The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Let us start from the fact that the human being is a many-part, a multi-part being, that is, from a fact that is quite familiar to us. We want to assume that within the anthroposophical movement there is always an effort to understand how the human being is composed of members, each of which requires a certain understanding, so that the understanding of the whole human being is only possible if one is able to unite the understanding that one has brought to the individual members into a whole. If we disregard everything else for the moment, we know that this human being is divided into the physical body, the etheric body or formative forces, the astral body and that which we call the I. Now this is not — or at least should not be — a mere classification of the human being and his essence, but what is listed as the four members of the human being actually comes from very different worlds and can only be understood from the inner conditions of these worlds. And only when one has understood how the physical body, the etheric body, the body of formative forces, the astral body and the I are formed out of their corresponding worlds, then one is able to gain an understanding of the entire human being from the resonance of the understanding of these individual human limbs. The human being's physical body must be understood from the standpoint of the physical world, but the etheric body or formative forces must be understood from the standpoint of the etheric world, and so on. If we are not extremely precise in this area, if we do not accept that things are exactly as I have just indicated, then we cannot come to an understanding of the human being as a whole.

Let us turn our attention away from the physical body of the human being. We can do this because all of today's education and science is based on understanding the physical body of the human being. But today there is no similar endeavor to understand the etheric body or the body of formative forces. At most, it is imagined that this etheric body or body of formative forces perhaps consists of a finer substance than the dense physical body and that this finer etheric substance is mixed with the physical body. But things are not like that; the situation is essentially different. Someone who has grasped everything that can be grasped from the standpoint of physical science in order to form an idea about the workings of the physical body could completely ignorant about the etheric or formative forces, because when we look at the human being, it is impossible to find the laws of the etheric or formative forces near the earth. We cannot look for the laws of the etheric or formative body in the vicinity of the earth itself. Just as we say, when a stone falls in a vertical direction: gravity is at work, the stone moves in the direction of the center of the earth - just as we look for the causes of the stone's fall in the vicinity of the earth or in the earth look for the causes of the stone's fall, we proceed correctly when we remain close to the earth, we proceed wrongly when we ask about the causes of the event in the etheric or formative forces. Rather, we must look for that which is at work in our etheric or formative body not on earth at all, but in the vastness of the universe, in a sphere that is, an indeterminate distance away from us. There the forces are at work from all sides. Just as physical forces work out from the center of the earth, so the forces from all sides work in and condition our etheric body.

Recall what I told you about the transition of a person from his pre-earthly existence to his earthly existence. He comes down and has already sent the laws for his physical body to earth. Then, I said, he collects his etheric body from the vastness of the cosmic ether. So there he is, before he moves into what he has sent ahead: his physical body, I, astral body and etheric body. But the ether body is not formed by the earth in terms of its laws, but, as we say, representatively: from the four quarters of the world; but this only means that it is drawn together from all sides. So the laws are effective from all sides of the world periphery, the surrounding area, when the human ether body is formed.

What we are now going to discuss may come as something of a shock to the modern reader, and will be extremely surprising. You will agree with me when I say that if we light a flame, however strong, the intensity of the light will mean less and less to us the further we move away from the source of the light. Eventually, at a certain distance, where this light source is hardly taken into account, where it has become so weak that we can no longer read; where, if there is a light somewhere in the distance, we can say for all practical purposes that there is no light. Everyone will admit that. Likewise, today's science admits that the force of gravity decreases with the square of the distance, becoming weaker and weaker the further you get into the surrounding area. But what people today do not consider at all is the following. We on earth express in our words the laws that apply on earth. The law that we express as earthlings also decreases, becomes weaker and weaker and is finally practically no longer there for a certain distance. No matter how cleverly you formulate natural laws for earthly conditions, no matter how cleverly you formulate historical sentences for what happens on earth, these laws, the laws of nature and historical laws, are no longer valid in a certain radius, just as the strength of gravity or the intensity of light has no further significance. Therefore, it is naive if someone were to claim that the same natural laws apply to a star that is so many light-years away as they do to us. For the validity of our natural laws exists only for earthly conditions and ceases when we venture out into space. But the laws of the ether come from the vastness of space. If we expect the same laws from them as the natural laws of the earth are, then we will never understand the etheric existence. Even as we speak of the etheric body of man, we must speak of something that follows quite different laws from the natural laws of the earth.

There lies that which is astonishing and shocking for today's humanity, but which must be gradually grasped. Otherwise, today's humanity will simply spin itself into earthly conditions and not get beyond these earthly conditions with its soul condition. I will now tell you this in a form in which one can say it – or at least should be able to say it – after having discussed anthroposophical truths within a circle for some time. For if one were to say what is about to be said today in front of an otherwise different circle, people would think one was not quite of sound mind. But that is not a criticism at all. Because as long as one is of sound mind, one retains the spiritual science. So basically, because the genius of language works quite correctly, one must be able to take it seriously with such things. At most, one should reproach someone who presents spiritual science for not being of sound mind. That is not a reproach at all! He is not of sound mind. One must only be with spirit with full consciousness, that is what matters. But if one says that one only has a justified consciousness when one is of sound mind, then one must renounce spiritual science.

People everywhere are declaiming: There are certain tremendously simple laws that one comes upon last. — People call them axioms or something, it does not depend on the names. I will call such axioms. The first axiom is: The whole is always greater than one of its parts. That is a matter of course, people say, and whoever sins against such axioms is not quite of sound mind, because the whole is greater than one of its parts. Or: The straight line is the shortest path between two points. For earthly conditions and for the world of the senses, this applies to the fullest extent. If we go to the most extreme abstractions, we come to such sentences: the whole is always greater than the sum of its parts, and: the straight line is the shortest way between two points.

But if you sail into the ether, then you really have to break through from the sensory world into another world, where precisely the most trivial laws of the sensory world no longer apply. As soon as you enter the etheric world, the law no longer applies that the whole is greater than one of its parts. Because in the etheric world, for example, it is like this for a human being: If you look at what is etherically behind the part of the whole human being, you look at the liver, lungs and search for their etheric correlates, then each individual part of the human being is considerably greater than the whole human being on earth. And if you ever believed that a person is greater than his liver, you would never be able to penetrate into the spiritual. For in the spiritual, a whole is created by the larger parts working together to form a smaller one, by the whole being created precisely through the interaction of the larger parts.

This may become even clearer to you for the other example, that a straight line is the shortest way between two points. Yes, that applies in the physical world. If you have one point here and a second point there, the straight line is the shortest. But if you enter the ether world, then every path that is taken is easy, every crooked one, every winding one, and if you want to take the straight path, it will get in the way. It forks at every point, it is just the longest way to get from one point to another. Therefore, in relation to the ether world, such a sentence: the straight line is the shortest way between two points - a sentence that spins you into the physical, that makes you not get out of the crust in which you are locked at all. As long as one does not take seriously the fact that even in the world of ether everything is different and even opposite to that in the physical world, one does not come to an understanding of the spiritual world.

People would like to know the members of the human nature: physical body, etheric body, astral body, I. But now they would like to have it so that they apply the same kind of thinking to the etheric body that they have applied to the physical body. But that is precisely what cannot be done, because to the same extent that one moves away from the physical world - but this is identical with the earthly world - the validity of natural laws diminishes, and quite different laws take their place. I am merely pointing out to you all how, when one comes to this second link in human nature, the necessity arises to engage in a completely different way of thinking.

But as soon as you enter this other thinking, you have to take this other thinking very seriously. You can go around in the physical world as much as you like and find all kinds of things, not atoms, but you can find cells and the like. But it would never occur to anyone to think that they would find thoughts under a microscope or in a telescope. They must be found in some other way. You can examine the brain under the microscope until the end of time, but you will not find thoughts in it, they do not go into the microscope. But that is precisely the proof that you only find the physical world in the microscope and in general in the whole view, because the ether world consists of nothing but thoughts. The etheric world is the activity of thoughts as forces. And as soon as one penetrates from the physical body to the etheric body in the case of man, this etheric body consists of thoughts throughout, but thoughts work as forces. We are completely permeated by thoughts, interwoven with thoughts everywhere, but thoughts work as forces.

This now has a very important consequence for the view of the human being. Because now imagine you are going to sleep. There in bed lies the physical body and the etheric body. The etheric body is full of thoughts. It is a kind of excerpt, a kind of extract from the ether of the world, and the ether of the world is an active world of thought. And therefore it is true that the etheric body of a person is something extraordinarily clever, if I may express it that way, full of thoughts full of light and without contradictions. And when a person leaves his physical body and etheric body with his I and his astral body, he actually leaves a very clever entity. The only thing that is fatal is that when a person sleeps, he is not aware of how clever he is, while he remains in bed. The fact that we are not so clever during the day is because during the day we and our astral body submerge into the very clever etheric body and constantly dull it. The fact that we are imperfect as human beings stems from our ego and our astral body. Our astral body and our ego are incapable of rising to the inner solidity, clarity and worldliness of the etheric body. If only we could make the etheric body speak and then write down in shorthand, just as faithfully or unfaithfully, what it has to say all night about the secrets of the universe, then it would be something tremendously clever, even more clever than what is written here.

So, world thoughts as forces work in this ethereal body of man, and we are only ever able to use something - it is always very little - of what is spread out in our ethereal body, in proportion to what we have in our astral body.

And yet, what are we as physical and etheric bodies when we remain in bed when we sleep and have withdrawn our ego and our astral body? We are then in bed a being of physical body and etheric body, and thus we carry within us only the laws of the plant kingdom. And the same thing that we can observe in ourselves, when we look back, as it were, and see the wisdom of the whole world radiating from our sleeping etheric body, in what we could observe in a backward glance in a human being, we basically have before us on a small scale everything that we also have before us when we look at the earth, in that it exists as a physical sphere, but out of itself lets the plant world sprout and has sprouted, and this plant world is ethereally stimulated on all sides by the world thoughts that are weaving in the world ether. This is the infinitely sublime image of the cosmos; of the cosmos that lies before us when we are only able to look at everything that springs from every single plant on our earth as if, I would like to say, from spiritual flames of fire, drawing lines and waves into the farthest reaches of space. So that we actually have before us the globe, the forces that bring vegetation out of the earth, sprouting from the farthest point in space and repeating this earth formation in every single sleeping human being.

When we visualize this image, we have to exclude everything that is in our ego and in our astral body, and we have to think of the image of animals with their astral body instead of the cosmic image. That which is in our astral body does not belong to that which is earthly on the one hand or etheric on the other, but rather belongs to a completely different world altogether. However, we do not seek this world in the same way that we seek the ether. If one describes it pictorially, and these things can only be described pictorially, because otherwise one comes into earthly ideas, one would have to say: How does one get an idea of the world ether? One comes to an idea of the world ether when one simply follows that which is here on earth outwards, when one swings further and further outwards - one must do this spiritually, of course. Here on earth, the effect of the ether is actually hardly noticeable, because it is weakest there. Just as the earthly effects of illumination, for example, are weakest far out in space, so the effect of the cosmic ether is weakest in the vicinity of the earth. As soon as we go out into the far reaches of the world, the actual nature of the etheric effect becomes more and more apparent. When we go out into the wide world, we begin to see how the physical of the earth is woven into the etheric according to very different laws than those found on the earth. But if one could go all the way out to the boundaries where the ether sprays in its effects from the outside, one would experience something curious. The superficial physical thinkers say: If you move out from the earth in a radial manner into the world, then you can go away into infinity. At most, those who know a little newer geometry will say: If you go out into infinity, you will come back on the other side, it will just take a little while. But that is what they think; in reality it is not so. In reality, you really do come to an end, even if the path can be called infinite by earthly standards, superficially speaking. The world has a transition from earthly lawfulness to cosmic lawfulness, which radiates in. The world is a closed whole, and if you come to the end - you only have to imagine it figuratively - then you will encounter the inside of a spherical surface everywhere. The astral then radiates inwards. The astral begins to work in from the outside by taking possession of the etheric.

But you still do not come to something that is the I. If you follow the world, you first come to nature, to physical nature, to earthly nature, from there to the etheric, and at the end of the etheric to the astral. But you do not yet enter the world to which the human ego belongs. It is initially not present at all in this area of the cosmos, which can be found even for the astral senses, but the ego still belongs to a further world, which in turn has its own laws. So when speaking of the human being, one must be clear about the fact that the different members belong to completely different worlds. We are not dealing with a mere classification, but with the presentation of the fact that the human beingness is a confluence of the beingnesses of radically different worlds. And now, at the moment when you want to think at all about the differentiation between waking and sleeping, you must also think about this differentiation of the different worlds. Because what we actually have in our I and in our astral body does not belong to the same world as the two members of human nature that lie in bed. What we left in bed, we have conveyed to the mineral and plant world for the time of sleep. What we carry with us as I and astral body, we have taken out of the plant and mineral world, we have raised it up into another world, which is not the plant and not the mineral world.

And what happens now while we sleep? While we sleep, exactly the same thing happens in what lies in bed as goes on outside in the world in the mineral and plant kingdoms, as long as the plants are not eaten by animals. For then the astral world of the animal world comes into play. But if we disregard humans and animals and consider only the earth with the plants, we have the world to which we surrender our physical and etheric bodies during sleep, and everything that happens in the mineral and plant kingdoms then also happens in our physical and etheric bodies.

Let us assume that we could not sleep. I have said before that people sometimes claim that they cannot sleep, but they do sleep, even if they interrupt their sleep and often wake up. Because the time that some people claim they have not slept is so great that they would have been dead long ago if it were true. So sleeping is necessary for the entire being of a person. But if we did not sleep – let us assume that – then we would continually work in our physical and etheric bodies with our astral body and our ego. But the physical body and etheric body cannot stand that at all. The physical body follows the laws of the earth. The astral body does not belong to the earth at all, it continually works on the physical body in opposition to the laws of the earth. The physical body would become quite unsuitable if a person could not sleep, because it is constantly being worked on by extraterrestrial laws. Just as if someone were to continually work a field of the mineral kingdom with hoes and spades and thereby pulverize it completely, so our astral body begins to work on the physical body. The physical body must again assert the earthly laws within itself so that it is strengthened in a certain way. And the etheric body is dulled by the astral body. I do not mean it is so bad, there are also clever people, one need not always reproach people for being clever; but in fact, seen cosmically, it has this effect. Then the etheric body must once again be exposed to the cosmos, so that it gets rid of this dulling influence for a while. And so the human being must become mineral and vegetable cosmos, so that that which is in him can flourish, so that a certain state is established when we wake up. I am now talking about normal life. In the case of abnormal phenomena, the human being naturally sleeps and wakes as well.

What is the condition that is brought about when we wake up? The condition that is brought about is that our soul, namely the astral body and the ego, cannot initially enter the physical body and etheric body completely. They can never enter completely. Oh, how clever we would be if we could enter our etheric body completely. But that would also exhaust us, we could not bear it. It is really true, this astral body is basically terribly selfish. The etheric body, which is actually identical in nature to the cosmos, is not selfish. It is also not envious, it has no need of it. But the astral body is subconsciously terribly envious of the etheric body, which is so wise, which contains the thoughts of the whole world in itself, - is terribly envious. And now it is already ensured that the senses remain independent, the I and the astral body remain independent during the day. Then gradually the I and the astral body are increasingly able to sink deeper into the physical body and the etheric body. But this only makes them imbued with the longing to go out again. They then want to sleep, and so the I and the astral body become tired. For the human being is only able to prove himself as an independent being because he is not absorbed by the physical and etheric bodies during waking. If the human being were absorbed by the ego and the astral body, then we would know nothing of ourselves and of the world, but we would find ourselves in the interior of our physical organism, which would go up to the skin, would follow the processes in our physical physical organism, would only know something about our inner being, and then we would still know that magnificent thoughts imbued with wisdom are sprayed into our inner being, but we would not go beyond these thoughts either. We would know nothing at all about any other human being, about animals on earth, about other beings on earth, if we were completely absorbed in our physical and etheric bodies. If we did not retain our independence, so that we did not enter completely into our physical body and etheric body, we could never establish relationships with the world, we could only know something of our physical body and our own etheric body.

People reflect on this: how is it that one says the table is outside of us? — One would not arrive at this statement: the table is outside of us — if we were to completely immerse ourselves in our physical and etheric bodies. We would never come to the realization that the table is outside of us — we would only experience what is within us, namely within the skin of our body. And there would shine in an internally closed universe, which is etheric, full of wisdom. But the idea that there is something outside of us comes from the fact that we ourselves are outside of ourselves when we are asleep. When the I is outside of the physical body, it gets used to being outside of the physical body. When the I slips back into it, it has an understanding of the outside world. We can thank the fact that we can sleep for the possibility of accepting things outside of us. We become accustomed to being outside of ourselves by placing ourselves outside of ourselves in our sleep.

Philosophers reflect on what guarantees existence; on why I say at all: something is – or: I am. If I were completely absorbed by my physical and etheric bodies, I would never come to say: I am. But by being able to make myself independent of the physical and etheric bodies between falling asleep and waking up, I get into the habit of living with the outside world as well. Just as one consciously has a memory, as I consciously remember yesterday when I saw someone today and ascribe a reality to this memory, so out of habit I ascribe an external reality to what is outside of me, because I am also sometimes outside myself when I sleep.

We must therefore think about things from completely different angles than we do today. But then we will really come to understand how much depends on the human being not being absorbed by his physical and etheric bodies. Only then can one really understand how the sense of freedom is essentially conditioned by the fact that one can also be outside one's physical and etheric body. People as naturalists, who do not reflect at all on the independence of an ego and an astral body in sleep, can never come to an understanding of freedom, because man would not be free if he were united all the time only with his physical and his ether body. How could they know about freedom if they know nothing of the times when man makes his astral body and his ego independent of his physical and ether bodies! If we could not sleep, we could not be free. Only what we bring with us from sleep into wakefulness makes us free.

Modern man has no conception at all of the world in which the I and the astral body find themselves during sleep. But if we know that everything that modern man can imagine lies in the realm of the mineral and the vegetable, then we know that modern science actually has only to decide about the sleeping person and not about the waking one; and about the sleeping person only if one has such ideas about the ether as I have mentioned today. If one knows this, then one will say to oneself: Now, however, I must also be able to arrive at ideas about the ego and the astral body. Today, as I already indicated the other day, one only has words from these things.

How can we get an idea of the ego and the astral body? Let me use a trivial example. Firstly, your thoughts can rest a little during the trivial comparison and secondly, we will understand each other better if I use this example. Imagine that some being, a human being or any other being that needs food, does not feed itself but completely refuses food. It becomes increasingly emaciated, until it is nothing but skin and bones. This is beautifully symbolized in a story: there was a farmer who had decided to wean his ox from eating. And now he had come quite a way with this weaning cure. He gave him less and less every day and was confident that he would be able to get to the point of giving him just a straw a day. He would have succeeded, but the ox died first, so he could not carry the experiment to the end. In the end, the being simply stops needing the extra nourishment.

But that is what has happened to the human soul in the course of historical development - or as we call the soul: I and the astral body. Gradually, people have lost any concepts that they can apply to the soul. Thus, the soul has become a mere word. I already told you last time: Mauthner, who wrote the “Criticism of Language,” no longer wanted to use the word soul at all. He wanted to say “Geseel” (to nourish the soul).

Now we recall times when there was still a living awareness that the concept of the soul needs nourishment if it is to be present; that for the soul one needs something to give to it, just as one needs nourishment for a living being. The concept of the soul has indeed died altogether, because in the end there was no more nourishment in the content of people's concepts. Let us look back at such times. I recall to you a saying of St. Paul's that is familiar to everyone: “If Christ is not risen, our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain,” because people - and this is the basis - would have to die spiritually if the power that lies in the resurrection of Christ had not come into the world. But this power is a spiritual power that is given to the souls. And if one comes from such ideas, one will say: What then should the concept of the soul be, in order for it to become a living concept, so to speak, as food? It must be given that on earth which is not earthly, the ethical-religious content, the moral content. These are what keeps the soul alive, just as the body receives nourishment.

How far is today's humanity from saying to itself: If the soul does not receive spiritual nourishment, it dies with the body! In Paul's time, there was still a vivid idea that not receiving spiritual nourishment means death for the soul. This must come to the world again through anthroposophy. For you can believe that if someone today is looking for proof of the immortality of the soul, he is looking for it in a similar way to the way science does. It does not occur to him to say: In the course of earthly life, the soul becomes more and more similar to the physical and etheric bodies; in order for it to sustain itself, it must receive spiritual nourishment, that is, moral and religious content, then it conquers the transience of the physical and etheric bodies. That the spiritual, the moral and religious in the spiritual has something to do with the life of the soul must first be understood by mankind. Then one also comes to attach reality and reality to the moral and religious.

