are formed by our thinking, which is mirrored in the physical body. We can see from this that understanding and knowledge are dependent on the physical and etheric bodies, which are affected only by the impressions of the physical world. Completely different thoughts have to take hold in our soul, in our astral body, and all our feeling, willing, and thinking not limited to the physical plane. Otherwise we will remain inwardly dead. All thoughts that represent objects are meaningful only on the physical plane. This is implied in the very question, “Are thoughts that do not represent objects justified?” Only with the thoughts living freely in the spirit, living freely in the astral body and the I can we gain insight, only with those thoughts can we live. These thoughts not only represent things, but are also inwardly active and alive; they create something out of themselves and out of us.

In modern art, naturalism predominates these days. In ancient times the soul was filled with images that brought activity into the thoughts of the astral body. Everything depicting only outer things is meaningless in the spiritual world. We must imbue ourselves with new images that can once again meaningfully permeate our soul. Often we take hold of something we believe to exist only in our imagination, to be only fantasy. This is frequently only a memory of something originating on the physical plane. We can revitalize what would otherwise die in our soul only by enlivening our images with thoughts that do not originate on the physical level and are not created by that kind of imagination.

People increasingly misuse the phrase: A beautiful soul in a beautiful body, a healthy soul in a healthy body. This phrase was appropriate for the understanding of earlier times. Unfortunately, today it is seen as a statement of cause; if someone has a healthy body, people conclude that a healthy soul lives in it. Whatever makes the body healthy will do the same for the soul.

If people do not develop thoughts that keep the astral body inwardly agile, they will suffer from mineral deposits even in childhood and as a result become ill later in life. And the world they enter after death will remain dark, because they do not radiate any light themselves. The rays of the sun strike a surface and that is how we see things. But in the spiritual world we are the source of light; we illuminate the surroundings we are supposed to see. Souls feeling the need to pursue spiritual science may not be aware of these circumstances, but they live in the depths of the soul. Just as in the physical world sunlight comes from the outside, so we must make ourselves sunlike in the spiritual world. We have to light in ourselves the spiritual fuel, the inner flame, to illuminate the realm of the spirit.

Physicists imagine the red of a rose can be traced to oscillation, to variations in wavelength. People say there is really no sound, only vibrations of air. They claim what we hear as sound exists only in our ears. Well, a simple experiment can teach us otherwise, namely, if we have someone wake us up by knocking on the door. We will notice that we were not conscious during the night when we were asleep, but that on waking up we were already living in the knocking. We ourselves have to enter into the knocking sound. We use the other person to do the knocking because our soul itself cannot do it. If we resolved firmly to wake up, we could do so, but this way we are only using the other person as a tool.

If materialist views continue to persist for several generations more, the red of roses will really disappear. People will actually see little gray atoms vibrating as an atomic whirl, not because they have to see them or because they exist, but because they will have trained themselves to see them. That is why it is necessary to spread spiritual science, to prevent having to live in a future filled with nothing other than physical atoms swirling around.

We are not talking about the physical ether but the one that is living thought. We must realize first of all that a rose is not a mass of whirling atoms, but that behind it there are real living and interweaving elemental beings. The theory of the spiritual world is secondary; the main thing is to concentrate our feeling, to feel ourselves living and weaving in our new perception of the reality of the spiritual world. This is the resurrection of the spiritual world in our souls, the truly ecumenical Easter event.

Our ancestors required a different event that was connected to the time when the sun reaches its zenith. When everything in nature was budding and blossoming, they experienced an ecstasy that reaffirmed for them the existence of the spiritual world. What they experienced then at St. John's Tide we now have to experience in the spring, at Easter. We have to be able to celebrate the awakening of the soul, the resurrection of the soul, when spiritual science speaks to us not merely as a theory, but as living knowledge.

• *. The following two lectures differ in character and content from the preceding five. In both, Rudolf Steiner approaches the central theme from a much wider perspective. In addition, “Faith and Knowledge” is not a complete, word for word, record of a lecture but notes summarizing what Steiner said. Therefore, the two lectures have been placed in the appendix.
• 1. Lecture of April 16, 1914, entitled “Wie findet die Menschenseele ihre wahre Wesenheit?” (“How Can the Human Soul Find Its True Essence?”).
• 2. Hermes, the ancient Greek herald and messenger of the gods. See also Lecture Three, note 5.
• 3. Max Müller, 1823–1900, German orientalist, linguist, and religious scholar, professor of philology at Oxford. Literally: “A change is to take place, a transformation of such magnitude that even if angels came down and announce it, we would understand it as little as an infant would understand what we told it about the world in our language,” in Leben und Religion (“Life and Religion”), Stuttgart, n.y.

I want to begin these lectures for Members by speaking of how Anthroposophy lifts human consciousness above the earthly and material domain simply through the light it sheds upon the nature and being of man.

It is hardly possible for anyone immersed in modern civilisation to think otherwise than that during his life from birth to death he belongs to the Earth. Membership of a spiritual world is in most cases a mere belief or a dim inkling. Insight into the fact that man belongs to any world other than the Earth is scarcely within the power of human beings whose education and whole upbringing are the outcome of modern civilisation. Nevertheless, to believe that when man is being spoken of earthly conditions alone have to be considered is the great fallacy of all contemporary spiritual life in the West and in Middle Europe. The East alone has preserved a certain consciousness—although in a decadent form—of man's connection with the super-sensible, cosmic powers and forces around the Earth. In olden times man felt himself dependent on the stars as well as on the plants and the animals around him on the Earth; he knew, too, that the Moon is not simply a physical orb revolving in space. Interest in the Moon to-day does not really go much further than attempts to discover whether there are or are not mountains or water there; hypotheses are advanced, but little thought is given to any other aspect of this neighbouring planet. As for the other heavenly bodies, investigation is entirely concerned with their physical conditions. In ancient times it was altogether different. Man was aware of his dependence on the heavenly bodies just as to-day he is aware of his dependence on the Earth.

I will start with something that has a certain scientific importance; it is an example that may perhaps not be to the liking of some people, but it is easy to follow. I have often emphasised in Anthroposophical lectures that the formation of the human embryo in earthly life, even when investigated from the purely scientific point of view, provides the proof in itself that something extra-earthly is at work in the process. Natural science believes the ovum to be the most complex structure that can possibly exist on Earth. Much thought is given to this complex structure of the ovum and recently we have been hearing about the wonders of the atom and the molecule! The structure of a cell is said to be indescribably complex. But this is a fallacy, for the ovum is, in reality, chaos; it is not a complex structure. The chemical physical structure goes to pieces, and before a living being can arise the ovum must have been in a state of chaos. The very purpose of fertilisation is to produce this state of chaos in the ovum, so that within the mother's organism there is matter which has been completely broken down. The processes in the mother's body produce this state of chaos. And now think of a crystal. The Cosmos cannot work in a crystal with its hard, firm edges; neither can the Cosmos work in the substance of a plant, which also has solid form; nor in that of an animal. Fertilisation means that the ovum becomes a chaos. Only then does the whole surrounding Cosmos work in upon this germinating entity and build up the living human form in such a way that the being of soul and spirit coming from earlier earthly lives can enter into it.

According to modern views this is so much nonsense—but it happens to be the truth! What is so deplorable in our time is that when one speaks the truth it is almost inevitably pooh-poohed by contemporary scholarship. Some people may say: “This statement of yours may be based upon occult vision; but is it also capable of proof?” It is indeed—and in more ways than one might imagine. At our Institute for Biological Research in Stuttgart remarkable confirmation of this fact has come to light. Investigations have been made into the function of the spleen. You know, perhaps, that the spleen has always been considered a very enigmatical organ. The story goes that in a viva voce examination the candidate was asked by the professor: “Can you tell me anything about the spleen?” The candidate puzzled his brains and at last blurted out in desperation: “I have forgotten it.” “What a pity!” said the professor. “Nobody has ever known anything about the spleen; you apparently were the only one, and you have forgotten it!”

I indicated a certain method, based on the principles of Spiritual Science, according to which Frau Dr. Kolisko has investigated the function of the spleen. The validity of her results is still being questioned but they will eventually win through, because the investigations were genuinely exact. During the investigations something else came to light. Because of the methods in general use to-day, one is sometimes obliged to adopt procedures that go much against the grain, but we finally decided to excise the spleens of rabbits. It was nothing in the least like vivisection but a quite simple operation; and we did everything that could possibly be done to avoid causing suffering. Unfortunately one of the rabbits died from a chill after the operation because by an oversight it was not taken immediately into the heated room. What result was to be expected from this operation? After the removal of the spleen something developed in the rabbit's body at the same place, something to which the Cosmos could have access. As long as the spleen itself was there the Cosmos could do nothing; but if the spleen is removed, the etheric spleen alone remains, and the etheric spleen adapts itself to the working forces of the Cosmos. It was to be expected, then, that at the place where the spleen had been, something would develop in the form that is a copy of the Cosmos, namely, the spherical form. And this is what we actually found! When we opened the rabbit we found a tiny organic body, spherical in shape; it had been produced by the in-working cosmic forces—when the condition in which the Earth alone works had been removed. This is entirely in line with the contention that the fertilised ovum is a body in which a state of chaos has been induced. And so karma led us to an external proof of something that holds good in another sphere altogether.