You can see from this what the age of intellectualism has actually done. What has the age of intellectualism done? You see, before the age of intellectualism, people still immersed themselves a little in their physical and etheric bodies. The fact that people no longer immerse themselves at all is only an achievement of the intellectual age. Since that time, they have only had reflections in their thoughts. The nature of abstract, intellectual thought is that it contains nothing in itself, because it is a reflection. People's earlier thoughts still had power. That is when people developed myth. The myth still penetrated down into reality. With abstract, intellectualistic thinking, one can think everything exactly, but it does not acquire any content; it is merely a drawing of the world, which one has with intellectualistic thinking. So it is that the intellectualistic age has brought man completely out of himself, leaving him to experience only mirror images of reality. The moral-religious world is not experienced at all if one wants to experience it intellectually, because the moral-religious things must indeed be done by man. No mirror images are experienced if they are not done, the moral-religious things. So it is a matter of the human being having to rise above the intellectualistic in order to experience the reality of the moral-religious in reality, to a real inner experience. This can only be done if one faces the will of spiritual science with full clarity.

What I have already been obliged to say elsewhere, I would also like to repeat here. In certain areas of the world, people are finally realizing that there is a difference between today and a hundred years ago. People talk about Goethe as he lived, say, in 1823, without emphasizing one thing that is only now beginning to emerge as an inkling in America, where it is even more pronounced than in Europe. Do you think that in the Weimar where Goethe walked around – or anywhere else, for that matter, where Goethe walked around – there were no telegraph wires, no telephone lines and so on? The air was not permeated by telegraph lines, by electrical lines. Now just imagine how fine the instruments are, where the effect of electricity is sent. But man has nothing but such devices before and around him. People over there in America are beginning to suspect that this has an influence on the physical human being, that he is surrounded by electrical lines and the like. Goethe walked the world without his body having induction currents in it. Today you can go far enough anywhere and the electrical lines will follow. This continuously induces currents in us. Goethe was not in such currents. All this takes away the physical body from humanity, makes the physical body so that the soul cannot enter it at all. We must be clear about this: in the time when there were no electric currents, when the air was not buzzing with electrical lines, it was easier to be human. Because there were not constantly these ahrimanic forces present, which take away one's body even when one is watching. It was also not necessary for people to exert themselves so much to come to the spirit. Because when we enter into ourselves, we actually only come to the spirit. Therefore, it is necessary today to apply much greater spiritual capacity to be human at all than it was a hundred years ago.

It does not occur to me to be reactionary and say, “So get rid of all that stuff, the modern cultural achievements!” That is not the intention. But modern man needs this direct access to the spirit, as spiritual science gives it to him, so that through this strong experience of the spirit he may indeed be the stronger in the face of those forces that are emerging with modern culture to solidify our physical body and take it away from us. Otherwise it will come to the point that people, I would say, miss the boat in the evolution of humanity.

This intellectual age has emerged for the benefit of humanity at a time when people could still immerse themselves somewhat in their physical body. If we had remained as people were in the 13th or 14th century, with the state of mind of those people, we would not be able to grasp intellectual thoughts at all. Then we would no longer have the older, but we would not even come to abstract intellectual thoughts; they would evaporate. The old would be alienated from us, we would not be able to think, and so we would go around as dreaming beings in the world, so reeling in the face of the most important world affairs. We would go around like reeling dreamers. But that is also what would happen to humanity if it does not sharpen and strengthen its inner spiritual abilities. Humanity would suffer so much from progress that it would be like hurting a person if they were to think. In the 16th century, people were still inwardly robust enough to think sharply in an intellectual way. They still took great pleasure in thinking intellectually. Today, we are already very close to people saying: Oh, thinking is so hard, film the whole story for me so that I don't have to think and can watch it in its various stages! — Strange things could come of that. I don't mean that in a humorous way. This is something, as you will see in a moment, that is very much within the realm of possibility. Just imagine if you could film the whole multiplication table, then a person could always carry a camera in front of him and, by making the calculation, the correct answer would be triggered by the specific sound, and he would have the whole story filmed in front of him. Gradually, man no longer wants to think because it starts to become unpleasant. Thinking becomes unpleasant. Man much prefers dreaming to thinking. And if those outer things, the outer cultural development, were to continue forever and a strong inner spiritual element were not to arise in the development, then it would actually be the case that all people would become reeling dreamers. This is meant very seriously; such a thing is in store for humanity. And this can only be counteracted by really getting involved in it, courageously and boldly tackling the spiritual world in the way spiritual science wants it and can do it. Today it is still quite possible for us to pull ourselves together so strongly inwardly as humanity, that we can achieve inner activity. But all those who understand this must work in earnest with all means at their disposal.

Please do not take the things I say in a negative sense negatively. I do not want to take anything away from modern culture. The more things are developed, the more I am enthusiastic about them. I do not want to abolish the telegraph or the film, that does not occur to me at all. But it is really necessary in the world to take into account that everywhere two things are juxtaposed. The world is completely dominated by externalization. The counterbalance: just as one must dry oneself after bathing, so one must delve inward in spirit, when on the other hand the culture of external observation is becoming ever greater and greater. This in particular calls upon us to become inwardly more and more active when we are outwardly absorbed in that which no longer works through us but works on us, so that we literally switch off as soul and spirit.

We can best find these thoughts, which we need, by realizing that This human being is such a complicated creature because the entities of the most diverse worlds flow together in him to form a total being. When I had written my “Outline of Esoteric Science”, a quite important contemporary philosopher sent me – I have already mentioned this – a long treatise about this “esoteric science”. And when I began to read it, I came across clever things like: Yes, that is an abstract division of the human being into physical body, etheric body, astral body and so on. Now that is just as clever as saying: It is abstract to say that water consists of hydrogen and oxygen. One need not be surprised if one has to say: It is impossible to discuss with someone like that. We must always distinguish between the impossibility of discussing the subject matter with our contemporaries. Such discussions are fruitless discussions. They are, of course, also the rarer ones. The more frequent cases are where opponents come forward with personal slander and lies. In such cases, the lie must be exposed as a lie, the slander as slander, before the world. But discussions alone achieve very little. For it is precisely the nature of anthroposophy and the nature of what its opponents have to present that they somehow want to discuss: that no bridge can be built; that anthroposophy must emerge through its own efforts in all areas. We must be just as vigilant in repudiating calumny and falsehood as we must realize that Anthroposophy can only make its way in the world by working with all the intensity that its inner strength can give it. So, dealing with opponents means: be vigilant where the fight is being waged with dishonest means. On the other hand, it may certainly be necessary for reasons of expediency to point out how justified one or the other is; one can do that when one is merely dealing with a fictitious opponent. Some people have liked to copy the refutations that are in my writings and have left out only what was positive. So it is indeed the case that one can extract factual refutations from my writings oneself. It is necessary to see clearly in these matters and not to start dreaming in this area.

Please forgive me for having to end almost every reflection with such a request, even if it attempts to introduce more remote areas. The most harmful thing for the Anthroposophical Society to do is to develop too great an inclination to sleep; it must be awake. Man becomes a plant when he sleeps. But the Anthroposophical Society also takes on a plant-like existence when its actual affairs are neglected. Just as a human being cannot always be a plant, cannot sleep through his whole life, so the Anthroposophical Society cannot always be asleep. Vigilance must also be developed. And I would like to recommend this to both the Anthroposophical Society and the Free Anthroposophical Society without distinction. Otherwise it could come about that the two societies developed only alongside each other because, if they had remained together, the members of one or the other would have disturbed each other's sleep too much. But when one is independent, the others disturb one's sleep less, and one can sleep all the better.

It is therefore important that both societies come to realize that both are now awake and not happy due to their own internal forces, and that the other should no longer disturb their sleep. Of course, I do not want to be insinuating, but sometimes one has to say such things and even has to say them to the Free Anthroposophical Society. If neither is to be the pet project of the other, then both should be treated quite humanely. So I would like this to be taken into account a little. I think one or the other already knows what I actually mean. People often say they don't know what I mean, but I still believe that if you want to, you can know what I mean, and even when I call for awakening, you can know what I mean, even if it sounds unpleasant.

So, my dear friends, send your delegates to the General Assembly of the Anthroposophical Society in Dornach from July 20 to 22. Send them well awake. Because we need wakefulness in the future, full wakefulness in the whole Anthroposophical Society.

In present-day anthroposophical life we must begin to develop an art which was one of the arts of the old Mysteries—those Mysteries which were based on a quite different kind of knowledge from that of to-day, and yet possessed in their customs, and in their whole way of conducting affairs, a great deal that has been lost, and must be renewed. The art I mean can be described, quite in accordance with the intentions of the old Mysteries, thus: from words there must be drawn Spirit. But when, in the old Mysteries, they spoke of Word, or Logos, they meant something very much more significant than is generally meant to-day. We have to learn to find again a deeper and deeper meaning in the objects and processes of the world—and in this sentence, once more: Spirit must be drawn forth from words.

To speak of the human being as consisting of physical body, etheric body, astral body, Ego, and so on, is really very abstract. For this reason we have tried on many occasions to describe what is really meant by these members of man's being. It is always possible to go further in such descriptions, and so to approach nearer to spiritual reality. To-day we shall consider the human etheric body, describing what is discovered by super-sensible vision about the real being of this human etheric body. We should not stop at the vague conception conveyed by describing how the etheric body is related to the physical body, how it differs in substance, and so on. Such descriptions are only approximate, and only by developing these approximate descriptions very much further do we penetrate to reality.

We know that when, under earthly conditions, the human being goes to sleep, the etheric body remains within the physical body, and that—as we have always described it—the astral body and the Ego leave this physical body and etheric body. The life of the astral body and Ego is still so weak, at the present stage of their cosmic development, that they are not capable of conscious experience between falling asleep and awakening. We have often discussed, up to a point, the subconscious experiences through which the astral body and the Ego pass during this time.

But to-day we shall look back at what is left behind in bed when a human being is asleep, and in particular at the etheric body. In this way we shall treat the term “etheric body” so as to draw out the Spirit from it, by that art of which I said just now that it was cultivated in the ancient Mysteries. Looking at this etheric body, we shall consider its real nature, as it is beheld super-sensibly, when the human being is asleep.

We see the physical body grow still. We see the human being unable to move his limbs—unable also to pour his will through his bodily form, so as to make use of his senses. The relation of the external world to his senses does not change. But the relation of the senses to the external world changes, inasmuch as the human being becomes inwardly still. Just as externally his arms and legs are still, in his organs of perception his will is not active in the delicate movements of response to the external world which are necessary for sense-perception. But it is a complete mistake to believe that the sense-organs themselves, or more exactly the sites of the sense-organs, are not filled by any activity during sleep. Over its whole extent, the physical body rests—but the human etheric body becomes all the more active and inwardly mobile between falling asleep and awakening. This is a characteristic fact: in the same measure as the functions of the physical body come to rest, at and after the moment of falling asleep, a more and more lively activity of the etheric body begins.

This lively activity of the etheric body streams out, in particular, from the senses. If the super-sensible gaze is directed upon the sleeping human being—that is to say upon the part of the human being present in the physical frame—then it is found that from those places where the sense-organs are located, a continual lively activity streams inwards. This is the life of the etheric body, or vital body during sleep.

For example, from the moment of falling asleep there is a particular process which originates from the region of the human eyes. It is as if, through the influence of light during the waking period, the eye had stored up forces for an activity that develops only after sleep begins. And this is in fact an etheric activity. In the same measure as the influence of light and colour from outside upon the eye is darkened, the eyes themselves begin, like two phosphorescent suns, to irradiate the interior of the physical part of the sleeping human being. The interior space of the human being is illumined by a phosphorescent, glimmering light. It is not surprising that this light, which streams into the interior of the human being, cannot be seen in the ordinary way. External, physical eyes do not see what goes on in the interior of man; there is no organ within the physical body which could immediately perceive this phosphorescent glow.

One of the inner activities of the etheric body in the human being during sleep can be described in this way. Into this there flows a further process. What a man can still observe while he is going to sleep—a kind of humming and singing, a changing murmur within his organism—continues during sleep itself as a music, extraordinarily rich in melody and harmony, which also fills the whole interior of man during sleep. From falling asleep to awakening, this musical activity continues. And the Ego and astral body, which are outside the physical and etheric body, receive strong impressions from this—from what they have left behind, the resounding music in the etheric body. And while it resounds in music, the etheric body is at the same time radiant with light. But the impression made upon the Ego and the astral body remains unconscious.

In the same way, etheric streams of warmth flow into the interior of man from the whole surface of the skin. The result—with much else that is more remote from what we perceive in the external world as warmth, light, and sound, and is thus difficult to describe—is an immensely beautiful and impressive living and streaming activity of the human etheric body.

Distinct, like an island, there stand out from the general etheric life of the cosmos this particular music, and radiance, and flooding stream of warmth. They stand out for inner reasons—which are rooted in the very existence and being of man himself. They belong to man's individual etheric body. And this flooding warmth, this phosphorescent glow, this resounding music—it is these that detach themselves, a few days after man's death, as etheric body from the astral body and Ego, and flow out into the general cosmic ether.

Many of you may have noticed how, after attending a concert the previous evening, one may wake up with the feeling that the soul has been listening again to the same music; as if the whole concert had been repeated for the soul during sleep. But this is a more complicated process than for the ordinary consciousness it appears to be. In reality the soul is emerging from the impressions of the cosmic music, which resounds in an individualised form in the human etheric body. But when the human being returns into the etheric body, all that I have described as going on in the etheric body is blotted out for consciousness by the perceptive activity of the physical body. And the human soul translates what is really individualised cosmic music into the recently-experienced earthly sounds. They are in a sense the clothing assumed by the cosmic music at the moment of awakening, because it has something in common with the stream of sound received at the concert. Because in the ordinary consciousness man cannot perceive the cosmic music, it is clothed in the sounds taken from earthly experience that are most nearly comparable to it. This is the real experience behind the phenomenon most of you may have met at some time.

You see what complex processes are embraced in the human etheric body. And if the attempt is made to penetrate further—using the methods with which penetration into such realms is possible—then it can be observed that in reality this flowing warmth, this gentle phosphorescent glow, this living music, are an outer revelation of cosmic beings. All that I have described is the external clothing, the revelation, the glory of mighty cosmic beings. And these beings disclose themselves as those we know from anthroposophical writings as the Exusiai. I have often named these Exusiai Revelations, because they live, in accordance with their inner nature, in the shining stream which during earthly sleep flows from the human sense-organs towards the interior of man. In this stream the weaving life of those beings we name Exusiai is revealed.

And now, with the same methods with which one observes these revelations of the human senses, so active in their etheric substance during sleep, these streams can be followed further along their course into the interior of man's organism. If one is looking at some shining object, one can follow the line from the eye towards this object. It is to be found somewhere on this line that leads outwards, the visual line. In the same way you can follow inwards from the senses the streaming, flooding etheric radiance.

There is not so far to go; very soon something different is reached. The mild phosphorescent glow, proceeding from the eyes; the living music, which comes from the region of the organs of hearing; the streaming warmth, which goes inward from the whole surface of the skin—all these become an organically coherent etheric system. (When one observes the waking human being, one sees the etheric body in activity—the physical body of course as well—and this activity is somewhat different from that I have described for sleep; the activity then extends a little outside the physical body.) Now one sees how all that streams and flows and shines inwards, from the senses and from the whole skin, is formed into a shell-like copy of man, but within him, extending to a certain depth. From the eyes, one sees this phosphorescent glow, inwards, changing into something I will describe in a moment. The streaming warmth goes inwards from the skin, attains a certain thickness like a shell, and then forms a kind of etheric organism which is compounded of the living music, the glowing light, the streaming warmth, intermingled with one another. All these, and much else, flow through one another, influence one another mutually, and form an organism—the etheric organism of man. If one contemplates this etheric organism with spiritual vision, and begins to understand its phenomena, one is bound to describe it as consisting simply of the forms of thoughts, of flowing thoughts. What is flowing within it is everywhere Thought.

If one were to follow this inner activity of the etheric body during sleep, in its continual fluctuation, and then draw it at a particular moment, one would draw of course lines, or coloured forms. But to describe the substance of these lines or coloured forms one could only say: it is as if thoughts were starting to flow. What lives otherwise in the activity of thought becomes an ever-changing flood and flow. It is the thought-process of the Universe individualised. This individualised thought-process of the Universe reveals itself as individualised Logos. One cannot really say: this forming of thoughts, which streams and weaves within man, connected with these movements shining in from the senses, is only thought. For it speaks. It speaks indeed a silent language, but one that can be perceived as belonging to the interior of man. It speaks indeed—as all things through the Logos speak to us—in an individual form, expressing in an inner Word, that can be perceived spiritually, the essential being of Man.

Thus when we proceed further inwards from the senses there appears to us: the human speech that is directed inwards. It can really be said: the Ego and astral body of man, which from falling asleep to awakening are outside the physical and etheric bodies, are unconscious, as far as the ordinary consciousness is concerned. But they do experience what is happening. And just as they experience the etheric activity of the senses during sleep, as an inward streaming and flowing, they experience too during sleep the etheric body as individualised Logos. Speech, which otherwise is directed outwards to the ears of our fellow men, is as if transformed, turned inwards etherically. It is as if we were to repeat inwards everything which we have said during the day, from waking to falling asleep—but in the opposite order, beginning with the evening and ending with the morning. In a silent language we repeat all that we have said from morning to evening—but in a way that reveals the whole nature of our soul. In so far as man's essential being is experienced in what is spoken, from morning to evening, this experience is manifested inwardly, from evening to morning, in the resounding, speaking, individualised Logos. And this resounding, speaking, individualised Logos brings to expression at the same time—writing, as it were, into the time-sequence of the etheric, in that gleaming, gently phosphorescent light—the occult script corresponding to everything that works inwardly during the night, as the other side of what is spoken during the day. (The same thing happens during every sleep, even during a daytime nap, but in a more fragmentary way.)

Looking at this still more closely, using the same methods through which the individualised Logos that weaves within man is revealed—seeking the ultimate reality, behind what is fundamentally only appearance—one finds all those hierarchical beings called in the anthroposophical writings Dynamis, who are above the Exusiai.

Thirdly—in this attempt to exercise the art of seeking the real being behind the words—we find the ultimate reality of what I once described as a kind of opposite vertebral column. Perhaps some of you remember how I described the human etheric body many years ago. In the periodical, Luzifer Gnosis, it is described how the streams that compose the etheric body as a whole work together to form a structure that lies towards the front of man, just as in the physical body the bony structure of the vertebral column, and the vertebral canal, lie towards the back. In the physical body we have this vertebral column and vertebral canal, running vertically. And in the etheric body we have a confluence, a radiating together of what I have just described, into a kind of opposite vertebral column—lying in relation to the physical body towards the front. And just as the nerves proceed from the physical vertebral column, and also the rib-bones, for example—in the same way the rays and the streams in the etheric body flow together into this other column. They do not proceed from it, but flow together and work together, with all that they contain, here in the front of the human etheric body.

The result is an exceptionally beautiful and impressive etheric organ. Particularly during sleep, it is revealed in its gleaming and glowing, its resounding and its manifold effects of warmth, its inner language. And beholding it more closely, one can see that this organ permeates what I once described (because these things must be described in vivid pictures) as the various Lotus-flowers. Thus you can realize how through this organ—which develops in this confluence of the etheric body, and connects with the streams of the astral body, forming the Lotus-flowers—man finds his connection with the external astral and cosmic universe.

This, too, is a manifestation. This, too, can be described as an appearance, and its true inner reality must be sought. This reality is found in the Hierarchy which in anthroposophical writings I have called the Kyriotetes.

You have now drawn out from the word “etheric body” its ultimate reality. It is a working and flowing and weaving together of the Exusiai, Dynamis, and Kyriotetes, who individualize their streaming, flowing, resounding, speaking activity, and form the human etheric body.

When we contemplate all that Kyriotetes, Dynamis, and Exusiai have formed and made individual, which shines and warms and sounds and speaks into the human physical body as the individual human etheric body—we have also reached man's astral body. For in this living activity of the Second Hierarchy, which streams from the Cosmos and is individualized in the human being, there is really contained the human astral body itself. This activity shows itself in the etheric body—it exists in the astral body.

Think of this whole activity, in which man is interwoven during sleep. For during sleep he is interwoven, unconsciously, with the activity of the Second Hierarchy. When he has gone through the gate of death, man needs this whole activity. For he must live on within it, when he has laid aside the etheric body as such; when after some days this sounding, this living music, this gently phosphorescent glow, these streams of warmth, have flowed away. When all this has flowed into the cosmic Universe, when one has observed the glow extending more and more widely, but growing fainter and fainter, and the music growing softer.... Really this should be described differently. When these regions are described it becomes natural to explain a thing by its polar opposite. It would correspond better to the perceptions of one who has died if I were to say: what is at first like a silent resounding—but one that is perceptible within man—becomes louder and louder, spreading outwards. But just because it grows louder this is perceived as a fading away of the inner etheric music; it can no more be perceived by the being of soul and spirit, who for the earth has died. For this being no longer has physical ears—and physical ears would be needed.

It is similar with the other experiences of man in the first days after death. Then he feels himself in his astral body. But again it is only the external side, a word, if one says: Man is now in the Soul-World. I have described it in this way in my book Theosophy, in accordance with the perceptions of the soul-organ most immediately accessible by man. But for the universal, cosmic intelligence, developed in cosmic realms, this region reveals itself as an interwoven activity of the beings of the Second Hierarchy.

Observe what sort of existence it is, at first, within the activity of the Second Hierarchy after death. Between birth and death the human being lives on earth, alternating between waking and sleeping. During waking, although his soul is woven into the activity of Exusiai, Dynamis, Kyriotetes, he is compelled to plunge down continually into the forms of the physical body. During sleep he lives with the etheric body, but this, too, imposes an individual quality on the activity of the spiritual beings, in accordance with the forms of the physical body. Thus the work of the Second Hierarchy has to absorb what the human being is, morally—whether he is good or evil, devoted to error or to truth. The activities appropriate to the beings of the Second Hierarchy are individualised according to what man is, as good or evil earthly man, as earthly man living in truth or in error. But account must be taken of what these beings of the Second Hierarchy, according to their own essential nature, purpose to do for the being of man.

Let us assume that a human being has a relation to a particular Being belonging to the Hierarchy of the Dynamis. Through this is developed, with the help of an Archangel as intermediary, the faculty of speech in man's organism. But in the development of this faculty the work of the Dynamis is in a sense dislocated, and distorted into triviality. And when a human being uses his words to say something evil, something filled with hatred, this work of the Second Hierarchy is violently dislocated. And it must be restored again. The human being must not live on after death in those forms which he has given to all I have described through his moral or immoral being. He must strip them off, and find his way into the living work of the Second Hierarchy. This stripping off of the dislocations, of the trivializations—this stripping off of those uses of the work of the Second Hierarchy which distort it into its opposite—this is accomplished by all that I have described as the passage of man through the Soul-World. And then man has ascended to what I spoke of in Theosophy as the World of Spirits, when he can follow with his own Ego-being, with his innermost being of soul and spirit, those activities which correspond to the Being of the Dynamis and Kyriotetes.

You see—in this way, through the art that seeks out the reality in words, the Being of Man can be described once again. We get nearer and nearer to a real picture of this Being. Just as one might indicate on the blackboard the distribution of the figures in a picture by Raphael, say the Sistine Madonna, with a few characteristic strokes—the words physical body, etheric body, astral body and Ego are only an indication. The reality is living activity, inwardly full and rich; and in this activity the Beings of the Cosmos, in realm's of body, soul, and spirit, are revealed. In the end one comes always to Beings.

If anything is described as if it were vaguely extended in Space or swimming in Time, or as a Physical World, Etheric World, and so on—it is the manifestation which is being described. It is like describing a swarm of gnats seen in the distance, so that the particular gnats cannot be distinguished, only a grey patch in the air. In the real world, what are at first called etheric body, astral body, are such grey patches. If one looks closely at these grey patches in the physical air, one discovers the particular existing gnats. If one looks closely at these spiritual grey patches, “etheric body”, “astral body”, one always discovers Beings.

To Beings one must come at last in all understanding of the world. For Beings alone are real. Anything comes into existence only through the co-operation of Beings—presenting then an unreal appearance to unclear vision. Just as in the unreal grey cloud the gnats are the real, particular beings—everywhere in the world it is particular Beings that are at work, and the rest is illusion, arising from the co-existence of Beings. Physical matter, too, is an illusion of this kind—something of the nature of a Being underlies everything. Men must understand this again, in order not to speak of something that is not really there: of Matter—or (which is no better) of Spirit in general—in order to learn to speak about beings, individual Beings of the universe.

Once, in the old Mysteries, they knew how to speak about the Beings of the universe. They knew that realities could not be described by talking either of Matter or of what is called Spirit in the ordinary consciousness—a grey spirituality, conceived pantheistically as present in all things. They knew that if one wants realities, one must have particular Beings. But consciousness of these Beings has gradually been lost—to the same degree that in Man himself the equality of individual being has developed more and more. As I have often said, Man has become more and more intellectual ever since the first third of the fifteenth century. What he knows about himself becomes more and more abstract. But behind this abstract life there is a being living more and more within itself; increasingly rich in inner spirituality. Man lost the dreamy consciousness he once possessed of the Beings of the universe, in becoming a self-apprehending being himself. He must realize again that only when we can point to individual Beings in the universe do we grasp realities.

It was the necessary course of human evolution to see Being everywhere in ancient times, but in a dreamy consciousness. Then the time came, when things were felt in the following way. The realities consist of all these Beings, living in the Cosmos: Kyriotetes, Dynamis, Exusiai, Archai, Archangeloi, Angeloi, human Egos, animal group-souls, the cosmic souls of the plants and so on. Not even the animals, as they live on earth, are realities; they too are illusion; the realities are the group-souls. The whole plant world on earth is no reality; the earth-soul is the reality. Plants are only as hair upon the earth organism, like the hair upon our own organism. Men knew that all these Beings I have named existed in the universe, and shine out, manifesting themselves, revealing themselves in speech. They knew that this expression in speech proceeded from their essential being. And that universal resounding, which arises from the confluence of what is spoken by the particular Beings in self-revelation, this is the Logos. But to begin with, the Logos was also only an Appearance. Only because Christ united this appearance, and made it concrete in His own Being, was through the Mystery of Golgotha the apparent Logos born upon earth as real Logos.

We must understand the connection of these things. Then the particular Beings can be described spiritually—how they shine, with gentle phosphorescence, and resound: how they spread streaming warmth, how they speak out their own essence. For each particular Being a full spiritual Form can be found in this way. And these full spiritual Forms are the only real things in the universe. In the old dreamy consciousness they knew a great deal about these realities. But this knowledge has shrunk more and more. Once it was known: Form shines out in this way from a certain Being who is reckoned among the Kyriotetes, in this way from human Egos, in this way from Angels, and so on. All this shrank, and contracted at last into a point, because the realities were seen less and less.

Originally they knew very well how the manifestations of the Exusiai, for example, differ from the manifestations of the human Egos, or these from the manifestations of the group-souls of the animals or of the plant Earth-soul. The differences were known, but gradually they fell into unconsciousness. A time came, when there was only the feeling: Yes, there are such realities, everything else is not real ... Space is not real, Time is not real, Matter is not real, Spirit in vague generality is not real—but cosmic individualities are real. But they could no longer be distinguished. And so they were described with the uniform word Monad. Leibnitz and Giordano Bruno spoke of Monads in this way. These Monads were the Realities I have spoken of, shrivelled up small. And no distinction was made between one Monad and another—or at most by tacking on an attribute to the word: the Monads of the Exusiai, the Monads of men, the Monads of animals, and so on.

And at last men lost the power even to speak about the Monads—to which the great German thinker ascribed a conceptual faculty, because he felt that spirit did indeed live in what had shrunk to the Monad. We have not only to remember that the Monad is something living; if human civilization is not to fall into decay, but develop further, we must not only remember the Monads, but we must understand once more, and now with a clear, enhanced consciousness, that all true reality consists in living, ensouled spirit-beings. And what is sketched first with a few lines—physical body, etheric body, astral body—must be brought to life, in the way we have done today.

And so one reaches the point of seeing man's soul and spirit-nature interwoven with the Beings of the second Hierarchy. One observes how man goes from earthly life to earthly life, and how from life to life a compensating cosmic Justice, a Karma, is at work. And here, too, considering this power at work in the Cosmos, one need not stop at the abstractions “Karma”, or “universal Justice”, or “moral world order”—but can go on to the realities.

Beginning with the etheric body, a description can ascend to the second Hierarchy, and therewith describe the human astral body as well. Just in the same way, one can begin with the astral body, and take hold of Thinking, Feeling, and Willing in the astral body, as they fade away at the moment of falling asleep, and go out with the astral body. If one begins there, and looks for the realities, one finds the following.

In our human Thinking there lives the activity of the Angels. In our human speech, which springs from Feeling, there lives for man as he sleeps during the night the activity of the Archangels. And in what is revealed in waking life through human movement of the limbs, through all that is imbued with Willing—and which also goes on in the astral body—there lives during the night, when the astral body is outside, the world of the Archai.

But what lives outside in this way, these super-sensible activities of Archai, Archangels, and Angels, which are reflected in the waking human being in Willing, Feeling, and Thinking—these must be harmonized with the etheric and physical bodies. The physical body must be formed in such a way that it can become the organ of thought, of speech, and of movement. One sees then how the activity of the Kyriotetes, Dynamis, and Exusiai passes over into a still higher activity: that of the Thrones, who bring human Willing into accord with the physical human organism, the human metabolism and limbs. Then we come to the Hierarchy of Cherubim, who bring the human faculty of speech into accord with its physical basis. In all that serves speech or song in the organism, or anything similar to speech—the Cherubim bring the human life of Feeling into accord with the organs of speech. And now the faculty of Thought must also have its physical organ in the human nerves and senses. It is the Seraphim who bring Thinking into accord with the nerves and senses of man. Speech, and all that is connected with it, is brought into accord with Thinking and Feeling by the Cherubim.

Thus we see, when we have threefold Man before us:—

In the organism of nerves and senses, in the basis of Thinking, the creating Seraphim.

In all that is the rhythmic man, which must as physical organism be brought into harmony with the faculty of speech—in all this we see the creating Cherubim.

In all that is expressed in the movement of the human limbs, in all activities of Will, for which the inner structure of metabolism and limbs must be present in man, harmony is accomplished by the Thrones.

From this we see how the physical human form dissolves into appearance, and behind it there stand as realities: Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones. We are always looking into the activity of the Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones, when the human Ego is interwoven with its inner activity, when man in waking life moves, speaks, feels, and thinks.

In this way we can find again a renewed Mystery wisdom for men; a Mystery wisdom which once more exercises the art of releasing Spirit from the word—of finding real Being in what is at first only sketched in a few lines as physical Man, etheric Man, astral Man. Real Being consists always in individual Spirits, who bear in experience within them what is of the nature of Soul, and who create what is outwardly manifest, the physical. Only existent Spirit-individualities are real. Their expression as Soul comes about because these individual Spirits experience themselves inwardly, and each other in mutual stimulus. That a physical world exists is because these Spirits (who have been rendered abstract as Monads and then have disappeared altogether from human observation) reveal themselves in creation, according to their various stages of existence. We can go back from the created world, which is really nothing but the outer Glory of creating Beings, to the world of experience, of Soul—which is the self-experience of the world of individual Spirits. And when we go on to the true reality, we come to the individual Spirits themselves, of whom the Universe is the revelation and the life.

As long as man stands upon Earth, he lives among the revelations of the individual Spirits. Between death and a new birth he must behold and pass through in full reality the individual Spirits in their own immediate forms. And in order to complete his development he must achieve the passage from the beholding of the spiritual realities in their true form to the order of Earth, in which he does not behold the individual Spirits, but in which they show themselves as it were only from outside, in their outer garments.

But if earthly life is not to fall into complete decay, man must learn once more to behold, and to know, and to understand, through the outer garment, the individual Spirits belonging to a higher world. Then man will see how his whole life consists in a struggle and effort among all that is outer garment of the Divine, and in a life within the Being of the Divine. But he can achieve a right existence within the Being of the Divine only if he develops himself more and more in the true beholding of the outer garment. He must learn to penetrate to the Being through the outer garment. He must not stop at the outer description, but press on to the inner life.

When once this is attempted by a considerable number of human beings, there will be the dawn of a future Earth-evolution, and of the metamorphosis of earthly being into the forms of Jupiter, Venus, and Vulcan. The Anthroposophical Society must unite human beings who feel themselves today as the nucleus of what must spread to wider and wider circles in human civilisation, that progress in the evolution of mankind may really come about, and that earthly life may not fall into decay.

If we consider human existence on Earth, the most significant element in life must appear to be our capacity to think or make mental images—the capacity to think for ourselves about the world, our own actions and so forth. Any other view would be a self-deception. Certainly there are temptations to consider other aspects of life as more valuable. We can feel, just below the threshold of consciousness, that our feelings about our own tasks, about our relationships and about the world, are more valuable than our thinking. And if we consider our moral existence, and the voice of conscience, we can tell ourselves that this conscience speaks to us from depths that thinking can never reach.

We may feel all the more inclined to such a view when we see that even the most highly trained thinking, schooled in accordance with normal life, cannot arrive at the moral impulses of a simple, unschooled conscience. Still, we would be fooling ourselves if we imagined that thoughts are not the essence of human life on Earth.

Certainly the voice of conscience, the feeling of compassion, come from inexpressibly deeper sources than our thoughts. Yet these impulses that well up from the depths only find their right place in the human sphere when they are permeated by thought. The voice of conscience, too, only finds its true value by living within our thoughts, so that we clothe in thoughts what the voice of conscience says. Without overestimating thought, we still have to acknowledge, if we want to proceed in describing human consciousness without illusion, that it is thinking that makes us human. So Hegel is right, in a sense, when he says that thinking distinguishes man from beast.

Let us consider the total compass of the thoughts that fill us from the moment we wake to the point of going to sleep. If we are honest about it, we will have to say that the majority of our thoughts in life are dependent on what comes from outside, on sense impressions and experiences that have to do with the material processes of earthly life. Our thoughts pass by in intimate connection with the Earth, so that whatever is most significant for us between birth and death seems to be connected to the Earth. But if we consider the totality of human life on Earth, we notice that a third of it goes by without any thoughts at all. If, with the means available to ordinary consciousness, we look back over a period of life, we naturally link one day's experience to the next and leave out the experiences of sleep that remain in the unconscious. But this leaves a third of life out of consideration.

From my earlier lectures you know that our activity during sleep, though unconscious, is not uneventful. The I and the astral body go through experiences at night that simply do not light up within our awareness. And if we look more closely, we notice that the unconscious forces that operate during sleep continue while we are awake—though we might say they live a life of sleep, for they operate in our whole activity of will, which is no clearer to us than the state of sleep. And they operate in a large portion of our feeling life, which is a kind of dreaming.

When we try to look at what comes from our deepest essence, from our fundamental nature, we have to look at something unconscious. Through spiritual scientific observation, we find that what operates in us while we sleep continues to operate while we are awake. It is present as the I and the astral body, though they do not enter ordinary awareness except in their effects—the expressions of our will and our feeling life—which give a special aspect to what does enter into clear, waking awareness: our life of thought. This becomes more comprehensible when we take into consideration the existence we participate in between death and rebirth.

When we pass through the gates of death, we undergo states I have described to you before, and that you already know in some of their aspects. If we examine very precisely what element of the human being is necessary for our thinking, our conceptual life, we arrive at the insight that for the formation of thoughts on Earth we need the physical body. The physical body must be set in action for us, as earthly human beings, to have thoughts. Beyond this, we also need to set our life body in action. But these are the two elements of human nature that seem to lie unconscious in bed while we sleep. Only when our consciousness has developed somewhat, through a certain training of our soul, and when we can even see physical things from a spiritual viewpoint, do we realize that actually we are thinking all the time, even when we are asleep. If we consider the whole human being, we can say that during earthly life we are never not thinking.

When we return in the morning to our physical and life bodies, normal consciousness forces itself very quickly back into them, and it is only then that normal consciousness becomes aware of external things—of sense perceptions that we then process conceptually, of objects that we perceive around us. But when we begin to enter much more consciously into our physical and life bodies, then as we awaken we meet the thinking that has gone on while we were asleep. We think; that is, the physical and life bodies are caught up in continual thought activity while we are asleep, only we are not present to it; we are outside this activity in our I and astral body, so we are not aware that it is going on. But this is a great self-deception. And just as we can better recognize any aspect of ourselves when it is torn away from its harmonious relationship to the whole of life—that is, when it appears in an abnormal state—so too we can realize based on external experiences of the world that while we are asleep we not only continue to think, but we think far more cleverly while asleep and absent than when awake and present. We arrive at the depressing fact that our life body thinks less well when we are within it, with the normal consciousness of our I and astral body. We spoil the thoughts that course through our life body by being present to them with our normal consciousness.

Someone who can see into these things can therefore confirm reports like the following. There were once two university students. One was a philologist and knew nothing of numbers. The other was a mathematics student. Now, we know that at certain moments in the study of mathematics, you do sweat through certain problems, whereas in philology it tends to go more easily. And that's how it was with these two students, who shared a room. One night, at the end of their preparations for their exams, the philology student was very pleased with himself, while the mathematics student was not, since he couldn't solve a problem he needed to solve for a written assignment. So he lay down to sleep very dissatisfied, and a strange event followed. At a certain hour the philology student woke up and saw the mathematics student get out of bed and walk to the desk. There, he thought some more, wrote for a long time and then went back to bed and slept. The next day, when they both got up, the mathematics student said, “We didn't drink anything last night, but this morning I have a terrible headache.” The other replied, “No wonder, if you get up at three and do calculations for hours, of course your head will swim the next day.” And his roommate said, “I was not up in the night!” He knew nothing about having been up. Then he looked and saw that he had solved the problem, though he had no memory of it.

These things are not fairy tales. I chose this example, which belongs to the literature, because you can check it. I could tell you many other such things. It is not a question of the individual example, but of the reality of all this. When consciousness is not present—and I emphasize that the person in question had no memory of his nocturnal activity—then the physical and life bodies are worked on by outside influences, and the life body works in the physical body to solve the assignment.

Now, I know that many will wish this kind of thing could happen more often. But we today do not have it so easy. In such a case as this the life body proves to be much more clever when it is left alone to work on the physical body than when the I and the astral body are present. This was merely an illustration of how we go on thinking all through the night. For our thoughts are stimulated directly by the outer world through the mediation of the life body, and then the physical body helps as well, to raise up thoughts for the physical human being on Earth.

So our thought life is definitely bound up with our physical and life bodies. Not so our feeling life and our will life. It is merely a superstition of modern science to imagine that our feeling and will are as bound up with our physical and life bodies as our thoughts are. I will only review a few points on this topic.

In contemporary earthly life, it is not true to say we can survey what happens with our I and our astral body when they separate from the physical and life bodies, taking with them from normal life only the will and a portion of the life of feeling. For this experience between going to sleep and waking up takes place in a completely different world. It takes place in a spiritual world, a world in which the environment is not the kingdoms of nature, the mineral kingdom and the plant kingdom, but the higher hierarchies, spiritual beings, spiritual events. But as long as we are beings of the Earth, we are not adequately developed to survey what we are experiencing in our I and astral body between falling asleep and waking up. The experience stays unconscious, but it is not less lively than what becomes conscious. We do go through it. And once we have done so, it is something that belongs to our inner content. Each morning we awaken changed; the night has changed us. We don't awaken in the same state we arrived at before going to sleep. Instead, we awaken in the state that our sleep life has put us into.

Now, when we pass through the gates of death, we lay down our physical and life bodies. And so, in the first days after death (since it takes about three days to let go of the life body), we feel that our thought life is being sucked up by the universe. First, we have a brief glance over our previous earthly life. It is as if our past life were the world around us; we see it in pictures before us. The whole of the past life stands before us at one stroke once the soul is free of the physical and life bodies, that is, once our passage through the gate of death has been accomplished. But it still takes days afterward for the life body to be completely dissolved in the general life processes of the universe.

During this time, our impression is, first, of a living and sharply contoured overview of the life. Then it grows weaker and weaker, but at the same time more “cosmic,” until after a few days it finally melts away. But in these few days, the most valuable aspect of the earthly life that is past departs from the person who has died. Everything we thought about the things of the world, about our whole earthly environment, what filled our normal consciousness—all this melts away from us in just a few days. And to the exact extent that the content of earthly life melts away, there emerges the content of what we all go through unconsciously every night during sleep. This content now begins to become conscious for us. If we really experienced nothing during our sleep life, then three or four days after death our conscious life would be at an end. For everything we thought of as most valuable during our life has melted away, and out of this darkening, dimming awareness there emerges what we lived through every time we slept, but which formerly remained outside awareness.

Now, the peculiar characteristic of our sleeping experiences is this: that in sleep the world takes place in reverse. Whether our sleep is long or short, once we fall asleep it is all the same, since other states of consciousness also have completely different time-senses. So the characteristic I am talking about holds true whether you sleep all night or only for a few minutes. From the time we go to sleep until the time we wake up again, we leave backwards through everything we just experienced between our last waking and the current moment of falling asleep. But we live through it in a different form than we did at first. When we are awake, we live through the day from start to finish, every event and every circumstance, in terms of physical, intellectual nuances. While asleep, however, we experience it all backwards and in terms of its moral nuances. Moral and religious impulses appear; we pass through everything evaluating how it has made us more or less valuable as moral human beings. We indulge in no illusions, nor can we, but we evaluate everything we did the previous day in terms of our fundamental humanity.

Natural science is wrong when it claims that human life relies on causality, on necessary consequences, though in waking life we may only see this linking of cause and effect. Reality contains another current, though it remains unconscious for us during the day, and every night as we sleep we experience this moral ordering of the world. There, we evaluate things morally, that is, in connection with our own human value. We do this every night, or every time we sleep, with regard to the last-experienced period of being awake. And when we pass through the gates of death, then we go backwards through the last night, the next-to-last night, the night before that, and so on, up to the first night after we were born when we became conscious for the first time—for about a third of the time we were alive, since we slept through about a third of our earthly life.