In many respects it is the case that if a man's thoughts and feelings are the outcome of contemporary civilisation, his outlook is bound to be limited to the Earth; he is incapable of directing his gaze in any real sense to the Cosmos. Let me remind you of what is said in the book Occult Science, namely that the Moon and the Earth were originally one body, but that the Moon subsequently separated from the Earth. This fact is revealed to seership but it is also to some extent recognised by modern natural science. Particularly in the last few years a certain literary and scientific movement has been speaking—although in an erroneous way—of this relationship of the Moon to the Earth. The Moon in the heavens was once united with the Earth, was then ejected—if I may so express it—and since then has been circling around the Earth.

I must now speak of a second fact, connected with man's spiritual development in earthly existence. Even a purely external survey of what men have achieved on the Earth indicates the existence of a primordial, archetypal wisdom. It was not, of course, imparted in the abstract, intellectual forms demanded to-day, nor was it so closely bound up with the senses. It was imparted in a more pictorial, poetic form. Of this primordial wisdom itself, which existed on the Earth in times long before writing was known, nothing has remained. Echoes have been preserved in sagas and myths, in the wonderful Vedic literature, in the Vedanta and other Eastern texts. Anyone who steeps himself in this literature—not in the style of Deussen who sees only the outermost surface but for all that is an interpreter of great renown—anyone who can get to the depths of what this literature contains will have a profound reverence for the infinite wisdom there expressed in a pictorial, poetic form. He will feel that behind it all there was something unuttered and unwritten, perhaps even greater and more significant a primordial, archetypal wisdom. How was this wisdom attained? Men did not study as we do to-day, imbibing the contents of book after book and so gradually amassing a certain amount of information. Every human being who had developed a certain insight in those ancient times knew what Inspiration is, knew how to read in the world itself—not in books—when he induced in himself the right attitude of soul. He knew the reality of inner illumination; it was as real to him as the reading of books is real to us to-day. The priests in the Mysteries brought him to the stage where he was able to experience this inner illumination and become aware of spiritual reality in the Universe. This indeed was the purpose of the instruction he received in the Mysteries. He did not feel that the illumination came to him from the clouds. If we to-day were listening to someone talking from behind a screen, we should not attribute the voice to some undefined source but to an actual person. Similarly, a man who attained illumination knew: there are Beings on the Earth who, although they are not in physical incarnation, are the great Teachers of humanity. Man knew that he moved among Beings who were not, like himself, incarnate in flesh and blood but who were etheric Beings, imparting the illumination and the content of the primordial wisdom. He knew that the Earth was peopled not only by human beings of flesh and blood but by other Beings too, working and living in etheric bodies.

In studying these things we must get rid of the preconceived notion that humanity has lived on the Earth since the time of which records exist and that this was preceded by undefined conditions leading back to the man ape or the ape man. This is a really ludicrous idea! What the historians say holds good for a few centuries only, namely, that human beings have not changed fundamentally, except that they are supposed to have become cleverer. It is said that the Egyptians were a superstitious people, that they had mummies and other such customs, but apart from cleverness they are thought to have been just like modern men. Nothing is known with any certainty of the long period of previous history, but the view is that it leads back finally to the man ape.

That is a view of evolution which must be abandoned! Man peopled the Earth before the animals, only in a different form; man is the older being, as you can read in Occult Science. The ancient Teachers of the primeval wisdom did not incarnate in physical bodies but lived in spirit bodies, and the men who communed with them, having experienced—as we ourselves experienced—the event of the separation of the Moon, knew that these Beings who had been among them as great Teachers had gone forth into the Cosmos, that they were no longer on the Earth but on the Moon. So that in truth not only the physical substance of the Moon but these spiritual Beings too, separated from the Earth. Once upon a time these Beings—who do not pass through birth and death in the same way as man—withdrew from the Earth and took up their abode on the Moon, although the actual substance of the Moon has been involved for long ages in a constant process of change.

This applies equally to man. In a period of seven to eight years the physical substances in the human body have completely changed. If anyone imagines that the bodies sitting here are the same as they were a few years ago, he is mistaken. The physical substance is entirely different; the soul and spirit has remained. Natural science is aware of this fact but pays no attention to it. The following question was once put to me after a lecture: “It is said that bees, as a hive, have a real link with the beekeeper, that if he has been very devoted to his bees and then dies, the hive is aware of his death and often dies too. How can this possibly happen? The bees as single entities have no faculties for knowing a human being, and the hive is only the sum total of the single bees!”—But this is by no means correct. I answered by using the following analogy. “Twenty years ago, two men were together. One of them goes to America, the other stays behind; after fifteen years the former returns from America and recognises his friend again. Yet not a single particle of the same physical substance has remained!”—And so it is not a question of each individual bee but of the intelligence of the beehive as a unit and that is not really so very different from human intelligence. As men, we are distinct from the cells in our bodies, from our various organs. And just as no single particle of the bodies of those who attended my lectures ten years ago has remained, but only the soul and spirit, so, although the Moon substance which once left the Earth has long since passed away, has been exchanged in the Cosmos, the Beings have remained. How these Beings have continued to participate in the life of earthly humanity is clearly revealed to the vision of Initiation, and to deeper observation of what we call karma. I will begin to speak about this to-day and continue in the following lectures.

When we make the acquaintance of a human being we do not as a rule give sufficient thought to the fact that we have really steered our whole earthly life towards this meeting. Acquaintance with another human being may take two forms. If we pay close attention we shall find more or less the following.—We get to know some person and feel aware of an intimate bond with him, no matter what he is like outwardly—good looking or ugly, intelligent or stupid. We pay no attention to his outer appearance; we feel an inner bond with him. That is the one alternative, in its extreme form. The other alternative is this.—We make the acquaintance of someone without feeling any inner bond, but he makes an intellectual or a moral impression upon us. We can describe him in great detail. Our relationship with the first acquaintance is such that if, after our meeting, we are among other people who also know him, it goes against the grain to talk about him; we feel a kind of embarrassment; there is something essentially inward in our relationship with him. But to talk about the second acquaintance is quite easy. We say that he is intelligent, or that he is a fool; we can describe the very shape of his nose, but we have no inner affinity with him. In the case of some people, no sooner have we made their acquaintance than we are always dreaming about them. We may get to know another person extremely well; we may be with him every day but we never by any chance dream about him because we have not been stirred inwardly. Very rarely indeed will there by anyone like Garibaldi,¹ who felt the inner bond even before there was any direct, personal relationship. Such cases are rare, but they do occur. The circumstances in which Garibaldi met his first wife are very interesting. External life affected him so little that he had no interest whatever in women. On a voyage to the coast of Brazil he happened to look at the land through his telescope and saw a girl standing on the shore. At that very moment he knew that she must become his wife. He hurried his ship to the land where a man greeted him in a friendly way and invited him to a meal at his house. Garibaldi accepted, and this man turned out to be the father of the girl he had seen through the telescope! Even before the meal was served he said to her—he spoke only Italian and she only Portuguese—that she must be his for life. She understood, and a very beautiful relationship was established between them. There you have a telling example of a karmic relationship. There was something heroic in the way the woman behaved. She accompanied Garibaldi on his campaigns in South America and when the news came that he had fallen on the battlefield, she went to search for him there. These were the circumstances in which she gave birth to her child, and in order to keep it warm she was obliged to strap it round her neck. Such experiences helped Garibaldi to find a firmer foothold in life. His wife eventually died and he married another woman whose acquaintance he made in an entirely conventional way; but this marriage lasted only for a day!

These are matters where karma stares us in the face, indicating two ways in which karma comes to expression between one human being and another. The karmic relationships differ entirely according to whether a man feels an inner bond or whether he can describe only the external characteristics of the other person.

When we study karmic experiences like that of an acquaintanceship where beauty or ugliness counts for nothing but where the feeling of kinship wells up entirely from within, we are led to discern the influence of those Beings of whom I have said that they were the original, primeval Teachers of mankind; they have remained active to this day, but now they work from outside, from the Cosmos. Such relationships are of special interest to these Moon Beings and through them they participate in the most intimate way in the evolution of earthly humanity.