The physical, cause-and-effect course of the world passes away from us, and what rises up before us is the course of the world as the gods and spirits think about it, feel about it and will it. Still, it appears to us bearing the coloration that earthly life gave it, since we have to pass through it in the form in which we lived it during our life on Earth. We need about a third of our lifetime to live it over again backwards in this way, just as I described it in my book Theosophy. There, I described the land of the soul and the world of the soul.

For before we enter a world that is completely spiritual, we have to live through everything that we experienced on Earth unconsciously in our sleeping state. In this way, we are training our awareness for the actual spiritual experiences between death and rebirth. At the same time, this backward experience of earthly life frees us from earthly life. Until we have done this, our consciousness is not adequately free to move among the spirits of the higher worlds. And once we have come to this point, we are only at the beginning of our life in the higher worlds.

Our life in the higher worlds, until we come to Earth again, can become a purely spiritual experience. Just as here we live among physical beings and events, there we live in a spiritual world among spiritual beings and spiritual events. We live among the spiritual beings and deeds that never descend to Earth, and among the spiritual beings who as human beings came to Earth and passed through the gates of death before us, or even after us. We meet again with all the people we knew during earthly life. And this community of ours is very widespread. For through our sleep life we include in this community everything that we only touched on briefly with human beings during our life on Earth. In sleep, we already live within the spiritual world, but we are still experiencing earthly events in reverse as earthly human beings; just this distinguishes our nightly experience from what we go through once we have passed through the gates of death.

First, we have to acknowledge that in the first few days, the content of our earthly consciousness melts away from us. The unconscious experiences of sleep, which we ignored during life, now emerge and we really do experience them. For in those earthly states of sleep, we experience backwards, and in pictures, only the events of waking life. As we step through the gates of death, we submerge ourselves in spiritual substance, just as here we submerge ourselves in material substance. Just as we have the physical and life bodies on Earth, after death we receive a higher kind of external sheath, a spiritual sheath. Through this process, we can actually go through, in a real way, what we only pass through in pictures, in images, during our periods of sleep on Earth. It is a real, true experience, just as real as our experience of earthly life in a physical body. This real experience, a repetition in reality of the pictorial experience of our sleep states, is the basis of the further experiences we go through in the later course of our life between death and rebirth.

What follows between death and rebirth, after we have put aside our whole earthly existence, is a preparation for the next life on Earth. In conjunction with the beings of the spiritual world, we form the spiritual seed of our next earthly life, and above all our next physical body. Then comes another period in which we grow oriented toward life on Earth. After dwelling for a long time among spiritual beings and spiritual facts, something happens that can be compared to a feeling of tiredness, of wanting to go to sleep. We feel how the awareness we have in the spirit becomes weaker, how we can no longer work together with the beings of the spiritual world in the way we have done, and our consciousness shifts over to an interest in a new life on Earth.

Just as every day we sink into the unconsciousness of sleep, our purely spiritual consciousness that fills most of our time between death and rebirth sinks down, not to unconsciousness but toward being filled with interest for life on Earth—as seen from the other side, from the point of view of the spiritual world. This interest in earthly life emerges many years, even many centuries, before we descend again to an actual life on Earth. The interest we took for so long in the purely spiritual world transforms itself into an interest in the succession of generations, and at the end of this succession, we ourselves are to be born. From out of the spiritual world, we take note of our ancestors through many long years before our own parents are born. So from out of the spiritual world we grow together with our ancestry.

At some point all this will become common knowledge, and only then will we see how limited today's science really is, despite its partial correctness, with regard to the concept of inheritance. Physical inheritance can only become comprehensible to us when we understand the role of those forces by which we participated in our ancestry from out of the spiritual world. When we point out here, with our limited scientific means, that we possess this or that characteristic of our great-grandfathers, we shouldn't forget that while this great grandfather was alive, we took an interest in him from out of the spiritual world; we grew together with what played itself out as the characteristics of the succeeding generations. We grew into it from out of the spiritual world.

When anthroposophy makes itself felt in the general civilization of humanity, these things will gain practical significance. We hardly realize how much in the way of cowardice and lack of energy derives today unconsciously from our notions of inheritance, for our science can only speak of inherited characteristics in a completely inadequate way. It has even permeated our arts, the whole of human thought.

When we finally penetrate to a realization of how we have been connected to the physical formation of our own ancestors, and also to the development of our own soul, which from out of the spiritual world has followed and co-created the whole evolution of our ancestors, then this awareness will become an inward reality for us. Then energy and courage will come from the spirit into our souls, where today we derive only cowardice and lack of energy from our contemporary style of thought. For it is not of the slightest value if we think this or that theoretically about the spiritual world. For the most part, we even clothe whatever we think about the spiritual world in physical thought forms. It is not a question of our making theoretical thoughts for ourselves about the spiritual world. ... What matters is not that we have mere thoughts about the spiritual world—we have to have them initially, so that the content of the spiritual world enters our souls at all—but that these thoughts become living and creative forces within us. Normal physical thoughts on Earth are completely abstract. Most scientific thoughts are abstract; they accomplish nothing within our human nature—no more than mirror images. Such thoughts are only pictures. If you are standing with another person, looking in a mirror, and the other person smacks you on the ear, you won't ascribe the blow to what happens in the mirror, but to the real person standing next to you. Thoughts are like these mirror images: they don't do anything, they don't act as impulses on reality. It is moral intuitions that can act as impulses. So, even if we have to start from thoughts, our thoughts about the spiritual world have to be active, active as reality itself and not like other thoughts.

We only enter into the real Anthroposophic view when we sense and experience thoughts as realities. A common objection arises at this point. It can be stated superficially that the whole anthroposophical world view is based on auto-hypnosis, a kind of self-suggestion. People say for instance that some of us are so suggestive that the very thought of drinking lemonade can fill us with the feeling of drinking a real lemonade. It is true that there are people so sensitive that they can taste lemonade in their mouths when they think about lemonade. This seems to be a good objection, but just let someone tell us about quenching thirst by the mere thought of lemonade! Mere thoughts do not become realities. As long as anthroposophy remains mere thought, it is like an imaginary lemonade. But it need not remain so, for it derives from spiritual reality. It does not simply operate like a thought, but it operates the way outer reality operates on material substances. It permeates, it resonates through our human life of feeling and of will. It becomes a reality in us. This is what matters.

So we don't have much if we have anthroposophy as theory. It has to become life. It is life if it fills our souls with energy, perseverance, courage. It is life if, faced with the cares of physical life on Earth—in our deepest sorrow, our deepest suffering—we become filled with inner joy, inner consolation, inner energy by looking up toward the spiritual world. Then anthroposophy becomes like a living being; it becomes something that seems to move amongst us as a living being. Only then has it become amongst us what it should be, permeating all our activity. And then it helps us to permeate this world in which we have come for the sake of the spirit, not for the sake of physical matter. Above all, anthroposophy arrives at real knowledge of what we are as human beings.

For the subject of these lectures, I have chosen an account of man's development during a particular period of the past, of his situation today, and of the outlook for his future evolution on this Earth-planet. No world-conception which has had any influence upon Western civilization, or its American off-shoot, has been content to deal only with present-day man and to show how the individual fits into the pattern of world-population. The world-conceptions acceptable to Western civilization have always emphasized the place of man in the whole course of human history on Earth. They have always shown the relationship between man of the present and of the past, no matter whether they go back only to a certain point—as the Old Testament does in describing the history of the Earth—or whether they trace man right through the stages of cosmic evolution.

The philosophies of the East, and even the early philosophies of Europe, if they did not belong to our modern civilization, were less concerned with this outlook. They were content to envisage man in terms of space only. The feeling we all have as a result of living within Western evolution makes it quite impossible for us to be satisfied with this spatial picture. There is a sort of psychological instinct in us to see ourselves in a brotherly association not only with men living today but also with men of the past; and unless we include both past and present we do not feel that we have a real notion of mankind.

But we can never have any satisfying idea of the historical development of man, whether in a wider or in a narrower sense, if we are limited to the results of ordinary anthropology. Man is a being whose evolution we cannot comprehend with the aid of nothing but external documents, however brilliantly they may be interpreted. Man is a being of body, soul and spirit; he is a being who has been penetrated, to a lesser or greater extent, by the spirit, in such a way that consciousness has been alive within him. The whole nature and being of man can be seen in the development of his consciousness, just as the being of a plant is finally revealed to the senses in the flower.

Let us therefore go a little more deeply into this most vital aspect of human evolution—the evolution of consciousness. When we consider man's consciousness as it is today we can make certain distinctions. In our ordinary waking condition, as we know it from waking in the morning to the time of falling asleep, we develop a more or less clear and luminous life of ideas which grow out of our life of feeling as the flower grows out of the plant. Over against this clear and luminous life of ideas there is a further condition which never really becomes quite clear, but is more or less unconscious, dark, inwardly surging and weaving. Even deeper than the feelings, which do, after all, quite directly stimulate our life of thought and ideas—much deeper within our being there is our surging will. And I have often described to anthroposophists how in his willing man is strictly speaking, asleep, even during his waking state. We never experience, in the waking conditions of our present-day consciousness, what lives within our willing. We have an idea that we are going to do this or that, but in this there is as yet no willing—only the intention to will clothed in the idea. Then the intention plunges into the depths of the human being, of which his consciousness has no clearer idea than it has of dreamless sleep. It then emerges as the will seen in the action of our arms and hands, legs and feet; in the activity we exercise on objects in the external world.

Whenever we act thus through the will on our own body, or in order to effect some change in the external world, we become aware of it through our ideas—ideas which also have some quality of feeling. Our ordinary consciousness perceives only the beginning and the end of willing, the intention in the form of an idea, and then again, also in the form of an idea, the consciousness observes our own movements or those in the external world which arise out of these intentions. All that lies between—how our intentions transfer themselves, via the soul, into our organism, how the soul arouses the physical warmth, the movement of the blood and muscles which then produce an act of will—of all this we are as unaware as we are of the events in dreamless sleep.

If we really manage to observe what happens, we must say that we are actually awake only in our ideas (our conceptual life); we dream in our feelings and sleep in our willing. Our knowledge of this willing is just like the experience of waking in the morning and noticing that our organism has somehow recuperated and refreshed itself. We perceive the effects of sleep when we wake. Similarly, we have the intention to perform some act of will; we transmit it unconsciously into our organism where, as though in sleep, it passes over into activity and deed; and we wake up again only with our action and see the result of what has been going on within us, of which we have been quite unconscious.

Such in broad outline is man's experience of his own being in waking, dreaming and sleeping. After all, the dreams we have when we are sleeping have very little relation to our ideas. They obey quite other laws than the logical laws of our conceptual life. But if we observe things closely we shall see that the course of our dreaming, with its marvelous dramatic quality that is so often typical of dreams, bears an extra-ordinarily close resemblance to our life of feeling. If in our waking life, we were capable only of feeling, those feelings would not, it is true, be very like the pictures of our dreams. But the dramatic quality, tensions, impulsive wishes and crises of the inner life, with their turmoil of emotion, are displayed in our feelings just as vaguely—or if you like, just as indefinitely—as they are in our dreams.; with this difference, that the basis of a dream lies in its pictures, whereas our feelings live in those peculiar experiences which we describe in terms of our inner life. Thus in the present state of human consciousness we may include our feelings and actual dreaming as part of the dream-state, and in the same way include our willing and actual dreamless sleep as part of the sleeping state.

We must, however, realize that what we are now describing as the basic quality of our present-day consciousness has passed through a process of evolution in a comparatively recent period, though we do not like taking much notice of this in our materialistic age. But you will not understand the surviving documents of human thought, even of the early Christian centuries, unless you realize that the inner activity of men in those days was quite different from what lives within our souls today as the activity of thought. In particular it would be a complete psychological error to seek to understand Scotus Erigena's work, “On the Parts of Nature” (De Divisione Naturae) written in the ninth century, for example, or the older writings on alchemy, with the conceptual intellect which has become normal today. We simply cannot understand what they were driving at if our modern type of thinking is employed. We can read the words, but we shall not grasp the meaning.

Human thinking since the fifteenth century has acquired a particular character which may have developed only slowly but has more or less already reached is culminating point. Yet this way of thinking, which represents the actual waking condition for modern man, is not really capable of giving him any satisfaction. A man can think, and that is the only luminous experience of his waking life. He can think, and that is the only means by which he can draw on his inner powers and establish the marvelous results of the sciences. Yet basically this modern thinking can give man no satisfaction for his inner yearnings. The fact is that he loses his own self in this modern thought. He does of course experience this thinking as the one clear element in his consciousness—much clearer, for instance, than his breathing or blood circulation, which remain obscure in the deeper regions of his consciousness. He feels that these also may contain some reality, but he sleeps through this reality, and it is only in his ideas and thinking that he is awake. But then, especially if he is disposed to a certain amount of self-observation, he comes to feel that although it is only in his thinking that he fulfils his inner being, yet his true self is lost. And I can give you two examples which will enable you—spiritually of course—to lay hands on this loss of self in thought.

There is a famous philosopher of modern times, Descartes, who is the originator of the famous saying, cogito ergo sum—I think, therefore I am. So this philosopher says. But today men do not and cannot say it. For when we merely think something or experience it in thinking, it does not follow that it “is,” nor that I “am” merely because I myself am thinking. For us these thoughts are at most pictures; they may be the most certain thing in us, but we do not grasp any “being” through our thinking. Again, we often say that if we think something, that is “nothing but thinking.” So also in Descartes' case: he wants to “be” and cannot find any other point at which to grasp this “being” of man, and so he seeks it where the common man certainly does not feel it to be—in thought. We do not think in sleep, but does it follow then that we are not? Do we die in the evening and are we reborn each morning? Or do we exist between falling asleep and waking? The simplest truths are in fact not taken into account by present-day views of the world. Descartes' “I think, therefore I am” is not based on something inwardly experienced, but is only a convulsive effort to attach oneself to reality. That is the first point.

The second point I want to make is this. Besides his thinking, of which modern man is very proud, we have the results of natural science, results of observation or experiment. In point of fact these do not help us to see the real being of things, but only the changes that occur in them—that which is transitory. And nowadays people consider a thought to be justified only if it derives from this external actuality, which after all reveals only a manifestation of itself. So we have ceased completely to grasp our real “being” in ourselves; our thought is too much in the air. We have no way of finding anything else in us except by methods that science applies to Nature; and then we seek our real being in that. In consequence, man today believes only in that part of himself which is part of Nature. Nature and the form of existence associated with it thus becomes a sort of Moloch which robs modern man of any real feeling of his own being.

Many people will perhaps retort that they don't notice anything of the sort, and will contradict what I have said. But that is only their opinion. The feelings which modern men have, at least if they have even the elements of self-awareness, are the outcome of the mood I have just described. They are encased, as it were, within this experience of their own being and their relation to the external world, and they then transfer the consequence of this condition to their consciousness of the world. For instance, they may observe the stars with their telescopes, spectroscopes and other instruments. They record what these instruments show and then build up a purely spatial astronomy and astrophysics. They do not notice that they are merely transferring to the heavens what they have observed and calculated about things on the Earth.

Thus, suppose that I have here some source of light. We all admit that if I move thousands of miles away from it, the light will become weaker and perhaps no longer visible. We all know that the strength of the light decreases with distance. Ordinary physics states the law that gravitation, too, decreases with the square of the distance. But people don't pursue this thought further. They can demonstrate that here on Earth, gravity has a particular magnitude and diminishes with the square of the distance, for they live on the Earth and establish laws of Nature and truths valid for the Earth, and build them into a system. Where gravity has a definite magnitude, these laws are true. The force of gravity decreases, but so does truth. What was true for the Earth ceases to be true if we pursue it further outwards into the Universe. We have no more right to regard the findings of physics and chemistry as applicable to the whole Universe than we have to assume that earthly gravity holds good throughout the Cosmos. The truths that rule in the heavenly spheres cannot be dealt with in the same way as those that hold on Earth. Of course to say this sort of thing nowadays is considered highly paradoxical—even crazy. But our general consciousness is so solidly encased nowadays that even the slightest remark which might pierce through the case immediately appears strange. Modern men are so wholly tied to the Earth that their knowledge, even sometimes their reflections, never pass beyond what they experience on Earth. And they deal with cosmic time exactly as they deal with cosmic space.

I was particularly impressed with all this recently. (I have often discussed this sort of truth among anthroposophists and what I am saying now is only a repetition based on a particular example.) This struck me with particular force when I was invited by our English anthroposophical friends to give a course of lectures at Penmaenmawr in the second half of August.¹ – 31^st August, 1923. (Revised edition in preparation, 1966.) The title of the German text in the Complete Centenary Edition is: Initiations-Erkenntnis. Die geistig und physische Welt- und Menschheitsentwicklung in der Vergangenheit, Gegenwart und Zukunft vom Gesichtspunkte der Anthroposophie Penmaenmawr is in Wales, where the island of Anglesey lies over against the West coast of Britain. It is really an extraordinary region which shows that there are quite different geographies over the Earth's surface from those you will find discussed in textbooks, even for the most advanced students. Ordinarily we think it more than enough if a geographical description includes the character of the vegetation, flora and fauna, and I in addition we base it on the geological and palaeontological nature of the region. But the Earth displays differentiations of a much more inward nature than any you will ordinarily find in geographical works. Thus in Penmaenmawr, where these lectures were held, you have only to go a short distance, a mile or so into the mountains, and all over the place you can find the remains of the old Druid cults, fallen stone circles of a simple sort. For instance, stones are put together to enclose a small space and covered with another stone so as to form a little chamber, where the light of the sun could be cut off, leaving the chamber in darkness. I do not dispute that such cromlechs had also to serve as burial places, for at all times the most important centers of worship have been set up over the graves of fellow-men. But here, even with these simple cromlechs, we have something further, as indeed indicated by the so-called Druid circles.

It was a wonderful experience when I went with a friend one day to one of these mountains at Penmaenmawr, on which the scanty remains of two such circles are still to be seen lying very close to each other. Even today it can be seen from the position of the stones that there were once twelve of them, and if one wants to discover their purpose they must be observed closely. Now while the sun follows his course through the Cosmos, whether during a day or during a year, a quite specific shadow is cast beneath each stone; and the path of the sun could be traced by following the shadow as it changed in the course of a day or year. We are still sensitive to light today, especially if light is associated with warmth or warmth with light. Present-day consciousness can naturally also notice the difference between the light of the summer and winter sun, since we are warm in summer and cold in winter; and we may note finer differences too. But, you see the same differences we can notice in so obvious a fashion in the light, when we are either warm or freezing, can be perceived in the shadow as well. There is a difference between the October sun and the July or August sun, not only in the direction but in the quality of the shadow. One of the duties of the Druids was to develop a special faculty for perceiving the quality of the shadow—for perceiving, let us say, the peculiar intermingling of a red tone in the August shadow or a blue one in that of November or December. Thus the Druids were able, by the training they received, to read off the daily and yearly course of the sun in the shadows. We can still see from these remains that one of the tasks they undertook was something of this sort. There were many other things that belonged to this cult: a Sun ritual, which, however, was not a mere abstraction, not even the abstraction we see in devotion and reverence. Without undervaluing devotion and reverence, it would be a complete error to believe that. But devotion and reverence were not in this case the essentials, for the cult included something quite different.

Take the grain of wheat or rye. It must be planted within the Earth at a particular moment of the year, and it is a bad thing for it to be planted at an inappropriate moment. Anyone who has exact knowledge of these things is well aware that it makes a difference whether a seed is planted a few days earlier or later. There are other things of this sort in human life. The people who lived about three thousand years ago in the region where the Druid cult flourished led an extremely simple life. Agriculture and cattle-raising were the chief occupations. But we may ask how they were to know when to sow and harvest in the best way, or when they were to attend to the many other jobs which Nature requires in the course of a year. Nowadays of course we have farmers' calendars which tell the farmer that on such and such a day such and such a job needs to be done, and tell him very intelligently. In our day, with our type of consciousness, this information can be catalogued and read off from the printed page. We think nothing of it, but the fact remains that there was none of that, not even the most primitive form of reading and writing, in the days when the Druid religion was in its prime. On the other hand, the Druids could stand in one of these stone circles and by observing the shadow they could proclaim, for instance, that during the next week farmers must undertake this or that work, or the bulls be introduced to the herd since the moment was right for the mating of the cows. The druids were equipped to read in the Cosmos; they used the signs produced by those monuments of which we have today only such scanty remains, and could read from them the information the sun gave them of what was to be done on Earth.

The constitution of the soul was in fact quite different, and it would be a serious conceit on our part if, just because we are capable of this little bit of reading and writing, we were to undervalue the art which made it possible to lay down the work and activities required on Earth through these revelations of the heavens. In places like Penmaenmawr we are impelled to recollect many other things, too, which Spiritual Science is peculiarly qualified to investigate.

I have often pointed out in anthroposophical circles how ordinary thoughts are inadequate to grasp what Spiritual Science can investigate and how we have to conceive it in Imaginations. I assume you all know what I have said about Imaginations in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment. It is these Imaginations and not our ordinary ideas which we must have in our souls when we are describing things on the basis of some immediate spiritual observation and not of external sense-perception. The genuinely spiritual-scientific accounts which are given you in our anthroposophical lectures have their origin in Imaginations of that kind.

Now these Imaginations are much more alive than ordinary abstract thoughts, which can give us no inkling of what reality is, but only pictures of it. Imaginations on the other hand, can be laid hold of by active thinking, in the same way that we can grasp tables and chairs. We are much more vigorously permeated by reality when our knowledge comes from Imaginations and not from abstract concepts. Anyone who speaks on the basis of Imaginations always has them before him as though he were writing something down—writing, however, not with those terribly abstract signs which constitute our writing, but with cosmic pictures.

Now what is the position with regard to these Imaginations in our district here? Anyone who knows them knows also that it is pretty easy to attain them, pretty easy to form them. If he has a sense of responsibility when describing anything through Spiritual Science, he will allow these Imaginations to take effect—that is, to inscribe them in the spirit—only when he has pondered them a good deal and tested them thoroughly. Nobody who speaks out of the spiritual world with a full sense of responsibility has a facile tongue. Nevertheless we can say that in districts like ours here it is relatively easy to inscribe these Imaginations, but they are obliterated equally easy. If in districts like this we create a spiritual content in Imaginations—I cannot put it any other way—we find it is like writing something down and immediately afterwards rubbing it out. But there in Wales, where land and sea meet and the tides ebb and flow each day, where the wind blows through and through you—for instance in the hotel where we were staying you could not only feel the wind blowing in the windows, but when one walked on the carpet it was like walking on a rough sea because of the wind blowing under the carpet—where moreover Nature is so full of life and so joyful in its life that you may get almost hourly alternations of rain and sunshine, then you do really come to see how Nature revealed herself to the Druid priests—or I might say the learned Druids, for it would be the same thing—when they gazed upon her from their mountain height. How then did the Earth appear to the Druid's spiritual eye when the heavens had the character I have just described?

This is very interesting to observe, though you will only realize it fully if you can grasp the particular geographical quality of the place. There you have to exert yourself much more vigorously if you want to construct Imaginations than you do, for instance, here. There, they are much more difficult to inscribe in the astral atmosphere. On the other hand they are more permanent and are not so easily extinguished. You come to realize how these old Druids chose for their most important cult-centers, just such places in which the spiritual as it approaches mankind, expresses itself to some extent in the quality of the place. Those Druid circles we visited—well, if we had gone up on a balloon and looked down from above on the larger and the smaller circles, for though they are some distance apart you would not notice that when you are a certain height above them—the circles would have appeared like the ground-plan of the Goetheanum which has been destroyed by fire. It is a wonderfully situated spot! As you climb the heights, you have wide views over land and sea. Then you reach the top and the Druid circles lie before you—there where the hill is hollowed out, so that you find yourself in a ring of hills, and within this ring of hills are the Druid circles. It was there that the Druid sought his science, his knowledge, his wisdom; there that he sought his Sun-wisdom but also his Nature-wisdom.

As the Druid penetrated into the relationship between what he saw on Earth and what streamed down from the heavens, he saw the whole processes of plant-growth and vegetation quite differently from the way in which they appear to our abstract thought of later days. If we can properly grasp the true quality of the sun, on the one hand the physical rays which enter our eyes, on the other the shadow with its various gradations, we come to realize that the spiritual essence of the sun lives on in the various grades of shadow. The shadow prevents only the physical rays of the sun from reaching other bodies, whereas the spiritual penetrates further. In the cromlechs which I have described to you, a small dark place is separated off. But it is only the physical sunlight which cannot penetrate there; its activity penetrates, and the Druid, as gradually through this activity he came to be permeated by the secret forces of cosmic existence, entered into the secrets of the world. Thus, for instance, the actions of the sun on plants was revealed to him; he could see that a particular kind of plant-life flourishes at a particular time when the sun is active in a particular way. He could trace the spiritual activity of the sun and see how it pours and streams into flower, leaf and root; and it was the same with animals. And while he was thus able inwardly to recognize the activity of the sun he also began to see how other activities from the Cosmos, for example, those of the moon, pour into it. He could see that the effect of the sun was to promote sprouting growth, with an upward tendency, and so he knew that if a plant as it grows out from the soil were exposed only to the sun, it would grow unendingly. The sun brings forth burgeoning, luxuriant life. If this life is checked and reduced to form, if leaves, blossom, seed and fruit assume a specific shape, if what strives towards the infinite is variously limited—all this has its origin in the activities of the moon. And these are to be found not only in the reflected light of the sun, for the moon reflects all influences, and these in their turn can be seen in the growth of the plant out of its root and also in what lives in the propagation of animals, and so on.

Let us take a particular instance. The Druid observed the growing plant; he observed in a more living way what, later on, Goethe observed more abstractly in his idea of metamorphosis. The Druid saw the downward streaming sun-forces, but he saw also the reflected sun-forces in everything that gives the plant its form. In his natural science he saw the combined activity of sun and moon on the root, which is wholly within the Earth and has the function of absorbing the salts of the Earth in a particular way. He could see that the action of sun and moon was quite different on the leaf, which, wrests itself out of the Earth and presses forward into the air. Again, he saw a different action on the flower, which pushes onwards to the light of the sun. He could see as a unity the activity of the Earth; to him, plant-growth and the being of the animal were also a unity.

Of course his life there was just what we experienced, with the winds raging around, which can reveal so much about the structure of the region, with the peculiar weather conditions which manifest themselves so vividly in that district. Thus, for example, at the beginning of one of our Eurythmy performances, which took place in a wooden hall, the audience sat with their umbrellas up, because just before the performance there had been a heavy downpour which was still going on when the performance began. The curtains were quite wet! This intimate association with Nature which can still be experienced today was of course also experienced by the Druids. Nature there is not so hard; she almost embraces one. It really is a delightful experience. I might almost say that one is drawn on and accompanied by the activity of Nature; one seems to be part of it. I even met people who maintained that one need not really eat there, that one can be fed by this very activity of Nature.

The Druid, then, lived with his Sun-Initiation within this activity of Nature, and he saw as the unity I have described the sun and moon mediated through the activity of the Earth, the growth of the plant, the growth of root, leaf and flower; and all this not in the form of abstract laws as today, but of living elemental beings. Different elemental beings of sun and moon were active in the root, in the leaf and in the flower. He could also pursue in the wider realms of Nature what is so beneficially differentiated in root, leaf and flower. Through his imaginative gifts he could see the small elemental beings restricted to narrow limits in the root, and he knew that what lives in beneficial form in the root can free itself and expand to the gigantic. Thus he saw the large-scale activities of Nature as the small activities of the plant raise dot a gigantic power. Just as he had spoken of the elemental beings in the root of the plant, he could also speak of these root-beings as having expanded in a cosmically irregular way and manifesting in the formation of frost, dew and hail. On the one hand he spoke of the root-beings who were beneficially active, and of the giants of frost and ice which are these root-beings grown to gigantic size.

Again, he spoke of the elemental activities in the leaf of the plant, which permeate themselves with the forces of the air; he traced them into the distant spaces of Nature, and he then saw that, if what lives in the leaf frees itself and strives beyond its proper limits into the distances of Nature, it manifests in the surging of winds. The giants of wind and storm are the elemental beings of the plant grown beyond their size. And the element which is distilled in the flower the etheric oils with their phosphoric quality—if that is freed, it manifests itself as the giants of fire, among whom, for instance, Loki belongs. In this science of sun and moon, therefore, the Druid saw as a unity both that which lives in the narrowly restricted space of the plant and that which frees itself and lives in wind and weather.

But he went further. He said to himself: When that which lives in root, leaf and flower is contained within the desirable limits set by the good gods, normal plant-growth results. If it appears in hoar frost, that is the work of opposing beings: for the elemental beings growing into powers of opposition, create the harmful, devastating aspects of Nature. Now as a human being I can make use of the devastating activities of the beings who are the opponents of the gods; I can gather the hoar frost in appropriate ways, and the products of the storm and whatever is caught up in the surging of wind and rain. I can make use of the giant forces for my own purposes by burning the plant, for instance, and reducing it to ashes, to charcoal and so on. I can take these forces, and by using frost, hail and rain and other such things, or what the giants of fire control—things which are the expression of forces that have grown to harmful vastness—I can protect the normal growth of the plant. I can rob these giants of all this and can treat normal plants with it, and by applying these forces of the opposing powers I can make healing medicines out of the good elemental forces which have remained within their proper limits. And this was in fact one of the ways of making medicines out of plants, by employing frost and snow and ice and by the use of burning and calcinations. The Druid felt it to be his work to take whatever was harmful from the opposing giant powers and restore it to the service of the good gods. We can trace these things in many different ways.

Now why am I spending time on this? I want to use it as an example—and I quote this particular one because I do indeed think that the Penmaenmawr lecture-course was a very important event in the history for the Anthroposophical Movement—to show how man's consciousness and his whole constitution of soul were quite different at a time not so very far removed from the present. With his present-day consciousness man cannot realize what lived in the consciousness of this ancient humanity. And what I have said of that ancient humanity could also be said of other peoples. There we catch glimpses of a quite different constitution of soul. Men in those days had no idea of what we experience as abstract thoughts. All their thinking was more dreamlike, and they did not live within such sharply outlined ideas and concepts as we do today. They lived in dreams which were much more vivid and alive, more full of substance; and indeed their waking life was really a sort of continuation of their dreaming. Just as nowadays we live in an alternation of dreaming or dreamless sleep and the abstract ideas of our waking life, so they alternated between this dreamlike everyday life and a dreamless sleep which was not wholly like ours. When they woke they felt that there was still something remaining over from sleep—something which afforded a sort of nourishment for the soul, which they had absorbed during sleep and which could still be felt the after-taste of sleep in their whole organism. There was a third condition which no longer occurs in human consciousness, a feeling of being surrounded by the Earth, and when a man woke up he felt not only that he had been asleep—of which he retained an aftertaste—but that he had been received into a kind of grave by the forces of gravity, that gravity had closed him in, and he was, as it were, within the embrace of the Earth.

Now just as we can describe our present-day states of consciousness as waking, dreaming, and sleeping so we should have to say that at a certain stage of the past there were the three states of dreaming, sleeping and being surrounded by the Earth. Since everything which evolves in the course of history has some sort of relation to the present, we find human souls in whom, during a later earth-life something peculiar appears like a genuine memory of earlier times, something connected with their earlier earth-life. Men like this display what for their own age is abnormal, but which is a living memory of their souls. Examples of this were Jacob Boehme and Swedenborg, and in such spirits something connected with human evolution lights up into contemporary humanity from a very distant past.

Tomorrow I will say more about the special qualities of vision of Boehme and Swedenborg; this will help us to understand the past of humanity and also the three future states of consciousness.

• 1. The Evolution of the World and of Humanity. 13 lectures, 19^th 1

Yesterday I used the culture of the Druids—which at the moment is particularly relevant to the development of our Anthroposophical Movement—to illustrate the soul-quality of an earlier age in a particular region. If we go back three or four or five thousand years—it varies in different parts of the Earth—we can always penetrate into a quite different type of soul-quality, and we then find that the whole spiritual and social guidance of human life in a particular period follows the pattern laid down by such a quality. The development to which I am referring is connected with the gradual evolution of human consciousness. It would be true to say that in olden times men were quite different beings from what they are today, and in the future they will again be different. Ordinary history tells little of this and so as soon as we get a few centuries away from the present, ordinary history, as it is presented to us, is to a considerable extent quite illusory as an aid to a real understanding of man.

In the lecture yesterday I pointed out how we should have to study three main stages of human consciousness, though naturally with many different shadings. The states of consciousness with which we are familiar—waking, dreaming and sleeping—are valid only for the present. If we go back into older periods of human evolution we no longer find the sort of waking condition of today, with its logically interrelated concepts. The farther we go back, the more do we fail to find this logical consciousness, which appeared in full development only during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, though it had begun in the later period of Greek culture. In earlier times, on the other hand, we discover a type of consciousness filled much more with living pictures than with abstract concepts; and we find this consciousness in man everywhere.

Natural forces in our sense were quite unknown to an older humanity. In the times I spoke of yesterday, people did not talk of meteorological laws controlling wind and weather, but, as I explained, of beings seen pictorially, of elemental spirits hovering around the plants, or of gigantic spiritual beings active in wind and weather, frost and hail, storm and thunder. All this was living in their observation of Nature without any logical deductions. Everything they saw, including the phenomena of Nature, was a living, weaving, surging of spiritual beings. The whole basis of their inner condition of soul was quite different from ours.

In a sense, men were more self-enclosed, but in a way very different from what we know today; this living in themselves was at the same time a consciousness full of living dream-pictures which led them out into the distant spaces of the Cosmos. Men saw pictures, though not in the way in which today we have thoughts, when the things are outside. While they had these experiences of the giants of frost, storm and fire, of the spirits of root, leaf and flower, they felt themselves united with plant, root, leaf and flower, with thunder and with lightning. Because they experienced the spiritual and spiritual pictures in their own being, they did not therefore feel their soul-life separated from external Nature.

If not in the very oldest periods described in my book Occult Science, at least in those that followed them, one can observe spiritually how this constitution of soul was accompanied by a general mood in the peoples who at the time were the most civilized. There was a time when men had an inner spiritual perception of the real being of man. In these pictures I have just spoken of they saw not only their present existence but their pre-earthly existence as well; just as we can see a perspective of space, they saw a perspective of time. It was not a recollection but an actual seeing; and they saw beyond their birth into a spiritual world from which they had descended into the life of man on Earth. It was quite natural for a member of this older humanity to see into his pre-earthly existence and to feel: I am a spiritual being, since before I assumed this earthly body I rested in the bosom of the spirit and spent my time within it, and there experienced my human destiny—not yet in a physical body but—if I may say so, however paradoxical it may sound—in a spiritual body.

To demand that one should believe in the spirit would have been absurd for this older humanity just as it is absurd to ask modern men to believe in mountains; you don't believe in them, you see them. In those days men saw their pre-natal spiritual life, though of course they saw it with the eyes of the soul. But there came a time when they indeed saw spiritually this inner being of man as the outcome of pre-earthly existence, while external Nature surrounding them became increasingly a sort of riddle. Pure sense-perception made its way gradually into human evolution. In very early times, such as those of ancient India, as I described them in Occult Science, men still saw everything, Nature included, spiritually. It marked a step forward when the vision of the spiritual remained inward, but Nature, if I may put is so, became gradually de-spiritualized. While man still felt inwardly that he was spirit born of spirit, when he looked outward to the blossoming of Nature, to the clouds from which the lightning flashes, to the wind and weather, to the delicate, wonderfully formed crystals, to hill and dale, a mood came over him which can be traced by Spiritual Science over long periods, especially over the times when men were civilized. They might have expressed it as follows: We men are spirit born of spirit; in our pre-earthly existence our being was knit together with the spiritual, but now we are transplanted into the environment of Nature. We behold the lovely flowers, the vast mountains, the mighty power of Nature in wind and weather, but the spirit is withdrawn.

Thus the notion of a purely material Nature in the environment increasingly arose. Men felt—I mean of course those who were the most developed, the men whom we should call civilized in our modern sense—they saw that their body was formed out of the substances of this Nature which for them had lost its divine-spiritual quality. If men nowadays felt anything like this, they would begin to think, to speculate and philosophize about it. It was not so with the men of that earlier time. Without reflection they experienced a great disharmony within themselves: “I come as spirit from a world of spirit, my essential being has descended from divine heights, but I am clothed with substance taken from a Nature which the spirit seems to have abandoned; my spiritual existence is interwoven with something that does not reveal the spirit. My body is made up out of the same substances as the flowers of the field and the water of the clouds and rain, but these substances have lost their divine quality.”

Those men felt as if they had been expelled from the spiritual world and thrust into a world to which in their essential being they did not really belong. It was of course possible to reject or to sleep through this mood, as happens nowadays with various aspects of our civilization. But those who were awake at this time felt it, and it is through moods and feelings like this and not in thoughts and concepts that mankind develops.

Even the way in which our thoughts evolve nowadays is only an episode—as indeed these lectures will show—and anyone who speaks merely in the form of thoughts is speaking in an unreal way. This is particularly true of the way we speak nowadays. The people who pride themselves most on being practical and are filled with conceit about it are basically the worst theorists. We have these theorists in offices, in schools—obviously in schools, but no less in offices and commercial houses—and everything there has a theoretical bias and thoughts run riot. But it is only an episode without any essential truth. These people will attain to some truth in their thinking about life only if they feel once more as men did when they found Nature de-spiritualized, when they feel that they are an outcast race, taken from a divine-spiritual world where they really belong, into one where their inmost human being is a stranger.

One of the ways in which this mood expressed itself was through the feeling that there had been a Fall of man. This idea arose from a change that had come about in human consciousness. Men felt that they had been thrust out of a spiritual world and that the reason for this must lie in some original sin. Thus at a particular epoch the conception of original sin, of the Fall of man, dawned in human consciousness.

If we understand the changes in human consciousness from the past through the present into the future, we shall also be able to understand how this conception of original sin, of a pre-historic Fall of man, arose. And at the same time when this mood came over man, his need was not for some grey theory, but for words through which souls needing comfort could find healing power. And what we have often described as the guidance of mankind in the old centers of ritual and religion, in the Mysteries, can be seen arising at a particular period of time coinciding approximately with ancient Persian and the earliest Chaldean culture in the Near East—it can be seen to coincide with what came from the priests, the great comforters of mankind. Consolation streamed from them and the Mysteries they celebrated; and indeed, human consciousness at that time was greatly in need of consolation. The words of the Mysteries had to contain some quality of soul that could speak to men's hearts with a power of healing and consolation. This is the epoch which exhibited such magnificent creative power (though in a somewhat different form from alter periods) in the spheres of art and religion, and a great deal in our art and in our religious ideas derives from that time, particularly the symbols, pictures and ritualistic ceremonies.

What was the source from which these teachers of the Mysteries drew in order to give this consolation? If the general waking consciousness consisted in the sort of living picture-consciousness I have described, yet at that time too there were three stages of consciousness. Nowadays we have sleeping, dreaming and waking. In those days, as opposed to the waking dream which, as I showed yesterday, was the normal form of waking consciousness, sleep was not as it is today, when it completely damps down our consciousness. Although with these men, too, consciousness was dimmed during sleep, there remained something of it on waking. Yesterday I described this by saying that when men woke after sleep, there remained something of it on waking. Yesterday I described this by saying that when men woke after sleep they had a sort of after-taste. Most people felt, not merely on the tongue or in the mouth, deeply permeated by a certain sweetness of experience which was the after-taste of their sleep. This sweetness they experienced in sleep spread over from their life of sleep into that of waking. This sweetness was to them a test of the healthiness of their life, whereas if other tastes were present it was evidence of illness.

It sounds strange to say that an older humanity experienced the sweet after-effects of sleep in their limbs, the arms, right down into the finger-tips and the other members. But spiritually-scientific investigation shows that it was so; and the genius of language has retained something of this, though in a crude and materialized form. A sleeping-draught was once something spiritual; that is, sleep itself, and it was only later that it became an actual liquid draught in material form. Sleep was then itself a draught of Nature, which extinguished the ordinary memories of day; it was a draught of forgetfulness. What ordinary men had from it was only a vague after-feeling, but Initiation gave the Mystery teachers, who were the leaders of humanity, a more exact consciousness of what really was experienced in sleep. In modern Initiation we ascend from our ordinary ideas to spirit-sight, but in those days, while ordinary men passed from their dream-waking life into sleep, for which they cultivated a consciousness and experienced this after-taste, the Mystery priests had means to feel their way consciously into sleep and so got to know what this after-taste implied. They learned of the water beyond physical existence, the water into which the human soul plunged during sleep each night—the waters of the weaving astrality of the world.

But that was only a second condition beyond the waking and reaming of ordinary life. The third condition was one of which modern humanity has no knowledge at all, a condition deeper than dreamless sleep today. I said yesterday that one might call it a state of being surrounded by the Earth, and this was the condition of man at night during deep sleep. Only the priest of the Mysteries by means of his Initiation could attain consciousness of it and impart the results of this experience, which constituted the knowledge of those days. Men felt themselves embraced by the Earth, but they felt something more; they felt that in the ordinary course of the day they had come into a condition very near death, a death, however, from which there was an awakening. They experienced this third condition of consciousness as if they had actually descended into the Earth and been laid in a grave, yet not one that could be called an earthy grave. I will try to make clear to you in the following way how this grave not only was, but how it had to be, conceived.