Just as there are Beings who belong to the Moon, so there are Beings who belong to the Sun. We have spoken of relationships where we find it easy to describe the other person in a more external way. In these cases it is the Sun Beings who interest themselves in the threads that are woven between soul and soul.

In studying human relationships we are led away from the Earth, first of all to the Sun and the Moon. There are human relationships in which we discern the working of the Moon; others in which we discern the working of the Sun. And so stage by stage we are led from the Earth to the Cosmos.

All that has been possible to-day is to make a beginning and we will continue in the lectures that are to follow.

• 1. Garibaldi, 1807–1882. The maiden name of his Brazilian wife was Anita Riveira de Silva.

In the lecture yesterday I gave certain indications in connection with the understanding of human destiny, and I said that an inkling of the power of destiny may come to a man from experiences which have had a significant effect upon his life. Suppose that at a certain age a man meets another human being; after the meeting their destinies run a similar course but the lives they both led hitherto have completely changed. An event like this meeting would have no rhyme or reason if it were entirely unconnected with previous happenings in their lives. Nor is this the case. Unprejudiced observation of the past reveals that practically every step taken in life was leading in the direction of this event. We may look right back into our childhood and we shall invariably find that some deed far removed in time from this event, that indeed the whole course of our life, led up to it as surely as if we had consciously and deliberately taken the path to it.

Such matters direct attention again and again to what in Anthroposophy we must call ‘karmic relationships.’

I also said that acquaintanceships differ in character and as examples I quoted two extreme cases. We meet someone and form a bond with him, no matter what outward impression he makes upon our senses or aesthetic feelings. We do not think about his individual traits; our attraction to him is caused by something that wells up from within us. When we meet other human beings, we are not inwardly stirred in this way; we are more conscious of the appearance they present to our senses, our mental life, our aesthetic feelings. I said that this difference comes to expression even in the life of dream. We make acquaintanceships of the first kind and during the night, while we are living in the Ego and astral body outside the physical and etheric bodies, we immediately begin to be aware of the persons in question; we dream about them. The dreams are a sign that something within us has been set astir by the meeting. We meet others of whom we do not dream because they have not stirred us inwardly and nothing wells up from within. We may be quite near to them in life but we never dream about them because nothing that reaches into our astral body and Ego organisation has been set astir.

We heard that such happenings are related to the extra earthly forces with which man is connected and of which modern thought takes no account—the forces working in upon the Earth from the surrounding, super terrestrial Universe. We learned that the forces proceeding from the spiritual Moon Beings are connected with the whole of a man's past. For the past is in very truth working in us when immediately we meet a human being we are impelled towards him by something that wells up from within.

Speculation and dim feelings must, however, be replaced by Initiation science which can actually bring to light the inner connections of these things. The Initiate before whom the spiritual world lies open, has both kinds of experiences, but in far greater intensity than is possible to ordinary consciousness. In the one case, where something rises up from within into the ordinary consciousness, a definite picture or a whole series of pictures filled with living reality rise up from within the Initiate when he meets the other human being and are there before him like a script he is able to read. The experience is quite clear to him; he himself is there within the picture which rises up in this way—it is as if an artist were painting a picture but instead of standing in front of the canvas were weaving in the canvas itself, living in every colour, experiencing the very essence of the colour. The Initiate knows that the picture arising in this way has something to do with the human being he meets. And through an experience resembling that of meeting a person again after the lapse of many years, he recognises in the human being standing physically before him, the replica of the picture that has risen up in him. As he compares this inner picture with the man before him, he knows that it is the picture of experiences shared in common with him in earlier earthly lives. He looks back consciously into an earlier epoch when these experiences were shared between them. And as a result of what he has undergone in preparation for Initiation science, he experiences in a living picture—not in dim feeling as in ordinary consciousness—what he and the man he now meets passed through together in a previous earthly life or a number of previous lives. Initiation science enables us to see a picture of experiences shared with a man with whom we are karmically connected; it rises up with such intensity that it is as if he were to break away from his present identity and stand before us in his earlier form, coming to meet himself in the form he now bears. The impression is actually as vivid as that. And because the experience has such intense reality, we are able to relate it to its underlying forces and so to discover how and why this picture rose up from within us.

When man is descending to earthly life from the existence he spends in worlds of soul and spirit between death and a new birth, he passes through the different cosmic regions the last being the Moon-sphere. As he passes through the Moon-sphere he encounters those Beings of whom I spoke yesterday, saying that they were once the primeval Teachers of humanity. He meets these Beings out yonder in the Universe, before he comes down to the Earth, and it is they who inscribe everything that has happened in life between one human being and another, into that delicate substance which, as opposed to earthly substances, the oriental sages have called ‘Akasha.' It is really the case that whatever happens in life, whatever experiences come to men, everything is observed by those Beings who, as Spirit Beings not incarnate in the flesh, once peopled the Earth together with men. Everything is observed and inscribed into the Akasha substance as living reality, not in the form of an abstract script. These spiritual Moon Beings who were the great Teachers during the age of primeval cosmic wisdom, are the recorders of the experiences of mankind. And when in his life between death and a new birth a man is once again drawing near the Earth in order to unite with the seed provided by the parents, he passes through the region where the Moon Beings have recorded what he had experienced on the Earth in earlier incarnations. Whereas these Moon Beings, when they were living on the Earth, brought men a wisdom relating especially to the past of the Universe, in their present cosmic existence they preserve the past. And as man descends to earthly existence, everything they have preserved is engraved into his astral body. It is so easy to say that man consists of an Ego organisation, an astral body, an etheric body, and so forth. The Ego organisation is most akin to the Earth; it comprises what we learn and experience in earthly existence; the more deeply lying members of man's being are of a different character. Even the astral body is quite different; it is full of inscriptions, full of pictures. What is known simply as the ‘unconscious' discloses a wealth of content when it is illumined by real knowledge. And Initiation makes it possible to penetrate into the astral body and to bring within the range of vision all that the Moon Beings have inscribed into it as, for example, the experiences shared with other human beings. Initiation science enables us to fathom the secret of how the whole past rests within man and how ‘destiny' is shaped through the fact that in the Moon-existence there are Beings who preserve the past so that it lies within us when we again set foot upon the Earth.

And now another case. When the Initiate meets a man in connection with whom the ordinary consciousness simply receives an aesthetic or mental impression unaccompanied by dreams, no picture rises up in him, to begin with. In this case the gaze of the Initiate is directed to the Sun, not to the Moon. I have told you of the Beings who are connected with the Moon—in the same way, the Sun is not merely the gaseous body of which modern physicists speak. The physicists would be highly astonished if they were able to make an expedition to the region which they surmise to be full of incandescent gases and which they take to be the Sun; at the place where they have conjectured the presence of incandescent gases, they would find a condition that is not even space, that is less than a void a vacuum in cosmic space. What is space? Men do not really know—least of all the philosophers who give a great deal of thought to it. Just think: if there is a chair here and I walk towards it without noticing its presence, I hit against it—it is solid, impenetrable. If there is no chair I walk through space unhindered.

But there is a third possibility. I might go to the spot without being held up or knocked, but I might be sucked up and disappear: here there is no space, but the antithesis of space. And this antithesis of space is the condition in the Sun, The Sun is negative space.² And just because of this, the Sun is the abode, the habitual abode, of the Beings who rank immediately above man: Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai. In the case of which I am speaking, the gaze of the Initiate is directed towards these Beings in the Sun, the spiritual Beings of the Sun. In other words: a meeting of this kind that is not part of a karmic past, but is quite new, is for the Initiate a means of coming into connection with these Beings. And the presence is revealed of certain Beings with some of whom man has a close connection, whereas with others the connection is more remote. The way in which these Beings approach the Initiate reveals to him—not in detail but in broad outline—what kind of karma is about to take shape; in this case it is not old karma but karma that is coming to him for the first time. He perceives that these Beings who are connected with the Sun have to do with the future, just as the Moon Beings have to do with the past.

Even if a man is not an Initiate, his whole life of feeling will be deepened if he grasps what Initiation science is able to draw in this way from the depths of spirit-existence. For these things are in themselves a source of enlightenment. A comparison I have often used is that just as a picture can be understood by a man who is not himself a painter, so these truths can be understood by one who is not himself an Initiate. But if a man allows these truths to work upon him, his whole relationship to the Universe is immeasurably deepened. When man looks up to the Universe and its structure to-day, how abstract, how prosaic and barren are his conceptions! When he looks at the Earth he is still interested to a certain extent; he looks at the animals in the wood with a certain interest. If he is cultured, he takes pleasure in the slender gazelle, the nimble deer; if his tastes are less refined, these animals interest him as game; he can eat them. He is interested in the plants and vegetables, for all these things are directly related to his own life. But just as his feelings and emotions are stirred by his relationship with the earthly world, so his life of feeling can be stirred by the relationship he unfolds to the Cosmos beyond the Earth. And everything that comes over as destiny from the past—if it makes an impression upon us—impels us in heart and soul to look up to the Moon Beings, saying to ourselves: “Here on the Earth men have their habitations; on the Moon there are Beings who once were together with us on the Earth. They have chosen a different dwelling place but we are still connected with them. They record our past; their deeds are living reality within us when the past works over into our earthly existence.”