Now when the Sun's rays fall on to the Earth, they are not merely reflected from flowers and stars. Farmers know this better than the city dweller does, for during the winter they use the Sun's warmth which has penetrated into the Earth. At that time of the year we have within the Earth what has streamed into it during the summer. Not only the Sun's warmth but other forces stream into the Earth. Yet from the point of view of which I am speaking this was the less important fact; the more important was that the activities of the Moon could also penetrate below the surface of the Earth to a certain extent. It was a pleasant idea of those days, not just a poetical idea but, in a way, a super-poetical one—though of course not held in any logical conception as we should today, but as a picture—when men thought of the light of the Sun streaming down to Earth in the light of the full Moon and penetrating a certain distance into the Earth, then being reflected not just from the Earth's surface but from its interior, after the light had been absorbed by the Earth.

The silver ebb and flow of the moonlight were experienced by man as the rhythmic play of its rays. It was not only a beautiful picture; the priests of the Mysteries knew something definite about this flowing moonlight. They knew that man is subject to gravitation as he lives on the Earth; that gravity holds him to the surface of the Earth, and thus the Earth draws his being to itself, as it were. The forces of the Moon were known to work against this force of gravity. They are in general weaker than the vigorous forces of the Earth's gravity, but they work against those forces. It was known that man is not just a clod held fast by the Earth's gravity, but that he is rather in a sort of balance, drawn to the Earth by gravity and away from it by the forces of the Moon, and that for him as earthly man it is the Earth which holds the upper hand. But as regards his head-activity, the effective influence on it is the negative gravity that draws him away. Thus though man might not be able to fly, at least he could raise his spirit into the starry spaces. By means of this Initiation, through these Moon activities, humanity in those days learnt from their Mystery-priests the effect on earthly man of his starry environment.

This was the astrological Initiation, so much abused nowadays, which was specially prevalent among the people of ancient Chaldea. By its path men could learn not only of the activity of the Moon, but of that of the Sun, Mars, Saturn, and so forth. Nowadays man is—if you will pardon a pictorial way of putting it so, for it is hard to describe such things in strictly logical words—man, as far as his knowledge goes, has become a kind of worm, not even an earthworm but something worse, a worm for whom it never rains so that he never emerges from the soil! Worms do after all emerge periodically when it rains, and then they can enjoy whatever is happening on the Earth's surface: and that is healthy for them. Modern man, with regard to his soul and spirit, is a worm for whom it never rains, and then they can enjoy whatever is happening on the Earth's surface: and that is healthy for them. Modern man with regard to his soul and spirit, is a worm for whom it never rains, and he is entirely encased in the Earth. Thus he believes that the members of this body grow on Earth more or less as stones are formed. He has no idea that the hair on his head is the result of the Sun's activity, for he is a worm which never comes above ground, a creature, that is, which bears the Sun-forces within him but never comes to the surface to investigate them. As the old Mystery-priests well knew, man has not grown out of the Earth like a cabbage; he has been created by the joint activity of the whole cosmic environment. You can see, therefore, how men in those days felt towards their Initiates and Mystery-leaders who could tell them from their training what his cosmic environment signifies for man.

These priests of the Mysteries could thus proclaim something which I shall have to give in an unimaginative form, since we are not nowadays capable of speaking as they did; they clothed all they said in wonderful poetry. The genius of language made that possible then, but nowadays we can no longer speak in such a way, because language is inadequate. If we had to put into words the message of the priests of the Mysteries to their people who came to them for comfort, feeling themselves thrust into a Nature which had lost its spirit, we should have to put it somewhat as follows: As long as you remain in your ordinary waking consciousness, your environment will seem to have been robbed of spirit. But if you plunge consciously into the region embraced by the Earthy, where you can behold the power of the star-gods in the silvery light of the Moon flowing and surging through the Earth, you will come to learn—no longer with the earlier spontaneity but only by human effort—that external Nature is everywhere permeated by spirit-beings and bears the gifts of the gods within herself as spirit-beings and elemental spirits.

This was the consolation which the priests of the Mysteries could give their people in olden days; they made them see that plants are not just beautiful but are really permeated by the weaving of the spirit; that the clouds do not just sail majestically through the air but that divine-spiritual elemental beings are active in them—and so on. It was towards the spirit of Nature that these Initiates led the men who depended on them for guidance.

Thus at a certain point in man's evolution the task of the Mysteries was to make it clear that when Nature appeared to have lost the spirit, this was only an illusion of ordinary waking consciousness. Actually, spirit was to be found everywhere in Nature. You see, there was a time when man lived within the spirituality of existence, and through the Mysteries experienced this spirituality even in the sphere which at first sight seemed to have been robbed of spirit. Man was still dependent on the spirit in all that affected him, whether instinctively when he had inner spiritual perception, or by the Mystery-teachings which showed him that Nature also was permeated by spirit.

If human evolution had stopped there, our consciousness could never have experienced one of the greatest blessings of humanity, perhaps the very greatest—I mean the experience of free-will, of freedom. The old mood of soul, with its instinctively experienced spirituality, had to be damped down. Man had to be led to three other conditions of consciousness. The feeling of being embraced by the Earth, which had enabled the old Initiates to attain their star-wisdom and their knowledge of Nature's spirits, died away completely, and man's soul-condition came to include only dreamless sleep, dreaming and waking. To balance this, there were the beginnings of that sphere of consciousness in which freedom can dawn. What we call today our waking consciousness, which enables us to enjoy our ordinary life and knowledge, was quite unknown to early humanity. Yet through it came the possibility of pure thinking; we may profess doubts about its existence, but in it lies the only possible basis for the impulse of freedom. Had men never attained this pure-thinking—which is actually pure thinking and does not, as such, guarantee the actual reality—they would never have reached the consciousness of freedom.

We might say that as humanity developed, man's earlier association with the spirit was veiled in darkness; on the other hand, he acquired those three states of consciousness which led him from spiritual heights into the depths of the Earth. But out of these depths he was to find the original forces for the unfolding of freedom. This quality of soul, with its waking, dreaming and sleeping, had been developing for close on a thousand years, and men had gone far into that darkness where the light of the spirit does not shine but where the impulse of freedom is to be found. Try to realize what human evolution has really been like. There was a time when man looked up to the starry heavens and the knowledge he still had of the stars showed him that their forces lived within him and that he belonged essentially to the Cosmos. But now, man—as spirit—was thrust down to Earth and the Heavens became, so to speak, dark, for the light, though shining down physically from sun or stars, became impenetrable for him. It was as if a curtain had come down, so that he could no longer find any basis for his existence. He could no longer perceive what lay behind the curtain.

We shall see tomorrow how this curtain has existed for a thousand years, becoming thicker and thicker, and how this expressed itself in man's whole mood. Then a light appeared which did penetrate the curtain and to a certain extent the curtain fell away; it was the light that shone forth on Golgotha. In this way the Deed of Golgotha finds its place in human evolution. This Deed, accomplished on the Earth, was to reopen for man the vision of the spirituality of the world which he had once seen in the wide spaces of the Cosmos. Christ, by passing through the Mystery of Golgotha, was to bring into man's life on Earth what had in earlier times been seen in the Heavens. The divine-spiritual Being of Christ was to descend and live in a human body, so that He might bring this light in a new way to men who could no longer leave the Earth.

We are only just beginning to understand the Mystery of Golgotha, and the future evolution of the Earth must consist in this Mystery being ever more deeply understood, so that the radiance spreading from the Mystery of Golgotha will change more and more from an inward to a cosmic radiance and will gradually irradiate everything perceptible to man.

But we shall be able to talk of this in greater detail only if we lay some further foundations for it today. Now something which was once a living fact in human evolution is, in a sense, returning. The priests of the Mysteries possessed, as I have told you, the power of contemplating the influence of the Moon; the influence of the Moon bore them up to their astrological Initiation. They learnt how it was possible to be initiated into the secrets of the stars by this means. An important point for the candidate for Initiation was that he should feel as though gravity were of less importance to him than it normally was. He felt that he weighed less. But then he was instructed by the older teachers not to give way to this feeling; when he began to feel lighter he must restore his heaviness by a strong exercise of will. The technique of the old Initiation made it possible for the candidate to allow the weight which was lost by the influence of the Moon to be restored by an effort of will; and as a result the wisdom of the stars shone forth. Thus every tendency in man at that time to overcome gravity was used to develop the will to hold fast to the Earth by the power of his own soul. But since this exerting of the will acted as a kindling of an inner light, it shone forth into the Cosmos and he could attain knowledge of cosmic spaces. When Spiritual Science throws its light on these matters, it is possible accurately to describe how this old consciousness came into being.

Now there is always a tendency for what existed in such men to recur; there is a sort of atavism, an inheritance, of things long past. It recurs just because men themselves return; and when this relation to the Moon appears in men who live at a time when, because this deep sleep is a thing of the past, such a relation should not occur, it appears as somnambulism, especially as ordinary sleep-walking. Then they do not combat this increasing sense of lightness by exerting the forces of their soul, but they wander about on roofs or at least get up out of bed. They do with their whole being what only the astral body should properly do. Something which has now become an abnormality was in earlier times an asset which could be used to attain knowledge. It was quite appropriate that popular usage should call such men “moon-struck,” for this condition of man's being is connected with an atavistic relation to the Moon-forces which has survived from older times.

Again, just as man is related, in the way I have described, to Moon-forces, he is also related to Sun-forces. But they are active in a more hidden part of man's being and we find them only indirectly. The Druids of the finest period—not those when decadence had set in—certainly sought their Sun-Initiation in this relation to the Sun-forces. Now whereas astrological Initiation depends on Moon-forces and makes possible a knowledge of the secrets of the Cosmos, this Sun-Initiation makes possible a sort of conversation with the divine-spiritual Beings of the Universe, a kind of Inspiration, whereas the Moon-Initiation gave only Imagination. Sun-Initiation is like a listening to the counsel of the spiritual Beings of the Cosmos—certainly a much deeper vision of the secretes of the world's being than could be given by Moon-Initiation. This may also recur atavistically, for Sun-activity exists in every man. But the constitution of man's soul today is quite different from that of the past, and his eyes are now specially organized to see only the physical rays of the Sun. As I told you yesterday, in the physical rays of the Sun there is an element of soul and spirit. Modern man does not realize or perceive this. In his attitude to the Sun, present-day man behaves as if he met another man who claimed to possess some inner quality of soul, and said to him: “There is no such thing; if you move your arm, it is a mechanical process like that of a lever; the muscles act as cords and when they are drawn tight the lever comes into action. That is the mechanism of it.”

That is really how men behave nowadays in regard to the Sun; they see only the external-physical; that is, the physical light. But when the physical light of the Sun's working penetrates into us, the spirituality of the Sun's being penetrates also. By means of a sort of inner concentration—not acquired in the way described in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds but possessed atavistically like some elemental force—a man can nowadays (and by nowadays I mean our present epoch of history which may of course extend for some thousands of years) cease through inner concentration to be strongly receptive to the physical working of the Sun but may, on the contrary, become receptive to its spiritual activity. Then his sight is changed. When this atavistic capacity appears, he sees differently from the ordinary way. When we look into a mirror, we see the reflection of what stands in front of the mirror. Just because the mirror is not transparent, it can reflect in this way. Now when a man's soul is constituted in such a way that, even when in full possession of all his senses, instead of looking into the Sun and seeing the physical sunlight he sees darkness, the darkness then becomes a sort of mirror which reflects his immediate surroundings. He does not say to himself: Here I have a plant which has a root which sends forth its leaves, flower, fruit and seed; rather, he says: When I look into the lower part of a plant, I see in it an elemental spiritual wisdom which makes it solid and permanent; if then I look further up the plant, I see how that quality is gradually overcome and how the plant strives to create alternatively a contraction and expansion in the formation of leaves, and finally strives upwards in the blossoms, as through transformed by fire. In this way the life of the plant is reflected in the darkness, which is however spiritual light.

Jacob Boehme possessed this atavistic power when he looked a the plant and saw the quality of salt below, the mercurial in the middle and the phosphoric above. Thus we can see in the spirit of a man such as Boehme, who was a natural Sun-Initiate, a capacity belonging to an earlier period of civilization, that primal civilization before there was any reading or writing. You completely misunderstand him if you read works such as the Mysterium Magnum, the De Signatura Rerum or the Aurora and do not see that in this stammering presentation there is something quite similar to what I described in relation to the Druids. Boehme was not initiated in an external sense, but his Sun-Initiation rises within him like a repetition of an earlier earthly existence. We can trace this into the very details of his biography.

There are still deeper forces which can be active in men, the forces of the outermost planet of our solar system. Modern astronomy does not regard it as the outermost since it has added two more—though even orthodox astronomers are worried because the movement of the moons does not properly fit, (The moons of Neptune and Uranus move in the opposite direction to the satellites of other planets,) but since it is the spatial arrangement with which they are concerned, they have added Uranus and Neptune. These, however, cause trouble because their moons are a little crazy compared with the ordered moons of Jupiter and other planets. In reality one must say that, for a living, concrete grasp of the planetary system, Saturn is the outer-most planet. Now just as a man can be under the influence of the Moon-forces which I described in detail, or of the Sun-forces, which I only outlined, he may also be under the influence of Saturn-forces. The activity of Saturn, as it rays into the planetary system and thus also into man, is like a cosmic historical memory. Saturn is, as it were, the memory, the recollection, of our planetary system, and if you want to know anything about the history of that system, you cannot really get it by astronomical speculation. Even external science is becoming rather desperate about all this because nothing fits. But the problem is not rightly tackled.

We have often spoken among ourselves about the so-called theory of relativity and the idea that it is never possible to talk of absolute motion; that there is nothing but relative motion. We can either say that the Sun moves and the Earth stands still, or that the Earth moves and the Sun stands still—as we have done in modern times. It makes no difference which one says, since everything is relative. And on one occasion here in Stuttgart, at a meeting of the Anthroposophical Society when we were talking about relativity, a supporter of the theory showed his audience clearly how it is all the same whether you take a match and strike it on the box, or take the box and move it past the match: in either case you light the match. This was meant as a serious scientific statement, and there is nothing to be said against it. Perhaps some simple soul might have thought of nailing the box to a wall—and then we should have had a little bit of “absolute.” We might somehow have moved the whole house and we should have had relativity again—but this might have been difficult! Yet it one takes the whole physical world, Einstein is quite right in saying that within the world there is nothing absolute, everything is relative. Unfortunately he stops at relativity, and it is just this relativity that ought to lead us on to look for something absolute, not in the physical world but in the spiritual. Everywhere nowadays, science—were it only rightly understood—offers us entry into the spiritual world. It is not a question of amateurish but of genuine exact science, and genuine science—except that it is not thought through to the end even by its experts—will lead to the spirit. Ordinary physical investigation cannot really tell us what this Saturn of our universe is. Saturn is in a sense the memory of our planetary system; everything that has occurred within that system is preserved in Saturn, and a Saturn-Initiate can learn of all those happenings.

Now just as our relation to the Moon can appear in a one-sided form in men as an inheritance of an older period of human evolution, with the result that they become sleep-walkers, or, again, as the spiritual forces of the Sun may emerge so that a man will not see the sunlight with open eyes but will see into the darkness in which Nature is mirrored, and then he will see as Boehme did—in the same way it is possible to experience our relation to the forces of Saturn, which work particularly on the head and implant in the human being a passing memory during his life on the Earth. These Saturn-forces can appear in a peculiar way, and just as we can talk of “Moon-men” who are the ordinary sleep-walkers, and of “Sun-men” such as Boehme, or in a lesser degree, Paracelsus, so we can also speak of a Saturn-man. This is what Swedenborg was. His is another case which should worry ordinary science—though it does not!

Swedenborg was master of the ordinary science of his time and was regarded as an authority. Up to his fortieth year he was thoroughly orthodox in his views and said nothing to which ordinary science might take exception. Then he suddenly became befogged. Actually we ought to say that the Saturn-forces became active in him, though people with an ordinary materialistic outlook say that he went mad. But it ought to make us pause to realize that there are so many surviving works of his which are recognized as scientific and are being published by a Swedish Society. The most distinguished scholars in Sweden are occupied just now in publishing his works—works, that is, written shall we say, before he attained spiritual vision. There is something unpleasant in having to deal with a man who up to his fortieth year was the most brilliant man of his age and after that must, to put it mildly, be called a fool!

Actually Swedenborg did not become a fool, but, at a particular moment, just after he had reached the heights of ordinary science, he began to see into the spiritual world. When this power of vision reached his head—the organ he had developed to so high a level—and when it was influenced by the spirituality of Saturn, he had his own special power of vision, not the vision of Boehme who saw the inner secrets of Nature mirrored in the darkness, but direct vision into the etheric, where the patterns of a higher spirituality appear. And thus he was able to give his own descriptions of them—though he did not actually see what he imagined he had, for the spirit-beings to whom he was referring are different. Nor on the other hand was it a mere earthly reflection of these spirits; he saw etheric forms and the activities of spirits in the etheric. He saw in the ether of the Earth the deeds of the spirits, though not the spirits themselves. Whereas Boehme saw reflection of Nature, Swedenborg saw what was accomplished in the etheric by the spirits whose activity was all he could see. Thus when he describes Angels, it is not Angels whom he sees but etheric forms. Nevertheless, these forms were actually the work of Angels—a picture of the activity of Angels. We must always keep our eyes on the reality of such things. And whereas it would be an error to claim that Swedenborg saw the spiritual world as such (that was not his peculiar power,) yet it was a reality that he saw.

The ordinary sleep-walker does something real, does with his physical body what he ought to do only with his astral body. Boehme saw with his physical body, particularly with his eyes, which were organized in such a way that he could exclude the physical and see into the darkness, but in that darkness he saw the light, the mirroring of Nature-spirits. Swedenborg did not see mirror-pictures, but etheric pictures of a spiritual existence of a higher order. Here we have an upward process from the sleep-walker who, being permeated by spirit, does not see but acts automatically, through what I may perhaps call the natural second sight of Boehme who saw not the external side of Nature but the mirror of his inner side, up to Swedenborg who saw not mirror-pictures but reality in the etheric, the picture of activities which proceed in higher spiritual regions.

You see then in what way we can speak of man's past and present, and how in the so-called abnormal conditions there is a sort of inherited survival which we must try to understand. When we can see the past in this light and see also what survives from the past into the present, we shall be able to get some idea of mankind's future with the help of a deeper understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. This is what we shall attempt in the lecture tomorrow.

You will have been able to realize from the lecture yesterday that a certain state of consciousness, which was an actual experience to men of earlier times, has to some extent been lost. I told you that the special sort of waking consciousness we have today, which consists predominantly in more or less abstract ideas or at the best in shadowy pictures, did not then exist in the same form, and that in its place there was a kind of waking-dreaming, or dreaming-waking. This was not experienced as we experience dreams but as a living picture which corresponded pretty well with spiritual reality. There was a condition of sleep which, though it was dreamless, left an after-effect of the kind described, and there was a third state of consciousness beyond this which was experienced as a resting in the surging Moon-forces, forces which, reaching under the Earth, lift man out of earthly gravity and allow him to experience his cosmic existence. The essential point about these older conditions of soul was that they allowed man to experience his cosmic existence. In our ordinary everyday consciousness there is only a shadowy image left of that older state of consciousness—a shadowy image that is noticed by very few and is mostly entirely unheeded.

I will try to describe this survival of a primeval state of consciousness. When we observe our dreams—chaotic as they are—we find that all sorts of experiences drawn from earthly existence flow into them. Things long forgotten crop up altered in many ways, even things which passed unnoticed at the time. The times, too, at which events took place may be thoroughly confused. But if you look more closely into the details of a dream, you will discover the remarkable fact that in essence practically everything which crops up in it is related to the happenings of the last three days. You may perhaps have a dream about something that happened to you twenty-five years before; you may dream of it in all its vividness, though somewhat altered in detail. But if you study it closely you will always discover something of the following sort: in this dream about an event of twenty-five years before, a character appears whom we will call Edward, and you will find that you have somewhere heard the name casually in passing, or your eye has caught it as you were reading. In the details of a dream, even the remotest, there is always some relation, however insignificant, to something which has happened during the last three days. The reason is that we bear within ourselves the events of the last two, three or four days—the period is of course approximate—in a quite different way from those which occurred earlier.

Our perceptions are, as you know, taken up into our astral organism and our ego-organism, and the events thus perceived do at first live in direct connection with our consciousness. What we have experienced in the course of three days—that is, when at least three days have passed—goes more intensively into our feelings. Ordinarily we do not notice these things, but they are realities all the same. The reason is that all we perceive or think, which is taken up into the astral organism and the ego-organism, has also to be somehow imprinted upon the etheric body, the body of formative forces, and at least to some extent even upon the physical body. This process takes two to four days, so that we have to sleep two or three times on anything we experience before it is imprinted on the etheric and physical bodies. Only then is it firmly fixed in the etheric body so that it may be a permanent memory. Thus in man there is a perpetual inner reciprocity, a sort of struggle, between the astral and etheric bodies, and the result is always that what we have experienced consciously is imprinted into the denser, more material elements of our being. After three or four days, what was at first only a transitory sense-experience is transferred into the body of formative forces and into the physical body.