We look upwards with reverence and awe, knowing that the silvery moon is but the sign and token of these Beings who are so intimately connected with our own past. And through what we experience as men, we enter into relationship with these cosmic, super earthly Powers whose images are the stars, just as through our carnal existence we are related with everything that lives on the Earth. Looking with expectation towards the future and living on into that future with our hopes and strivings, we no longer feel isolated within our own life of soul but united with what is radiating to us from the Sun. We know that the Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai are Sun Beings who go with us from the present on into the future. When we look up into the Cosmos, perceiving how the radiance of the Moon is dependent upon the radiance of the Sun and how these heavenly bodies are interrelated, then out yonder in the Cosmos we behold a picture of what is living within our very selves. For just as Sun and Moon are related to one another in the world of stars, so is our past—which has to do with the Moon—related to our future—which has to do with the Sun. Destiny is that in man which flows out of the past, through the present, on into the future. Woven into the Cosmos, into the courses of the stars and the mutual interplay of the stars, we behold the picture—now infinitely magnified—of what lives within our own being.

Our vision is thereby widened and penetrates deeply into the cosmic spheres. When a man passes through death he is released, to begin with, from his physical body only. He is living in his Ego organisation, his astral body, his ether body. But after a few days his ether body has released itself from the astral body and from the ‘I.' That which he now experiences is something that emerges as it were from himself; to begin with it is not large, but then it expands and expands—it is his ether body. This ether body expands into cosmic space, out into the very world of the stars—thus it appears to him. But as it expands the ether body becomes so fine, is so rarefied, that after a few days it vanishes from him. But something else is connected with this. While our ether body is being given over to the Cosmos, while it is expanding and becoming finer and more rarefied, it is as though we were reaching out to the secrets of the stars, penetrating into the secrets of the stars.

As we pass upwards through the Moon-sphere after death, the Moon Beings read from our astral body what we experienced in earthly existence. After our departure from earthly existence we are received by those Moon Beings, and our astral body in which we are now living is for them like a book in which they read. And they make an unerring record of what they read, in order that it may be inscribed into the new astral body when the time comes for us to descend to the Earth again.

We pass from the Moon-sphere through the Mercury-sphere, the Venus-sphere and then into the Sun-sphere. In the Sun-sphere, everything we have lived through, everything we have brought about and achieved in earlier incarnations becomes living reality within us. We enter into communion with the Beings of the higher Hierarchies, participating in their deeds, and we are now right within the Cosmos. Just as during earthly existence we move about on the Earth, are confined as it were within earthly conditions, we are now living in the cosmic expanse. We live in the infinite expanse, whereas on the Earth we lived in a state of confinement. As we pass through our existence between death and a new birth, it seems to us as though on the Earth we had been imprisoned ... for everything has now widened into infinitudes. We experience the secrets of the Cosmos, but not as if they were in any way governed by laws of physical nature: these laws of nature seem to us then to be insignificant productions of the human mind. We experience what is happening in the stars as the deeds of the Divine Spiritual Beings and we unite ourselves with these deeds: as far as in us lies we act among and together with these Beings. And from the Cosmos itself we prepare for our next earthly existence.

What we must realise in all its profound significance is that during his life in the Cosmos between death and a new birth, man himself fashions and shapes what he bears within him. In external life man perceives little, very little, of his own make up and organisation. An organ can only really be understood when there is knowledge of its cosmic origin. Think of the noblest organ of all—the human heart. Scientists to-day dissect the embryo, observe how the heart gradually takes shape and give no further thought to the matter. But this outer, plastic structure, the human heart, is in truth the product of what each individual, in cooperation with the Gods, has elaborated between death and a new birth. In the life between death and a new birth man must work, to begin with, in the direction leading from the Earth towards the zodiacal constellation of Leo. This stream which flows from the Earth towards the constellation of Leo teems with forces and it is along this direction that the human being must work in order that when the time comes he may project the germinal beginnings of the heart—a vessel in which cosmic forces are contained. Then, having passed through this region in the far spaces of the Universe, man comes to regions nearer the Earth; he passes into the Sun-sphere. Here again forces are at work which bring the heart to a further stage of development. And then man enters the region where he is already in contact with what may be called the Earth warmth. Out yonder in cosmic space there is no Earth warmth, but something altogether different. In the region of the Earth warmth the preparation of the human heart reaches the third stage. The forces streaming in the direction of Leo out of which the human heart is fashioned are purely moral and religious forces; in its initial stages of development the heart contains only moral and religious forces. To anyone who realises this it seems outrageous that modern natural science should regard the stars merely as neutral, physical masses, ignoring the moral element altogether. When man is passing through the Sun region, these moral forces are taken hold of by the etheric forces. And it is not until man comes still nearer to the Earth, to the warmth, that the final stages of preparation are reached; it is then that the forces which shape the physical seed for the being of soul and spirit who is descending, begin to be active.

Each organ is produced and shaped by cosmic forces; it is a product of these cosmic forces. In very truth man bears the stars of heaven within him. He is connected with the forces of the whole Cosmos, not only with the plant world through the substances which he takes into his stomach and which are then absorbed into his organism. These things can, of course, only be understood by those who have the gift of true observation. A time will come when the macroscopic aspect of things will be considered as well as the microscopic—which has really become a cult nowadays. People try to discover the secrets of the animal organism, of the human organism, by deliberately shutting off the Cosmos. They peer down a tube and call this microscopic investigation; they dissect a minute fragment, put it on a glass plate and try to eliminate the world and life as much as ever they possibly can. A tiny fragment is separated and studied by means of an instrument that cuts off any vista of the world surrounding it. There is, of course, no reason to belittle this kind of investigation for it brings wonderful things to light. But no real knowledge of man can be obtained in this way.

When we look from the Earth out into the Cosmos beyond the Earth, then, for the first time, part of the world is revealed. For after all it is only a part that becomes visibly manifest. The stars are not what they present to the physical eye—what the eye beholds is merely the sense image—but to this extent they are, after all, visible. The whole world through which we pass between death and a new birth is invisible, super-sensible. There are regions which lie above and beyond the world that is revealed to the senses. Man belongs to these realms of super-sensible existence just as surely as he belongs to the world of sense. We can have no real knowledge of the being of man until we consider the life he has spent in the vast cosmic expanse. And then it dawns upon us that when, having passed through the gate of death into the Cosmos, we have returned to the Earth once again, the connections with this cosmic life are still alive within us. There is within us a being who once dwelt on the Earth, ascended into the Cosmos, passed through the cosmic realms and has again come down into a restricted existence on Earth. Gradually we learn to perceive what we were in an earlier existence on Earth; our gaze is carried away from the physical, transported into the spiritual. For when we look back into earlier earthly lives the power inherent in Initiation science takes from us all desire for materialistic pictures.

In this connection, too, many strange things have happened. At one period there were certain theosophists who knew from oriental teachings that man passes through many earthly lives, but they wanted a materialistic picture although they deceived themselves to the contrary. It was said at that time that the physical organism of man disintegrates at death but that an atom remains and passes over in some miraculous way to the next earthly life. It was called the ‘permanent atom.' This was simply a way of providing a materialistic picture. But all inclination for materialistic thinking of this kind vanishes when one realises that in very truth the human heart is woven and shaped by the Cosmos.

The liver, on the other hand, forms in the near neighbourhood of the Earth; the liver has only little direct connection with the cosmic expanse. The knowledge gradually acquired from Initiation science makes us realise that the heart could not exist at all if it had not been prepared and inwardly formed by the Cosmos. But an organ like the liver or the lung only begins to form in the neighbourhood of the Earth. Viewed from the Cosmos, man is akin to the Earth in respect of the lungs and liver; in respect of the heart he is a cosmic being. In man we begin to discern the whole Universe. According to spiritual anatomy, the lungs and certain other organs might be depicted by sketching the Earth; the forces contained in these organs operate in a realm near the Earth. But for the heart one would have to make a sketch of the whole Universe. The whole Universe is concentrated, compressed, in man. Man is in truth a microcosm, a stupendous mystery. But knowledge of the macrocosm into which man is transformed after death is free from every element of materiality. We now learn to recognise the true connections between the spiritual and the physical, between one quality of soul and another.

For example, there are people who have an innate understanding of their environment, of the human beings around them in the world. If we observe life we shall find individuals who come into contact with numbers and numbers of others, but they never really get to know them. What they say about these other people is invariably uninteresting and tells one nothing essential. Such individuals are incapable of really sinking into the being of others, they have no understanding of them. But there are other individuals who possess this gift of understanding. When they speak of another person their words are so graphic and explicit that one knows at once what the man is like without ever having met him; he is there before one. The description need not be detailed. A man who can sink himself in the being of another is able to convey a complete picture of him quite briefly. Nor need it necessarily be another individual; it may be something in nature. Many people try to describe a mountain, or a tree, but one despairs of getting any real picture; everything is empty and one feels parched. Other individuals again have the gift of immediate understanding; one could easily paint what they describe. Such a gift or defect—understanding of the world or obtuseness—has not come from the blue but is the result of an earlier earthly existence. If with Initiation science one observes a man who has a deep understanding of his human and non human environment, and then investigates his preceding earthly life—I shall have much to say on this subject—one discovers the particular qualities of his character in that earlier life and how they were transformed between death and a new birth into this understanding of the world around. And one finds that a man who understands the world around him was by nature capable of great joy, great happiness, in the preceding life. That is very interesting: men who in their previous life were incapable of feelings of joy are incapable, now, of understanding human beings or the world around them. A man who has such understanding was one who in an earlier life took delight in his environment. But this quality, too, was acquired in a still earlier life. How does a man come to have this joyousness, this gift of taking delight in his environment? He has it if in a still earlier earthly life he knew how to love. Love in one earthly life is transformed into joy, happiness; the joy of the next earthly life is transformed into warm understanding of the surrounding world in the third life.

In perceiving the sequence of earthly lives one also learns to understand what streams from the present into the future. Men who are capable of intense hatred carry over into the next earthly life as the result of this hatred the disposition to be hurt by everything that happens. If one studies a man who goes through life with a perpetual grudge because everything hurts him, makes him suffer, that is what one finds. Naturally one must have compassion for such a man but this trait in the character invariably leads back to a previous incarnation when he gave way to hatred. Please do not misunderstand me here. When hatred is mentioned it is natural for everyone to say: “I do not hate, I love everybody.” But let them try to discover how much hidden hatred lurks in the soul! This becomes only too evident when one hears human beings talking about each other. Just think about it and you will realise that the derogatory things that are said about an individual far outweigh what is ever said in his praise. And if one were to go into the true statistics it would be found that there is a hundred times—really a hundred times—more hatred than love among human beings. This is a fact although it is not generally acknowledged; people always believe that their hatred is justified and excusable. But hatred is transformed in the next earthly life into hypersensitiveness to suffering and in the third life into lack of understanding, obtuseness traits which make a man hard and indifferent, incapable of taking a real interest in anything.

Thus it is possible to survey three consecutive incarnations through which a law is operating: love is transformed into joy, joy is transformed in the third life into understanding of the environment. Hatred is transformed into hypersensitiveness to suffering and this again, in the third life, into obtuseness and lack of understanding of the world around. Such are the connections in the life of soul which lead over from one incarnation to another.

But now let us consider a different side of life. There are individuals—it is perhaps for this very reason that they are as they are—who have no interest at all in anything except themselves. Now whether a man takes real interest in something or takes no interest at all has great significance in life. In this respect, too, odd things come to light. I have known men who had been talking to a lady in the morning but in the afternoon had not the slightest idea of what kind of hat or brooch she was wearing, or the colour of her clothes! There are people who simply do not observe such things. It is often regarded as a very excusable trait but in reality it is anything but that. It is really lack of interest, often going to such lengths that a man simply does not know if the person he met was wearing a black or a light coat. There was no inner connection with what stood before his very eyes. This is a somewhat radical example. I do not suggest that a man falls into the clutches of Ahriman or Lucifer when he does not know whether the lady he was talking to had fair or dark hair, but I merely want to indicate that individuals either have or have not a certain amount of interest in their environment. This is of great importance for the soul. If a man is interested in what is around him, the soul is invariably stimulated by it, lives with the environment. But whatever is experienced with lively interest, with real sympathy, is carried through the gate of death into the whole cosmic expanse. And just as man must have eyes in order to see colours on the Earth, so in his earthly existence he must be stimulated by interest, in order that it may be possible for him between death and a new birth to behold spiritually all that is experienced in the Cosmos. If a man goes through life without interest, if nothing captivates his eyes or his attention, then between death and a new birth he has no real connection with the Cosmos, he is as it were blind in soul, he cannot work with the cosmic forces. But when this is the case, the organism and the bodily organs for the next life are not being rightly prepared. When such a man enters the sphere of forces streaming in the direction of Leo, the rudimentary preparations for the heart cannot be made; he comes into the Sun region and is unable to work at its further development; then, in the region of terrestrial warmth, the Earth warmth, he is again unable to complete the preparation; finally he comes down to the Earth with a tendency to heart trouble.

Thus does lack of interest—which is an attribute of the life of soul—work over into the present earthly life. The nature of illness can only become fully clear when one is able to perceive these connections, when one perceives how the physical disability from which an individual is now suffering arose from something appertaining to the life of soul in a previous incarnation and has been transformed in the present incarnation into a physical characteristic. Physical sufferings in one incarnation are connected with experiences of a previous incarnation. Generally speaking, human beings who are said to be ‘bursting with health,' who never get ill, who are always robust and healthy, lead one's gaze back from their present existence to earlier lives when they took the deepest interest in everything around them, observed everything with keen and lively attention.

Naturally, things appertaining to the spiritual life must never be pressed too far. A stream of karma may also begin. Lack of interest may begin in the present life; and then the future will point back to it. It is not a question only of going back from the present to the past. Hence when karma is at work one can only say, as a rule it is the case that certain illnesses are connected with a particular trait or quality of soul.

Speaking generally, then, it may be said that qualities of soul in one earthly life are transformed into bodily traits in another earthly life; bodily traits in one earthly life are transformed into qualities of soul in another life. Now it is the case that anyone who wants to perceive karmic connections must often pay attention to what seem to be insignificant details. It is very important that the gaze should not be riveted on things that in the ordinary way are considered to be of outstanding significance. In order to recognise how one earthly life leads back to an earlier life, the gaze will frequently have to be directed to traits that seem of secondary importance. For example, I have tried—in all seriousness of course, not in the way that such investigations are often made—to discover the karmic relationships of various figures in history and in the sphere of learning, and my attention fell upon a personality whose inner life expressed itself so radically and remarkably that he ended by coining unusual forms of words. He has written a number of books in which the strangest forms of words occur. He was a very severe critic of social conditions, of men and their dealings with one another. He also deplored the jealousy shown by many learned men in their behaviour to their colleagues. He quotes examples to illustrate the tricks and intrigues of certain scholars in an effort to down their fellows, and the chapter in question is headed: Schlichologisches in der wissenschaftlichen Welt (underhand ways in the scientific world). Now when a man coins an expression like Schlichologisches, one feels that it is characteristic. And an alert, inner perception of what lies behind such expressions leads to the discovery that in a previous incarnation this personality had to do with all kinds of warlike undertakings, often calling for a great deal of manoeuvring and camouflaged actions. This was transformed, karmically, into a flair for coining such expressions for intrigues, disputes, quarrels. In the word pictures used for facts now under his observation, his head was describing that which in an earlier life he had carried out with feet and hands. And so in connection with this particular person I was able to give illustrations of how the physical had in a certain way been transformed into traits of soul.

• 2. ‘Negative space.’ See Physical and Ethereal Spaces, by George Adams; also Plant, Sun, Earth, by George Adams and Olive Whicher.

In the lecture yesterday I spoke of certain aspects of karma operating through the earthly lives of men, and of the forming of destiny, and I shall try to-day to give you an idea of how destiny actually takes shape.