But how little of what I have been describing actually comes into men's consciousness nowadays! Yet it is something which is perpetually taking place in the life of the human body and soul. Every experience of which we have been aware has to wait three or four days before it is fully our own. It fluctuates between the astral and etheric bodies, and cannot decide—one might say—whether it has really been impressed into the etheric and into the physical body.

This is something of extraordinary significance. Remember that basically our true being is only our ego and astral body. We cannot really claim that the etheric body is our own property. In this materialistic age people talk as though the etheric and physical bodies were their, whereas actually they belong to the whole Cosmos. And so when in the course of three or four days, what our ego and astral body have experienced is passed on to the etheric and physical bodies, it is then part, not only of ourselves but of the Cosmos. It is only for three days that we can claim any action of ours in the world as significant for ourselves alone. After that we have, as it were, imprinted it on the Universe, and it rests within the whole Universe and belongs not only to us but also to the gods.

In very early periods of human evolution, as a result of that state of consciousness which is now lost and which has deeper than sleep, men had a definite impression of this remarkable fact, and the Initiates were able to give information about what lay behind it. Particularly in the epoch of which I spoke yesterday, the Egypto-Chaldean epoch, it was only a vague feeling that men had. But the priests were initiated into the real nature of the fact. Whereas nowadays Initiation must be a purely inner experience of soul and spirit, at the most with symbols and rites of a physical nature only, in those earlier days Initiation was an external process and the effects of that external process passed over into man's inner being. To take one example: when a man was to be initiated, for three or four days he was put by the Hierophant who was initiating him, into this state of consciousness which we have now lost. The purpose of this was to enable him to see for himself what happens during these three days in the world external to him, and how it finds entrance into the real being of man. The Initiate was enabled to see what happens to an idea, to an experience or a feeling, before it becomes a man's own property.

Our materialistic attitude to the world today affords us no conception at all of the extraordinary significance of the wisdom that lay within this condition that is so deeply concealed from us. I can perhaps best explain to you what was accomplished in the three days of this Initiation during that dim condition of consciousness if I remind you first of our ordinary dream-life with an attitude based purely on what we might call scientific method, there is still something extraordinarily profound involved.

How is this dream-life really revealed? There are of course many kinds of dreams, but let us keep for the moment to what consists largely in the recollection of past experiences. Pictures of these experiences arise in dreams. How do they arise? You are aware that they appear radically transformed. This transformation may go a very long way; for instance, we may take the case of a tailor who in his ordinary life has never had the occasion of making a Minister's state robes; he may have made a number of coats and been very proud of them, but for all that he has not the slightest chance of making such a robe as he now dreams he makes. In a dream like this there may be a number of different influences at work. For instance, the man may in a former life have been the attendant of a Roman magistrate and among his duties had to help him on with his toga. A dim feeling of all this survives and what a man experiences in this life may be colored by what streams over from a previous one.

This is just an example of how the content of dreams may be altered; the important fact is that they undergo the intense transformations we all know. One must really ask what is contained in these dreams, what is at work in them. It is external events which give the occasion for this type of dream, but the external events make their appearance in a wholly altered form.

The reason for this is quite beyond the conception of our ordinary scientific ideas. The sort of law which we should recognize as scientific, the laws we look for in the external world by our method of observation and experiment, cease to be valid as soon as we pass inside the skin of a human being. We should be very much mistaken were we to assume that the natural laws laid down in the laboratory were valid within the human being. Not only are the substances transformed within our organism when we consume them in the ordinary course of nourishment, but the laws of the substances are also changed, down to the smallest atoms. What appears in our dreams is not just the abstract reflection of some reality; in our dreams we see the weaving of the organic laws within which man has his being. Dreams are much closer to us than is our normal abstract thinking; they show the way in which external substances act within man. Our dreams are a protest against the part of reality that is shackled within the laws of Nature. From the time you go to sleep until the time you wake, you live in a world where according to the scientist everything is controlled by these laws. Actually the moment you enter, even to the slightest degree, into the spiritual world through your dreams, your dream-experience arises as a protest against the laws of Nature. Dreams cannot run their course in the way of external events, or they would be very much like actual waking life. Dreams which emerge from real sleep are in their make-up a protest against the laws of Nature, and they concern us much more intimately.

In this regard modern investigators of a materialistic turn of mind have made some interesting discoveries. Some of you will know a book by a man called Staudenmaier, entitled Experimental Magic, which appeared a good many years ago and is typical of the spiritual constitution of many modern scientific thinkers. Staudenmaier wanted to find out if there is any reality in the spiritual world. Of Anthroposophy he admitted that he knew only what its opponents had written. People don't like studying Anthroposophy; they find it difficult, particularly if they are typical scientific thinkers of today.

Staudenmaier attempted, by spiritualistic methods, to get into the spiritual world. He dulled his consciousness until he was in a sort of mediumistic state; then he began automatic writing and was surprised that he wrote a lot of nonsense which did not at all agree with what he knew about reality. In particular, the fact that spirits seemed to be speaking to him did not agree with it! He knew that was impossible and yet what he wrote assured him that spirits were speaking. He was appalled by the lies that these non-existent spirits told him. You should read in his book all the incredible lies which flowed into his writing. He became—to use no worse a word—a medium, and he did not know what to make of it all. A friend advised him to give the whole thing up and to lead a normal, sensible life and go out shooting. So he did, and he went out after magpies; but even there he found that whatever it was he had stirred up inside himself continued its activity, and he could not rid himself of it. If he looked up at a tree, he saw, not a magpie but a fearful dragon with terrible fangs, which looked at him with horrifying eyes. The same things happened everywhere, and he lived in an inner struggle to get himself back into a normal condition.

I mention all this because here we have experimental evidence that there is an immediate protest against the external order of Nature as soon as we are not merely dreaming while awake but are using this device to contact and arouse the inner being of man. Obviously we regard it all as lies. When we have thought of a man as a friend and as a decent fellow, and if after he has got into this mediumistic condition we see him putting out his tongue at us or making long noses, then inevitably we say that the spiritual world is lying and that this experience is simply that of a dream. Now there is something in this. Whenever man approaches the spiritual world inside himself, within which everything inside his skin is enclosed, there is an immediate protest from this sphere against the natural order. It is not surprising that when a man enters it with underdeveloped faculties of judgment, all kinds of elemental beings appear and create delusion. But there is always this protest against the natural order when we approach the spiritual; and ordinary dreams make this clear.

We ought to realize that we then enter a quite different order of being, and, even though it appears only in the fleeting form of the dream, it is all the same a protest against those admirable laws of Nature which we establish by laboratory experiments. This is the first step into the spiritual world where we immediately find the protest against natural laws, which are, as it were, robbed of their dignity as soon as we penetrate a little into man's inner being.

The old Initiates knew very well through their three days' Initiation that there is not only a natural order, but that within and behind that natural order there is a spiritual one. It is moreover still possible for anyone who has acquired some knowledge of Initiation to penetrate with modern methods into these things and to pass through the experiences a really fearful torment of the soul. When dreams begin to weave their forms we actually enter a world where the laws of Nature collapse, and just because the ordinary laws no longer hold good, their interrelations change, however many recollections of ordinary life may still be effective. If we have come to regard natural laws as the last word, we find ourselves face to face with nothingness. It is painful, almost tragic, for a modern man, as he passes through Initiation, to experience entry into a sphere of being where this protest against the laws of Nature is encountered; he feels that everything he had got from his intellect, and which was determined by the laws of Nature is swamped. His soul can no longer breathe because he has been too much accustomed to the natural order. He finally realizes that an altogether different world is pressing in from a quite different direction. This is no longer a natural but a spiritual order, which is throughout permeated with what in the depths of our present-day human conscience we experience as a moral world-order. He gradually learns that on the one hand there is the order of Nature perceived by the senses, for which the laws have been established by natural science; on the other hand, if he moves out of this natural order, he moves into a world that protests against the natural order. As he experiences this protest, a sort of luminous water of life pours round him and he can once again breathe—this is the moral order which ultimately expands into the spiritual.

The highest knowledge gained by the ancient Initiates was when they discovered the protest against the physical world-order and saw the true moral world-order extend into the physical. It is indeed experienced in a much weaker degree during the three days described: whatever we experience in the external world, whether actions or feelings, takes three or four days to be imprinted on our organism. But when the process is completed, the imprinted form is not like that which we experienced externally; it becomes an impulse demanding a moral expression very different from the natural order. If we could see how our experiences have changed in our inner being during those three of our days, we should see that what we experienced in its natural form during our earthly existence has been imprinted in our external being and is no less real than it was in the external world. But now it lives within us as the impulse of a moral world-order by means of which we may move further over the ocean of life. Thus we carry the results of what we have experienced naturally as the moral foundation for our later life.

In recent periods of human evolution, however, when men plunged into that “lower sleep,” if I may call it so, that Earth-embraced sphere, he plunged into the outer ether. There his experiences find their compensation. He is not merely set within the moral world-order as regards the direction of his inner life; in that lower sleep he is set within the moral order of the Cosmos. Since this deep sleep has been lost to our forms of consciousness and we now have only a very faint echo of it in the three-days' experience described, this contact with the Cosmos has been lost also. Indeed, we should have been gradually thrust out of the self-subsisting moral world-order if a particular event had not occurred in the course of Earth-evolution. The experience undergone by the older Initiates so as to be able to tell men what happens during those three days, was undergone as a unique world-event, as an event in world-history, by the Christ Being who descended from spiritual worlds into the body of Jesus of Nazareth and, though a God, lived a truly human life. That experience of the three days now became available for all mankind. What could previously be discovered in the sleep of deep consciousness, taking place in man not consciously but at least subconsciously, in a natural way, had to be gone through in order that man might find his connection with what was brought about for earthly humanity by Christ in the Mystery of Golgotha. This was the vicarious deed of a God. Man was to take a step upwards in his evolution and to experience in moral form through Christianity what had previously come to him naturally. The Mystery of Golgotha is therefore closely related to the whole meaning of earthly evolution, because of its relation to the evolution of man's consciousness. We can understand what was to be accomplished by the Mystery of Golgotha only if we can look back on what had once occurred naturally and was now to occur morally.

In this respect, however, our modern consciousness, which runs its course between waking, sleeping and dreaming, has not yet attained inner harmony. Since the fifteenth century, when this modern consciousness first received its imprint, it has looked on Nature one-sidedly and has claimed to understand the order of Nature, considering that what is found there constitutes reality. Beyond this reality men will not look; they will not press forward to that strengthened form of human knowledge to which the spiritual reveals itself just as the natural order does. Thus it has become customary to speak of the moral order as of unknown origin. To do this was not strictly honest, since the common view of Nature cannot admit any reality in the moral order. One could, even if a little dishonestly, get over this difficulty by saying that on the one side we have knowledge, on the other, faith; and that the moral order belongs to the realm of faith; that knowledge cannot become faith nor faith, knowledge; and that the moral order belongs to the realm of faith. Such is the convenient formula which has become customary. The distinction has even come to be regarded as something specifically Christian, though even five or six hundred years ago no genuine Christianity, and certainly not original Christianity, would have admitted the distinction. Even today it is not yet Catholic dogma, however much it may be Catholic custom, to distinguish in this way between faith and knowledge.

We cannot get a proper notion of the relation between the natural and the moral-spiritual order because we are not aware of the transition between them; because the dream is not understood which leads out of the natural order and protests against it, thus preparing the way. If we have gone through this preparatory stage, we can make contact with the moral order of the world.

Only an honest view of the past of mankind, and of something which modern man does not yet possess, can lead to a satisfying picture of all this. Failing that, even historical documents of ancient times remain just things which can be studied but convey no real meaning. Now we spoke this morning a good deal about the opponents of Anthroposophy. I could say much that would be for their good, though certainly not in their favor. The comments of our opponents ... I often have to recall an anecdote supposed to be based on truth which the famous Professor Kuno Fischer was fond of telling. He used to relate how he had had two schoolfellows—they may have been brothers—with an uncle who was a thorough simpleton. The boys got to the stage of learning logarithms and having to buy log tables. The uncle caught sight of these tables and when he saw the mass of figures he asked his nephews what they were. The boys were completely at a loss to explain, but at last the young rascals conceived the idea of telling him they were the house-numbers of all Europe. The uncle believed them and finally thought it an excellent idea to be able to know at a glance all the house-numbers of London, Paris, and so on. Now people who are unable to see with insight into the meaning of the ancient documents are like the old uncle with his log tables. Our modern historians who edit these ancient documents do not tell us much more about them than the uncle did about logarithms when he took them to be the house-numbers of Europe. We must make it clear to ourselves how far their interpretation, based on present-day abstract thought, is removed from the real spiritual facts. We must have the determination to do that, or we shall never be able to see how man has developed into the present out of a past when he was very different.

We are living at a time when all sorts of inner conflicts must arise from our present-day experience of sleeping, waking and dreaming, if we are in the least capable of real self-observation. Just as men lost the real knowledge of that deep sleep which was so significant for them that the Initiates had to explain its nature to them, so in modern times our ordinary sleep tends to crumble to pieces. I do not mean that in the future men will dream the whole night through, but rather that their dreams will be dulled. Just as man has passed since olden times from that “waking dreaming” to our modern abstract thinking, our present-day chaotic dreams will be dulled, and that duller kind of sleep will become normal. Dreams will no longer extend into our consciousness, which will be overlaid entirely by our present-day form of abstract logical thinking. But then a super-consciousness will emerge, already apparent to anyone who can understand these things. This super-consciousness is concerned with the human will and with the effects of the will when it acts on the nervous system. If with the help of Initiation-knowledge you observe the unrestrained way in which human will is developing, you will be able to see how various psychological manifestations, sometimes going as far as actual physical illness, are really the herald of a form of consciousness higher than our present waking consciousness.

But there is something beyond this which men will not yet be able to experience unless they can actually acquire spiritual science: a science, that is, which needs a quite different sort of thinking from the normal and is in reality far more practical than the theoretical attitude to life, which is in fact completely unpractical. This spiritual science adds an inner living power of thinking to ordinary abstract thinking. Yet this is not something we can arbitrarily add or neglect; it occurs because an organism is coming into being within man which did not exist in earlier times and of which only the first foundations have so far emerged. The way in which the blood circulates through man's limbs, his arms, legs, hands and feet, is continually changing. What we often call “nervousness” (a nervous state) nowadays is an expression of the fact that a higher condition is striving to make its way into man, but that he is unwilling to accept it because of its strangeness, and this produces a restlessness which will cease only when he makes the new consciousness his own.

Thus we can visualize three further states of consciousness towards which man is making his way: a dulled dream life, waking, and a heightened state of waking. All the turmoil and upheaval which show themselves even in external conditions today are due to the fact that men are trying, for the most part quite unconsciously, to fight against something that is approaching humanity from the spiritual worlds. It is struggling to make its way especially into the human will. We shall have to understand—as nowadays we do not—that as soon as the spiritual comes into action, we pass at once into a sphere where a protest is uttered against natural laws. We shall also not properly understand the Mystery of Golgotha unless we can rise to the realization that the full import of that Mystery cannot be attained by our ordinary knowledge. To grasp its full meaning we have to develop a new faculty; we have to pass with right understanding beyond mere dreaming, which indicates a natural process, and penetrate to an understanding of the other side of being. It is from the side of the spirit that we have to acquire the elements of understanding adequate for future comprehension of the Mystery of Golgotha. What we must do is to set our experience of the present in this way between the past and the future, and so feel ourselves as a sort of bridge between them. Thus we shall increasingly achieve the understanding required for the use of spiritual truths alongside the natural.

It is easy to understand our ordinary illusions, just because the things that are false are so uncommonly logical. We do not suspect that falsehood can be so logical. What could be more logical than to argue as follows: first observe how long it takes some particular geological stratum to reach a particular thickness, then, if we are dealing with another stratum, divide the smaller into the greater thickness and multiply it by the time taken by that stratum to form, and so reach the conclusion that some epoch, the Silurian or Devonian for instance, was twenty or 200 million years ago. The arithmetical calculation is quite correct and there is nothing to be said against it. It is only ordinary logic that is here deceiving us.

This sort of logic always reminds me of the logic one of the greatest mathematicians of all times applied to his own life. When he had already reached a considerable age he suddenly became ill with some kind of lung trouble; and seeing that he had had a good deal to do with doctors, he had the idea of calculating how many tiny abscesses would have to be got rid of in order to shake off the lung trouble. His calculations about the further development of the illness showed him that it would take fifteen years, and then he would be cured. But ... he died two years later. That was the reality; the other was only logic.

The same sort of thing applies to the relationship between reality in the Cosmos and our ordinary logic. Things are very easily proved by logic, and the logic is perfectly sound. It is just as sound as if we calculated as follows: Our heart goes through certain phases of development; in a definite period it will have reached a definite condition; then we calculate how long it would take to reach that condition and the answer is 300 years. Then we can calculate backwards 300 years and see what our heart looked like 300 years ago. Unfortunately we were not alive, at least as physical beings, 300 years ago, and we shall not be alive 300 years hence. Equally the Earth did not exist in those past ages that are worked out by the geologists. The destinies undergone by the Earth can be known only in spiritual terms. That is the distressing thing about modern science: it can prove so logically what is really an illusion, and its proofs tell us nothing about reality.

Human beings today, though people do not realize it consciously because they refuse to be aware of it, are living with the unconscious fear that they are on the way to losing touch with truth. We can see this fear manifesting itself in various forms. Fundamentally, the people who base their philosophy of life on materialism are very ill at ease. They are always harassed by anxiety about the limits they have set themselves, for their cherished limits create appalling obstacles to living a fully human life. People already feel intuitively that if they have nothing more than the natural order to rely on, they cannot draw life from it; above all, that the ideas derived from this natural order cannot lead them to any genuine artistic and religious experience or ideas.

We must always remember that our existing religious systems originated in the times when men were dependent on that deep sleep I have described for their understanding of the Cosmos. All our religious institutions derive from those times: the religious institutions, yes, but not the Mystery of Golgotha. That is independent of any religious view; it stands grasped by those conditions of consciousness that are still in course of preparation. For centuries now, even millennia, the religiously creative side of man has lain barren and the same is true of real artistic capacity. With rare exceptions we have to live on what we can get from various cultural revivals. We do not possess any original power of creation. But that is what is seeking to make its way into this age, and the general unrest typical of our civilization today is something like the birthpangs of a new age, a new age in the scientific and artistic spheres but also in the social, religious, and moral spheres. The future of mankind—that is what we must strive to take to heart. There has never been a time when humanity has been less disposed to listen to Initiation-knowledge and yet never a time when humanity has been in greater need of it.

That is why I wished particularly to speak to you about the past, present and future of humanity from the point of view of the evolution of consciousness. Of course, in three lectures I could do it only in outline, but you can work out within your own hearts what I have told you. Because our consciousness lies closest to our own being, it is there that men can become most easily fruitful and be stirred towards spiritual experience. In order that present-day man may develop into a man of the future, what we need is not any materialistic experience but spiritual experience. Ever since we have been victims of abstract thinking and ideas, our inner habit is really such that anyone participating in our present culture must have the same sort of impression from any talk of the spirit as the simple old uncle in the story about the log. tables, and will interpret all the powerful evidence for the entry of the spiritual as if it were like the house-numbers of Europe. The analogy is a little far-fetched but if you remember what I have told you, you will understand what it means. Our normal attitude to life, or rather our ordinary judgments about life, penetrate into all our scientific thinking and produce there a philistinism and banality raised to the nth degree, even a moral hypocrisy claiming scientific validity. If there is any, even the slightest, sign of the entry of the spiritual, it is assumed to be something which intelligent human reason, according to this materialistic view, can only call “mad.”

There is a good story, founded on fact, which also illustrates this attitude. At the beginning of the forties of the nineteenth century the old philosopher Schelling was called from Munich to Berlin. He had held his peace for several years, but a high reputation had preceded him. People looked forward to lectures on philosophy of a more positive kind, as opposed to those he himself called negative. Anyway, in these lectures at Berlin University he was to deal with the spiritual development of man, the essence of religion and the Mysteries, in a much deeper fashion than anyone had done hitherto.

When Schelling began his lectures, the front rows were occupied by the most brilliant intelligences, the professors of various subjects, the heads of the teaching departments and the most distinguished representatives of spiritual life—certainly not mere callow students, who had to sit at the back. They were all waiting—as far as they were able to wait—to see what Schelling's great reputation would accomplish. As the lecture proceeded, the faces of the audience grew longer and longer. Schelling did in fact speak in a remarkable way about the spirit; just at the moment when materialism was reaching its climax and coming to its fullest flower, he spoke of the spirit. As he spoke, the faces grew appreciably longer because the audience had no idea what he was after. Trendelenburg, well-known later on as a philosopher, who was sitting in one of the front rows, said he thought he had understood a little, though most of it was beyond him; but he was not even sure he had understood that little!