When a man passes through the gate of death he comes into a spiritual world that is not, so to speak, more devoid of happenings and beings than our physical world, but infinitely richer. Understandable as it may be that it is never possible to do more than describe one phenomenon or another from the wide orbit of this spiritual world, the different descriptions given will have conveyed some idea of the infinite richness and manifoldness of man's life between death and a new birth. Here on the Earth, where our life between birth and death runs its course, we are surrounded by the several kingdoms of nature: by minerals, plants and animals, and by the physical human kingdom. Apart from the human kingdom, we rightly consider that the beings comprised in these other kingdoms belong to a rank below that of man. During his earthly existence, therefore, man feels himself—and rightly so—as the highest being within these kingdoms of nature. In the realm into which he enters after death, exactly the opposite is the case: man feels himself there to be the lowest among orders of Beings ranking above him. In Anthroposophical literature I have, as you know, adopted for these Beings the names used in olden times to designate the higher Hierarchies. The first is the Hierarchy immediately above man, linked with him from above as the animal kingdom on Earth is linked with him from below. This is the Hierarchy of the Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai. Then, above this Hierarchy, comes that of the Exusiai, Dynamis, Kyriotetes, and then the highest Hierarchy of all—the Thrones, Cherubim and Seraphim. There are nine ranks, three times three ranks of Beings higher than man. Between each group of three higher ranks (ranging from below upwards) there is a parallelism with the three lower stages (ranking from above downwards) of animal, plant, mineral.—Only by including all these ranks have we a complete picture of the world to which man belongs.

Human existence may also be characterised by saying that at physical birth or conception man passes from a purely spiritual existence into the realm of the natural orders of animal, plant, mineral; when he passes through the gate of death he enters the realm of Beings ranking above him. Between birth and death he lives in a physical body which connects him with the kingdoms of nature; between death and a new birth he lives in a ‘spirit body' which connects him with the Beings of the higher Hierarchies. Here on Earth our attention is directed, first and foremost, to our environment; we feel on a level with this world and from the Earth we look upwards to the Heavens, to the realm of spirit—whatever may be the designation used in the different religions. From the Earth man looks upwards with his longings, with his piety, with his highest aspirations in earthly existence. And in trying to envisage the spiritual realm above him, he uses imagery borrowed from the earthly world, he pictures what is above him in forms derived from earthly existence. In the life between death and a new birth it is the opposite: his gaze then is directed downwards from above. You may say, “But this means that his gaze is directed to an inferior world.” That is not the case, for the earthly world presents a quite different aspect when seen from above. And precisely in the study of karma it will become clear to us how different happenings on the Earth appear when seen from above.

Having entered the spiritual world through the gate of death, we come, first of all, into the realm of the lowest Hierarchy: Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai. We feel linked with this next higher Hierarchy and we are aware that just as in the earthly realm everything around us means something to our senses, what the spiritual realm contains means something to the innermost core of our soul. We speak of minerals, of plants, of animals, inasmuch as we see them with our eyes and touch them with our hands, inasmuch as they are perceptible in a material sense. Between death and a new birth we speak of Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai, inasmuch as these Beings have a connection with the innermost core of the soul. And passing on through the long existence spent between death and a new birth, we learn gradually to become part of the life of the Beings of the next higher Hierarchy who are concerned with us and with one another. These Beings are as it were the link connecting us with the spiritual outer world. During the first period of life between death and a new birth we are also very deeply occupied with ourselves, for the Third Hierarchy has to do with our own inner life and being. But then, after a certain time, our gaze widens: we come to know the spiritual world outside us, the objective spiritual world. Our leaders here are the Exusiai, the Dynamis, the Kyriotetes. They bring us into connection with the spiritual outer world. Just as here on Earth we speak of what is around us—mountains, rivers, forests, fields, whatever it may be—so do we speak in yonder world of that to which the Beings of the Second Hierarchy lead us. That is now our environment. But this environment is not a world of objects like the Earth; everything lives and has being, lives as spiritual reality. Nor in this life between death and a new birth do we come to know Beings only; we come to know their deeds as well, we feel that we ourselves are participating in these deeds.

But then a time comes when we feel how the Beings of the Third Hierarchy—Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai—and the Beings of the Second Hierarchy—Exusiai, Dynamis, Kyriotetes—are working together with us at what we ourselves are to become in the next earthly life. A mighty, awe inspiring vista opens before us. We behold the activities of the Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai and we perceive how these Beings act in relation to one another. Pictures come to us of what is proceeding among these Beings of the Third Hierarchy; but all these pictures are related to ourselves. And gazing at these pictures of the deeds of the Third Hierarchy, it dawns upon us that they represent the counterpart, the counter image of the attitude of soul, of the inner quality of mind and heart that characterised us in the last earthly life. We now no longer say in terms of an abstract idea of conscience, “You were a man who acted unjustly to this person or that, whose thoughts were unjust.” No, in the majestic pictures of the deeds of the Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai, we behold the fruits of our attitude of mind and heart, of our life of soul, of our mode of thinking, in the last earthly life; we perceive images of this in what the Beings of the Third Hierarchy are doing. Our attitude, our feelings towards other individuals, towards other earthly things, are now outspread in the spiritual sphere of the Universe. And we become aware of what our thinking and our feeling signify. Here on the Earth this inner activity manifests in Maya, as if it were enclosed within our skin. Not so in the life between death and a new birth. The manner of its appearance then is such that we know that whatever thoughts, feelings or sentiments we unfold are part of the whole world, work into and affect the whole world.

Echoing the East, many people speak of Maya, of the illusion of the external world; but it remains an abstract thought. Studies like those we have been pursuing make us aware of the deep import of the words: “The world surrounding us is Maya, the great illusion.” We realise, too, what an illusory view prevails of the life of soul. We think that this is our affair and ours alone, for the truth is revealed only during our existence between death and a new birth. We perceive then that what seemed to be enclosed within us forms the content of a vast and majestic spiritual world. As our life after death continues, we observe how the Beings of the Second Hierarchy, the Exusiai, Dynamis and Kyriotetes, are connected with the faculties we have acquired in earthly life as the fruits of diligence, activity, interest in the things and happenings of the Earth. For having cast into mighty pictures our interest and diligence during the last earthly life, the Exusiai, Dynamis and Kyriotetes then proceed to shape images of the talents and faculties we shall possess in our next earthly life. In the images and pictures fashioned by the Beings of the Second Hierarchy we behold what talents and faculties will be ours in the next incarnation.

The course of this life continues and when the middle point of time between death and a new birth is about to be reached, something of particular importance takes place. From our habitations here on Earth—especially in those moments when as we look upwards to the firmament of heaven the stars send down their shimmering radiance—we feel the sublimity of the heavens above us. But something of far greater splendour is experienced as we gaze downwards now—from the realms of spirit. For then we behold the deeds of the Beings of the First Hierarchy, of the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones working in mutual interrelationship. Mighty pictures of spiritual happenings are revealed to us as we gaze downwards—for our heaven now lies below. Just as in physical existence on Earth we gaze at the starry script above us, so when we look downwards from the realm of spirit we behold the deeds of the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones. And in this spiritual existence we are aware that what is proceeding among these Beings, revealed in sublime, majestic pictures, has something to do with what we ourselves are and shall become. For now we feel that what is taking place there among the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones reveals the consequences which our deeds of the previous earthly life will have in the earthly life to come. We perceive how in earthly life we behaved in this way to one individual, in that way to another individual, how we were compassionate or pitiless, whether our deeds were good or evil. Our attitude and disposition are the concern of the Third Hierarchy, our deeds of the First Hierarchy, the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones. Then, in the cosmic memory now alive in us, there arises a shattering, awe inspiring realisation of our deeds and actions between birth and death in the last earthly life. Down below we behold the deeds of spiritual Beings, of Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones. What are they doing? They show us, in pictures, what our experiences with individuals with whom we had some relationship in the previous incarnation will have to become in the new relationship that will be established in order that mutual compensation may be made for what happened between us in the previous life. And from the way in which the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones work in cooperation, we realise that the great problem is there being solved. When I have dealings with an individual in some earthly life, I myself prepare the compensatory adjustment; the work performed by the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones merely ensures that the compensation will be made, that it will become reality. And it is these Beings who also ensure that the other individual with whom I shall again make contact is led to me in the same way as I am led to him. It is the majestic experiences arising from the pictures of the deeds of the higher Hierarchies which are recorded by the Moon Beings and subsequently inscribed by them in our astral body when the time comes for the descent to another earthly existence. Together with us in the life between death and a new birth, these Moon Beings witness what is happening in order that the adjustment of the previous earthly life may take place in a subsequent life.

This, my dear friends, will give you an inkling of the majesty and grandeur of what is here revealed, as compared with the sense world. But you will realise, too, that the things of the sense world conceal far, far more than they actually make manifest.

Having lived through the region of the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones, man passes to still other realms of existence. More and more the longing arises in him for a new incarnation in which compensation can be made for what he did and experienced in his previous earthly life.

Anthroposophy has failed in its purpose when it remains a mere collection of ideas and conceptions, when people speak abstractly of the existence of karma, of the way in which one incarnation works over into another. Anthroposophy is only fulfilling its real purpose when it speaks not only to the head but awakens in the heart a feeling, a discernment, of the impressions that can be received in the super-sensible world through the Beings of that world. It seems to me that nobody with an unprejudiced, receptive mind can listen to such communications about the super-sensible world as I am now giving, without being inwardly stirred. We ought to be able to realise that although here on Earth we live through the whole gamut of human experiences, from deepest suffering to supreme happiness, what we are able to experience of the spiritual world should affect us far more potently than the most intense suffering or the highest happiness. We can only have the right relationship to the spiritual world when we admit, “In comparison with earthly sufferings or earthly happiness, what we are able to experience of the truths and beings of the spiritual world remains shadowy”—as indeed it does to those who merely listen to information about Initiation science. But to Initiates themselves it is far from shadowy. We should also be able to say, “I can feel how deeply what is here imparted about the spiritual world would affect the soul, if the soul had only sufficient strength and energy.” A man should ascribe it to earthly weakness if he is incapable of experiencing every degree of feeling, from fiery enthusiasm to deepest suffering, when he hears about the spiritual world and the Beings of that world. If he ascribes to his own weakness the fact that he is unable to feel these things with due intensity, then the soul has gone some way towards establishing the true and right relationship to the spiritual world.

When all is said and done, what value is there in spiritual knowledge if it cannot penetrate to the concrete facts or indicate what is really taking place in the spiritual world! We do not expect our fellow men on Earth to talk about a meadow in the way that pantheists or monists or would-be philosophers talk about the Godhead; we expect a detailed description of the meadow. And the same applies to the spiritual world. It must be possible to describe the concrete details. People to-day are still unaccustomed to this. Many who are not out and out materialists will accept generalities about the existence of a spiritual world and so forth. But when this spiritual world is described in detail they often become indignant because they will not admit that it is possible to speak in this way of the Beings and happenings of the spiritual world. If human civilisation is not to fall into chaos, more and more will have to be said about the realities of the spiritual world. For earthly happenings too remain obscure when people have no understanding of what lies behind them.

In this connection, my dear friends, there is something in the destiny of the Anthroposophical Society that strikes a note of tragedy. But if the necessary understanding for these things becomes more widespread, at any rate among Anthroposophists themselves, there is justification for hoping that good may develop out of the tragedy, that from the Anthroposophical Society there may go forth a quickening of the civilisation that is so obviously heading for the chaos of materialism. But if that quickening is to be a reality, something must be understood which at the beginning was not understood—which can more easily be understood to-day because more than two decades of effort have passed since the founding of Anthroposophical work.

At the beginning, as you know, the Anthroposophical Movement was within the Theosophical Movement. When we founded in Berlin the Section from which the Anthroposophical Society eventually developed, I wanted at our first gathering to strike a kind of keynote for what ought really to have followed. And now that we have tried through the Christmas Meeting at the Goetheanum to reorganise the Anthroposophical Society, I am able to speak about a certain fact to which probably very little attention has been paid hitherto. Nor could it have been otherwise here, because as far as is known to me none of our friends from Bohemia was present at the time. I gave a first lecture which was similar in character to the lectures given later on to the Groups. This first lecture had an unusual title, one which might at the time have been considered rather daring. The title was: “Studies of the practical working of karma.” (Praktische Karmaübungen.) My intention was to speak quite openly about the way in which karma works.

Now the leading lights of the Theosophical Movement who at that time regarded me as something of an intruder, were present at the meeting and they were convinced at the outset that I was not qualified to speak of inner, spiritual matters. At that period the leading lights of the old Theosophical Movement were always reiterating: “Science must be upheld, account must be taken of modern science. ...” Well and good—but nothing much came of it. Things have now been set on the right path but only the very first steps have been taken; nor will anything essential have been achieved until we have advanced beyond these first steps. And so what was intended in those early days all became rather theoretical. “Studies of the practical working of karma” were announced but nobody at that time would have understood their import, least of all the leading lights of the Theosophical Society. It therefore remained a task which had to be pursued under the surface as it were of the Anthroposophical stream, performed as an obligation to the spiritual world. But to-day—and how often it has been so during the development of the Anthroposophical Movement—I am reminded of the title of what was to have been the first Anthroposophical Group lecture: “Studies of the practical working of karma.” I can also remember how shocked the leading lights of the Theosophical Society were by such a presumptuous title.

But time marches on and more than two decades have elapsed since then—much has been prepared, but this preparatory work must also have its results. And so to-day these results must become reality. “Studies of the practical working of karma” which one desired—rather boldly—to begin at that time, must be actually undertaken. Such indeed was the aim of our Christmas Meeting: to bring real and living esotericism into the Anthroposophical Movement. This must be taken in all earnestness. By formalism alone the Anthroposophical Movement will have no regenerating effect upon our civilisation. In the future we must not shrink from speaking quite openly about the things of the spiritual world.

I want to begin to-day to speak of spiritual realities underlying earthly happenings and the life of humanity on Earth. Within the whole process of earthly evolution stands the Mystery of Golgotha—the Event which imbued this evolution with meaning. To deeper observation, everything that preceded this Event was in the nature of preparation. And although on account of the shortcomings of men and the influence of the Luciferic and Ahrimanic Powers from the spiritual side, the impediments to progress are more in evidence than the progress itself, it is nevertheless true that since the Mystery of Golgotha everything proceeding from the physical and spiritual worlds alike has come to pass for the sake of bringing man further along the path of world evolution as a whole. The gifts of Christianity to humanity will—if men prove worthy to receive them in their deeper, spiritual significance—be revealed only in times to come. But the essential impulse—and this applies, as well, to everything that Anthroposophy can achieve—lies in the Mystery of Golgotha.

We know that the influence of the Mystery of Golgotha made its way, to begin with, across the South of Europe and on into Middle Europe. But I do not want to speak of that to-day. I want you to think of how Christianity spread across the North of Africa into European civilisation. You know that some six hundred years after the founding of Christianity through the Mystery of Golgotha, a different religious stream—the stream of Mohammedanism—spread across from Asia. In contrast to Christianity, the spiritual life that is connected with the name of Mohammed expresses itself more in abstractions. In Christianity there are many more direct descriptions of the spiritual world than there are in Mohammedanism. But it has been the destiny of Mohammedanism to absorb much ancient science, much ancient culture. We see how Mohammedanism comes over from Asia and spreads in the wake of Christianity. It is an interesting spectacle. We see the stream of Christianity flowing towards the North, reaching Middle Europe; we see, too, how Mohammedanism twines as it were around this Christian stream—across North Africa, Spain and on into France.

Now it is quite easy to realise that had Christianity alone been at work, European culture would have taken a quite different form. In an outer, political sense it is of course true that Europe repulsed the waves of Mohammedanism—or better said, of Arabism. But anyone who observes the spiritual life of Europe will realise, for example, that our modern way of thinking—the materialistic spirit on the one side and science with its clear cut, arabesque like logic on the other—would not have developed had Arabism not worked on, despite its setbacks. From Spain, from France, from Sicily, from North Africa, mighty and potent influences have had their effect upon European thinking, have moulded it into forms it would not have assumed had Christianity alone been at work. In our modern science there is verily more Arabism than Christianity!

Later on, as a result of the Crusades, much Eastern culture—by then, of course, in the throes of decadence—came directly to the ken of the European peoples. Many of the secrets of Eastern culture found their way to Europe through this channel. In Western civilisation, above the stratum of Christianity, lie those elements of oriental spiritual life which were absorbed into Arabism. But you see, none of this is really understandable when perceived only from the outside; it must all be perceived from within. And from within, the spectacle presented to us is that although wars and victories brought about the suppression of Arabism and the bearers of Mohammedanism, the Moors and so forth, nevertheless the souls of these people were born again and continued to work. Nothing whatever can be gained from abstract accounts of how Arabism made its way to Europe from Spain; insight can only arise from a knowledge of the inner, concrete facts.

We will consider one such fact. At the time of Charles the Great in European history—it was at the end of the 8th and beginning of the 9th centuries—Haroun al Raschid¹ was living over in Asia, in Baghdad, in an entourage of brilliant oriental scholarship. Everything then existing in the way of Western Asiatic learning, indeed of Asiatic learning in general, had been brought together at the Court of Haroun al Raschid. True, it was all steeped in Mohammedanism, but everything in the way of culture—mathematics, philosophy, architecture, commerce, industry, geography, medicine, astronomy—was fostered at this Court by the most enlightened men in Asia. People to-day have little conception of the grandeur and magnificence of what was achieved at the Court of Haroun al Raschid. First and foremost there was Haroun al Raschid himself—not by any means a ruler of mediocre intelligence or one who merely for the sake of self glorification called to his Court the greatest sages of Western Asia, but a personality who in spite of unwavering adherence to Mohammedanism was open and receptive to everything that oriental civilisation had to offer. At the time when Charles the Great was struggling with difficulty to master the rudiments of reading and writing, much brilliant learning flourished at the Court of Baghdad. The conditions in which Charles the Great lived are not comparable in any way with those brought into being by Haroun al Raschid.

This was at a time when many regions of Western Asia and wide territories in Africa had already adopted Mohammedanism, and the brilliant learning cultivated at the Court of Haroun al Raschid had spread far and wide. But among the wise men at that Court—men deeply versed in geography, in nature lore, in medicine and so forth—was many a one who in still earlier incarnations had belonged to ancient Mystery Schools. For men who were Initiates in an earlier life do not always give direct evidence of this in another incarnation. In spite of having been an Initiate in earlier Mysteries, it is only possible for a man in any given epoch to absorb the spirituality and develop the constitution of soul which the body of that particular epoch allows. Seen in its essential nature, the life of the soul does not tally with the intellectual ideas of the psyche in man prevailing at the present time. The soul lies at a far deeper level than is usually imagined.

Let me give you an example. Think of a personality like Ernst Haeckel.² The first impression one gets of him is that his view of the world is coloured by materialism, that he expounds a kind of mechanism by which the life of nature and also the life of soul is determined, that in his invectives against Catholicism he is sometimes fascinating, sometimes fanatic, and sometimes, too, lacking in taste. One who is cognisant of the threads connecting the different earthly lives of a human being will pay little attention to these traits; he will look at the deeper qualities of soul. Nobody who in trying to observe the actual manifestations of karma allows himself to be blinded by Haeckel's most striking external characteristics will be able to discover his previous incarnation. In order to find Haeckel's previous incarnation attention must be paid to the way and manner in which he expounded his views. The fact that Haeckel's erudition bore the stamp of materialism is due to the age in which he lived; that, however, is unimportant; what is important is the inner constitution and attitude of soul. If this is perceived by occult sight, then in the case of Haeckel the gaze is led back to Pope Gregory VII,³ the former Abbot Hildebrand—actually one of the most impassioned advocates of Catholicism. If one compares the two personages, knowing that both come into the picture here, one will perceive that they are the same and also learn to recognise the unessentials and the essentials in respect of the great affairs of humanity as a whole. The theoretical ideas themselves are by no means the prime essential; they are only essential in this abstract, materialistic age of ours. Behind the scenes of world history it is the quality, the modus operandi, of the soul that is all important. And when this is grasped it will certainly be possible to perceive the similarity between Gregory VII and his reincarnation as Haeckel.

Insight of this kind has to be acquired in studying the concrete realities of karma, and if it is to mean anything to us to be told that at the Court of Haroun al Raschid, for example, there were men who, although their physical bodies and education make them appear outwardly to be typical products of the 8th and 9th centuries, were nevertheless the reincarnations of Initiates in ancient Mysteries. When the eye of spirit is directed to this Court, a certain personality stands out in bold relief—one who was a deeply discerning, influential counsellor of Haroun al Raschid, and for that epoch a man of great universality. A remarkable destiny lay behind him. In a much earlier incarnation, and in the same region afterwards ruled over by Haroun al Raschid, but inhabited, then, by quite different peoples, he had participated in all the Initiations which had there taken place, and in a later incarnation, as a different personality, he had striven for Initiation with deep and intense longing, but was unable to achieve it because at that time destiny prevented it. Such a personality lived at the Court of Haroun al Raschid but was for this reason obliged to conceal deep down in his inner life what lay within him as the fruits of the earlier incarnation as an Initiate. The inability to achieve Initiation occurred in a later incarnation and after that came the incarnation at the Court of Haroun al Raschid. And at this Court, for the reason that in those times Initiations in the old sense were no longer possible—this personality was one who out of a strong inner impulse and with powerful and sound imagination, organised and vitalised everything that was cultivated at this Court. Scholars, artists, a whole host of poets, representatives of all the sciences, were to be found there; moreover Baghdad itself at that time was the centre of the very widespread scientific and artistic activity prevailing in the empire of the Caliphs. The organisation of it all was the work of this personality—a personality endowed with great powers of initiative. Such individuals invariably play a significant role in the onward march of civilisation.

Let us think of Haroun al Raschid himself. If with occult sight one discerns the qualities of soul he possessed and then tries to discover whether he has since reincarnated, one finds that Haroun al Raschid continued to be associated with and to carry further what he had instituted on Earth; having passed through the gate of death he participated, spiritually, in the earthly evolution of mankind; from the spiritual world his influence was considerable but he himself assimilated a great deal. And then, in the form appropriate to the epoch, this personality came again as Lord Bacon of Verulam,⁴ the founder of modern science. From England, Bacon of Verulam. gave a strong impetus to European thinking. You may say: but what a different personality from Haroun al Raschid! ... Nevertheless it is the same individuality. The outward differences are a matter of the external world only. We see the soul of Haroun al Raschid after death moving across from Asia and then, from the West, influencing the later civilisation of Europe, doing much to lay the foundations of modern materialism.

The other personality—he who had been not only the right hand but the very soul of Haroun al Raschid's Court and had had that strange spiritual destiny—this personality took a different path. Far from seeking a life of outward brilliance, the urge in this soul after death was to unfold a rich inner life, a life of deep inwardness. Because this was so, there could be no question of taking a path leading to the West. Think again of Haroun al Raschid and his Court—outward brilliance and magnificence, inner consolidation of the fruits of civilisation, but at the same time the impulse to externalise everything contained in Mohammedanism. This was bound to come to expression in a subsequent incarnation. The wide and all embracing application of scientific method had to come to the fore—and so indeed it did. The outward brilliance that had characterised the Court of Haroun al Raschid came to clear expression in Bacon himself.

The other personality who had been the very soul of the Court in Baghdad was of a deeply inward nature, closely related to what had been cultivated in the ancient Mysteries. This could not come to expression—not at any rate until our own time when, since Kali Yuga is over and the Michael Age has begun, it is possible once again to speak openly of the spiritual. Nevertheless it was found possible to pour what had been received from the Mysteries in such volume and with such vital power into civilisation that its influence was profound. Something of the kind may be said in connection with the other personality whose development in the spiritual world after death was such that finally, when the time arrived for a new incarnation, he could not land, so to speak, in the Western world where materialism had its rise; he was led, inevitably, to Middle Europe and was able there to give expression to the impulse deriving from the ancient Mysteries but conforming with the altered conditions of the times. This personality lived as Amos Comenius.⁵ And so in the later course of world history these two souls who had lived together at the Court of Baghdad took different paths: the one as it were circling the South of Europe in order, from the West, as Bacon of Verulam, to become the organising genius in modern literature, philosophy and the sciences; the other taking the overland path—as did the Crusades—towards Middle Europe. He too was a great and gifted organiser but the effects of what he achieved were of an entirely different character. It is a wonderful and deeply impressive spectacle—there they were, Amos Comenius and Bacon of Verulam, having taken different paths. The fact that the period of their lives did not exactly coincide is connected with world karma, but ultimately—if I may express it in a trivial way—they met in Middle Europe. And a great deal that is needed in civilisation would become reality if the esoteric influences contained in the work of Amos Comenius were to unite with the power achieved by the technical sciences founded through Bacon of Verulam. This outcome of the paths taken by two souls who in the 8th and 9th centuries worked at the Court of Haroun al Raschid is one of the most wonderful illustrations of how world history runs its course. Haroun al Raschid makes his way across Africa and Southern Europe to England, whence his influence works over into Middle Europe; Amos Comenius takes the path which brings him to Middle Europe, and in what develops from his achievements there he meets the other soul.

Only when history is studied in this way does it become reality. What passes over from one epoch of world history so into another does not consist of abstract concepts; it is human souls themselves who carry onward the fruits of each epoch. We can only understand how what makes its appearance in a later epoch has come over from an earlier one, when we perceive how the souls themselves develop onwards from one epoch to the next. The distinction between what is called ‘Maya' and inner reality must everywhere be taken earnestly. Perceived in its outward aspect only, history is itself Maya; it can only be rightly understood by getting away from the Maya and penetrating to the truth.

We will continue these studies in the next lecture to Members. May the right kind of understanding be forthcoming as we now pursue the task inaugurated by the Christmas Foundation Meeting: to make into a reality what was announced at the very beginning, perhaps rather naively, as ‘Studies of the practical working of karma.' After preparation that has been going on for decades now, a genuine study of karma and of its manifestations will certainly be possible in the Anthroposophical Society without causing misunderstanding and apprehension.

• 1. Haroun al Raschid, 764–809.
• 2. Ernst Haeckel, 1834-1919.
• 3. Gregory VII, Pope from 1053 to 1085.
• 4. Bacon of Verulam, 1561–1626.
• 5. Amos Comenius, 1592–1671.