Then, some days later, two of the people who had been present at the lecture happened to meet. There had been a good deal of discussion among Schelling's hearers, and these two had taken part in it, wondering why on earth he had been called to Berlin, since not a word of what he had said was intelligible. But one of them now had the answer: Schelling's daughter had got engaged to the son of the Minister of Education! So everyone could understand why Schelling had been willing to come to Berlin. The whole thing was explained!

It may seem strange to tell you these things, but I am obliged to talk to you in this way. For the form of thinking characteristic of the present day is so far removed from the sort of thinking proper to Anthroposophy, which is moreover not just a whim of ours but an absolute necessity for man's future unless he is to fall into decadence. Only this new form of spirituality will be able to experience fully the three stages of consciousness which will emerge in the future: namely, a damped-down dream-sleep, ordinary waking, and a heightened consciousness. Otherwise man will never be able to experience his humanity properly in future lives on Earth. For the gods wish out of present threefold man to form the threefold man of the future, as they have formed the present threefold man, the dreaming, sleeping and waking man, out of the former threefold man who dreamt in pictures, slept, and on waking experienced the after-effects of his sleep, and also slept deeply. In this present age of freedom, as I have so often explained to anthroposophists, we must resolve by our own free knowledge to live towards the goal laid down for us by the divine Powers of the world. If we do that we shall not only think, we shall above all feel, in the right way about the past, present and future. Then we shall also have the right will with regard to this life on Earth, in accordance with the divine-spiritual ordering of the world—from the past, through the present, into the future.

This is what I wished to talk about, and with these words I will bring our studies to a close, not however without expressing a wish that tomorrow a discussion may begin here which will show that in the Anthroposophical Society some desire exists to promote a fully living consciousness in this Society of what man in his fullness is to be—the whole man who must be comprehended as including man of the past, man of the present, and man of the future. For these three are also one. What man has been in the past, what he is in the present, and what he is to be in the future, will embrace in face of the divine World-Order the whole being—anthropos. But in order to strive for this there must be an enthusiastic, heart-felt grasping of Anthroposophy to lead us to the true anthropos, the whole man, man in his fullness.

First of all I want to say a few words of greeting to express the feelings which your gathering have aroused in me. Your speaker described in a pleasing way the impulses that have brought you together here. Much of what I shall have to say in the coming days will inevitably be a kind of interpretation of what is present within you, more or less strongly as inner experiences which you wish to be brought to clarity of soul. I say clarity of soul rather than merely of an intellectual nature.

You have been brought together by that which lives in the depths of your souls. These depths are taken hold of by forces which, in the specific way in which they are working at the present time, are of recent date. These forces—in the way they are working in you—are scarcely older than this century. They are forces which even today reveal themselves very clearly to him who can see them, but in the near future they will become ever more apparent. In the next few days we shall describe these forces in their most intimate nature, as well as the opposite tendencies which preceded and had become “out of date” by the last third of the nineteenth century. But today, I shall speak about these forces in their more external aspect.

I think, my dear friends, that you feel you can no longer find yourselves in accord with what an older generation has to say to the world today. You see, as early as the seventies, eighties and nineties of the last century, people were stressing, both in art and in philosophy, the deep gulf between the older and younger generations. But all that was said then by poets and others about this gulf, this abyss, is pale in comparison with what has to be considered today. Today the younger and the older generation speak entirely different languages of the soul. This is so to a far greater extent than is realized. It attaches no blame to an older generation as regards the younger. To speak of blame would be to use a form of thought belonging to the older generation—one of their philistine forms of thought. We shall not speak of blame, neither shall we accuse. But we shall consider how fundamentally souls belonging to evolution in the West have changed since the last two to three decades. In our present time, many things clash.

A little while ago I gave a series of lectures in England, at Oxford. As a university town, Oxford occupies a unique position in the cultural life of the West. One feels that in Oxford—a town very closely connected with spiritual evolution in the West—a relic of the Middle Ages is surviving on into the present time. It is by no means an unpleasing relic, quite the contrary, and in many respects worthy of admiration. We were taken round by a friend who is a graduate of Oxford University, and it is the custom there, when in their capacity as graduates, always to wear cap and gown. After we had gone round with him, I met him again in the street. The next morning I could not help describing to the English audience the impression I had when this friend appeared in cap and gown. It seemed to me thoroughly symptomatic. This, together with other experiences, induced me to form a picture and to say why a new social structure, reaching to the depths of modern spiritual life, is necessary. When this friend met me in the street, I said to myself that if I had to write a letter now, under the immediate impression of this meeting, I should not know what date to put on the letter. I should have been tempted to date it about the twelfth or thirteenth century, in order to adhere to the style where such a thing was possible.

Something that is not of the present has been preserved there. We find nothing like it in Middle Europe. But what we find in Middle Europe, in influential centers of culture, is nevertheless an evolutionary product of what I have just described.

Here, in Middle Europe, the gown has practically been discarded, except on festive occasions, when Directors and other officials are expected to wear it, often to their great annoyance.

Our friend, who was also a barrister, said to me: “If I were taking you round the Law Courts in London, I should, as a barrister, have to put on a wig, not a cap.” There you see a survival of something that has become out of date, and yet was still alive in the last century. So there we have the Middle Ages in the present. In Middle Europe people have, after all, outgrown a custom which belonged to the former generation and had become old. First they discarded the costume; then, with a sudden jump, they adopted a kind of thinking, rather different in character, which headed straight into materialism. These contrasts between Western and Middle Europe are extraordinarily great. And now there is a very symptomatic phenomenon which I prefer to describe through facts rather than by abstract words.

In Middle Europe we have forgotten Goethe and accepted Darwin, although Goethe grasped at its roots the knowledge which Darwin only indicates superficially. Many similar things might be quoted. Perhaps you will say that Goethe has not been forgotten, for there exists a Goethe Society, for example. I don't believe you will say it, so I will not pursue it further. Goethe himself and what he brought to light—the Middle European spiritual impulse—were, in fact, forgotten in the second half of the nineteenth century. But these things are mere symptoms. The point is, that along the path taken by Middle Europe and its cultural life, the leading centers of culture emancipated themselves in the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries from the spirit which still remained in the West. Since that time, Middle Europe lost the spiritual, lost the element that storms and pulsates through the soul, from consciousness. That is why it was possible, too, for Goethe to be forgotten.

In the West this element has been preserved in traditions and in external life. In Middle Europe, especially in the German-speaking regions, it has been pushed down, as it were, into the depths of the life of soul, and consciousness has not been filled with it. This was particularly marked in the last third of the nineteenth century.

Close historical study will reveal something strange in the last third of the nineteenth century. If we study the literature and the writings which were read by those who played a part in shaping the cultural life, we find during the last third of the nineteenth century, up to the middle of the eighties and nineties, in German-speaking districts, quite a different style in the journals and even in the newspapers from the style that is current today. Thoughts were finely chiseled and elaborated; importance was attached to sequence in the thoughts, and to beauty as well. In comparison with the style current in the last third of the nineteenth century, our modern style is raw and crude. We need only pick up writings—no matter what they may be—of men in the sixties and seventies, not deeply learned or scholarly but possessing an average degree of culture, and we shall find this great difference. The forms of the thoughts have changed. But what is raw and crude today has proceeded from what, even in scholarly literature during the last third of the nineteenth century, was finely chiseled and full of spirituality. But those who lived through it, who, without necessarily growing old, have reached more advanced years in the present-day world of thought—we notice what has insinuated itself in a dreadful way into every domain of thought and spiritual life: symbolically, I will call it the “empty phrase,” the “cliché.”

With the vogue of the “cliché” there began to develop lack of thought, lack of sound sentiments, lack of will, which are now on the upgrade. These characteristics were the immediate outcome of the “empty phrase,” the “cliché.” The outstanding development of the “empty phrase” took place in the last third of the nineteenth century. You can follow this externally, my dear friends. Things that crop up in a certain epoch need not necessarily appeal to you. And although in one form or another they may definitely not appeal, you can still study them from the point of view of their significance for the whole of mankind.

Think of the rich tones of inner beauty which are to be found in the German romantic poets in the first third of the nineteenth century. Think of the words of a man like Jacob Grimm when he touches on things spiritual, how these words seem to be full of the fresh, health-giving air of the woods, and you will say: “In those days the ‘cliché’ did not yet dominate Middle Europe.” It did not make its way into Middle Europe until the last third of the nineteenth century. Those who are sensitive to such matters are aware of the gradual entrance of what inevitably accompanies the “empty phrase.” When the empty phrase begins to dominate, truth, as experienced inwardly by the soul, dies away. And something else goes hand in hand with the empty phrase: in social life man cannot really find his fellow-men any longer.

My dear friends, when words sound forth without soul from the mouth—as they do in the empty phrase, the cliché—then we pass by other human beings and cannot understand them. This too reached its culmination in the last third of the nineteenth century, not in the soul's depths but in the field of consciousness. Men became more and more alienated from one another. The louder the call for social reforms, the more is it a symptom of the fact that men have become unsocial. Because they no longer have any feeling for what is truly social, they cry out for social reform. A hungry animal does not howl for food because it has food in its stomach, but because it has none. Similarly, the soul that cries out for social life, cries, not because it is permeated with social feeling, but because this feeling is lacking. And so man was gradually turned into a being whose nature is not understood today, and yet it is clear enough that everywhere in the relations between man and man no need is felt to grow near, in soul, to other human beings. Everyone passes the other by. The individual's greatest interest is only in himself.

What then has come into the twentieth century from the last third of the nineteenth as the customary social feeling between man and man? Nowadays you continually hear: “That is my standpoint.” This is how people talk: “That is my standpoint.” Everyone has a standpoint.—as if the standpoint matters! The standpoint in spiritual life is just as fleeting as it is in the physical. Yesterday I stood in Dornach, today I am standing here. These are two different standpoints in physical life. What matters is that a man should have a sound will and a sound heart so that he can look at the world from every standpoint. But people today do not want what they can glean from different standpoints; the egoistic assertion of their own particular standpoint is more important to them. But thus a man shuts himself off in the most rigorous way from his fellow-men. If somebody says something, the other person does not really enter into it, for he has his own standpoint. But people do not get any nearer to each other by such means. We can only come nearer to each other when we know how to place our different standpoints in a world that is common to us all. But this world is simply not there today. Only in the spirit is there a world that is common to all—and the spirit is lacking. That is the second point.

And the third is this. In the course of the nineteenth century the humanity of Middle Europe has really become very weak-willed—weak-willed in the sense that thought no longer unfolds the power to steel the will in such a way as to make man, who is a thought-being, capable of shaping the world out of his thoughts.

And now, my dear friends, when it is said that thoughts have become “pale” this must not be twisted into the assertion that no thoughts are needed in order to live as men. Thoughts, however, must not be so feeble that they stick up there in the head. They must be so strong that they stream down through the heart and through the whole being of man, right down to the feet. For really it is better if, besides red and white blood corpuscles, thoughts, too, pulse through our blood. It is a good thing, certainly, when a man has a heart too, and not merely thoughts. Best of all is for thoughts to have a heart. And that has been lost altogether. We cannot cast off the thoughts that have followed in the wake of the last four or five centuries. But these thoughts must get a heart as well!

And now I will tell you, from an external point of view, what is living in your souls. You have grown up and have come to know the older generation. This older generation expressed itself in words; you could only hear clichés. An unsocial element presented itself to you in this older generation. Men passed each other by. And in this older generation there also presented itself the impotence of thought to pulse through the will and the heart.

You see, people could live with the “cliché,” with antisocial conventionality, with mere routine instead of warm community of life, so long as the heritage from earlier generations was still there. But this heritage was exhausted by the close of the nineteenth century. And so what presented itself could not speak to your own souls. And now, precisely in Middle Europe, you felt that in the depths below there is something that stands in the direst need of rediscovering what once lived beyond the empty phrase, beyond convention, beyond routine. You wanted again to have a living experience of truth, a living experience of human community, of stout-heartedness in cultural life. Where is it then?—so asks a voice within you.

And often, at the dawn of the twentieth century—even if not clearly expressed, it could be seen—on the one side there were the young, and on the other, the old. The old man said: “That is my standpoint.” Ah! as the nineteenth century drew to its close, everyone began to have his own particular standpoint. One was a materialist, the second an idealist, the third a realist, the fourth a sensualist, and so on. They all had their standpoints. But gradually under the domination of empty phrase, convention, and routine, the standpoint had become a crust of ice. The spiritual Ice-Age had dawned. The ice-crust was thin, but as men's “standpoints” had lost the sense of their own weight, they did not break through it. Besides, being cold in heart they did not thaw the ice. The younger people stood side by side with the old, the young with their warm hearts not articulate yet, but warm. This warmth broke through the ice-crust. The younger man did not feel: “That is my standpoint,” but he felt: “I am losing the ground from under my feet. The warmth of my heart is breaking this ice that has congealed out of empty phrase, convention, and routine.” Although not clearly expressed—for today nothing is clearly expressed—this state of thing[s] had existed for a long time and still exists at the present day.

It is hardest of all for those who with a scholarly education try to fit in with the times. They are confronted by thoughts that are void of heart-quality and are quite consciously striven for just because of this. Now in speaking out of the spirit it is often necessary to shape words differently from what is customary when telling people something highly logical, philosophical or scientific. This approach is quite out of place in face of the spiritual, and altogether out of place in face of the spiritual is the following, which we will take as an example.

People say today: He is not a true scientist who does not interpret observation and experiment quite logically; who does not pass from thought to thought in strict conformity with the correct methods that have been evolved. If he does not do this he is no genuine thinker. But, my dear friends, what if reality happens to be an artist and scorns our elaborate dialectical and experimental methods? What if Nature herself works according to artistic impulses? If it were so, human science, according to Nature, would have to become an artist, for otherwise there would be no possibility of understanding Nature. That, however, is certainly not the standpoint of the modern scientist. His standpoint is: Nature may be an artist or a dreamer; it makes no difference to us, for we decree how we propose to cultivate science. What does it matter to us if Nature is an artist? It matters not at all, for that is not our standpoint

At the outset I can only describe a few impressions to illustrate what was working together in chaotic interplay with the approach of the twentieth century—the century that has placed you before such hard trials of the soul. We have had to face outer events, including the grim and terrible world-war; these are only the outward expression of what is reigning in the innermost soul of the modern civilized world. It is simply so, and we must be conscious of it. Primarily we have to seek for something which the deepest soul of Germany is yearning for—as your speaker truly said—but which precisely within Germany was denied by men's consciousness the nearer the modern age approached. We lost not only Goethe but also a great deal of what was there in the Middle Ages and out of which Goethe grew, and we must find it again. And if it is asked today quite from the external aspect: Why have you come here today?—I shall answer: In order to find this. For you are really seeking for something that is there. Goethe answered the question: Which secret is of the highest value?—The revealed secret. (From the Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily.) But it has to be revealed through eyes being opened to perceive it. What concerns you are mainly longings of the inner life—if you understand yourselves aright. Whether one has to become a teacher or adopt some other profession—that is not the point. Everything which those who want again to become whole men are seeking today shall be found out of the common center of true manhood. That is why we find ourselves together here.

After all, it is quite a different matter if in earlier centuries—to take a radical example—people burnt a Giordano Bruno. In those times this was the customary way of refuting truths. But now—to compare this with the following symptom drawn from the realm of science—when the Swabian doctor Julius Robert Maier was making a voyage round the world, the peculiar constitution of the blood in Southern Asia brought him to the conception of what is known as the heat equivalent, the conservation of energy. In 1844 he wrote a treatise on this subject which was rejected as amateurish and unsuitable by the most famous scientific periodical of the time, the Poggendorf Annals. Julius Robert Maier was so enthusiastic about his discovery that whenever anyone met him in the street he began at once to talk about it, until finally contemporary experts decided that as he was always talking about the same thing, he was suffering from fixed ideas. As you know, he was declared insane and put into an asylum. Today you can go to Heilbronn and see the Robert Maier Memorial. It is said that the law of the conservation of energy is the most important law of physics that has been discovered in the modern age. Well, of course, such things happen! Mankind may, naturally, lapse into error, but the point I want to make is that this can be judged out of mere phrases, mere convention, mere routine.

Think of the way such a terrible tragedy, such a terrible mockery, was described in the nineteenth century, and compare it with the account given today of the same case. What has actually happened cannot be undone by abstract writings. Anyone who has a heart within him and reads the descriptions that are given of such a case, feels as if robbed of all inner support and a terrible turmoil is set going in his soul. Human beings must again be capable of feeling, not weakly, but strongly: beautiful—ugly, good—evil, true—false. They must be capable of feeling things not weakly but strongly, so that they live in them with their whole being, that their very heart's blood flows into their words. Then the empty phrase will dissipate and they will feel not only themselves but other men within their own being; convention will dissipate, and the heart's blood will pulse through what they have in their heads; then sheer routine will dissipate and life will become human once again.

Young people in the twentieth century feel these things; they have been seeking but found only chaos. These things cannot be portrayed by writing up external history. At the end of the nineteenth century there was a crucial point in the inner development of mankind. Souls who were born shortly before or shortly after the turn of the century are of quite a different inner make-up from those who were born even during the last third of the nineteenth century. One can speak about this if, in spite of the years piling up, one has not allowed oneself to get old.

So we shall see tomorrow, my dear friends, how the new generation has not linked up with the old but is divided from it by an abyss. It is not a question of finding fault but only of trying to understand. I am not finding fault when I speak of the tragedy which befell Julius Robert Maier. The same kind of thing happened to many people. It is not a matter of finding fault, but of the need for understanding. For the most important thing is to understand what is experienced deeply and inwardly; an unclear seeking cannot be allowed to continue. A light must come that will flood this unclear seeking without making it dry or cold. We must find this light, while preserving the heart's blood.

I do not wish to impose upon you anything that savors of the mystical, but to point to the truth, the truth in the spirit. You know that among the many clichés which became current in the nineteenth century, it was said that the great pioneer of the nineteenth century closed his life by calling out to posterity: “More light!” As a matter of fact Goethe did not say “More light!” He lay on his couch breathing with difficulty and said: “Open the shutters!” That is the truth. The other is the cliché that has connected itself with it. The words Goethe really spoke are perhaps far more apt than the mere phrase “More light”. The state of things at the end of the nineteenth century does indeed arouse the feeling that our predecessors have closed the shutters. Then came the younger generation; they felt cramped; they felt that the shutters which the older generation had closed so tightly must be opened. Yes, my dear friends, I assure you that although I am old, I shall tell you more of how we can now attempt to open the shutters again.

In speaking of a movement among the youth, a clear distinction can be made between the youth movement in the wider sense and those young people who are particularly concerned with schools, with the sphere of education in general. I do not wish to accentuate either the one or the other, but our aim will be most readily attained if we consider the main difficulties of the inner life among the youth at Universities and Colleges.

We shall often have to start from details and then quickly soar to a wider outlook. Allow me to say a few words about the inner experiences undergone by young people at Universities. As a matter of fact, this situation has been preparing for many decades, but recently it has reached a climax making it more clearly perceptible.

Young people at the Universities are seeking for something. This is not surprising, for their purpose in going to college is to seek for something. They have been looking in those who taught them, for real leaders, for those who were both teachers and leaders or—as would be equally correct—teachers endowed with leadership, and they did not find them. And this was the really terrible thing clothed in all kinds of different words—one man speaking conservatively, the other radically, one saying something very wise and another something very stupid. What was said amounted to this: We can no longer find any teachers.

What, then, did youth find when they came to the Universities? Well, they met men in whom they did not find what they were looking for. These men prided themselves on not being teachers any longer, but investigators, researchers. The Universities established themselves as institutes for research. They were no longer there for human beings, but only for science. And science led an existence among men which it defined as “objective.” It drummed into people, in every possible key, that it was to be respected as “objective” science. It is sometimes necessary to express such things pictorially. And so this objective science was now going about among human beings but it most certainly was not a human being! Something non-human was going about among men, calling itself “Objective Science.”

This could be perceived in detail, over and over again. How often is it not said: This or that has been discovered; it already belongs to science. And then other things are added to science and these so-called treasures of science become an accumulation, something which has acquired, step by step, this dreadful objective existence among mankind. But human beings do not really fit in with this objective creature who is strutting around in their midst, for true and genuine manhood has no kinship with this cold, objective, bolstered-up creature. True, as time has gone on, libraries and research institutes have been established. But the young, especially, are not looking for libraries or research institutes. They are looking in libraries for—it is almost beyond one to say the word—they are looking for human beings—and they find, well, they find librarians! They are looking in the scientific institutes for men filled with enthusiasm for wisdom, for real knowledge, and they find, well, those who are usually to be found in laboratories, scientific institutes, hospitals and the like. The old have accustomed themselves to being so easy-going and phlegmatic that they really do not want to be there at all in person—only their institutes and libraries must be there. But the human being cannot bring this about. Even if he tries not to be there, he is there nevertheless, working not through the reality that lives in him as a human being, but through a leaden heaviness in him.

One could express this in other ways too: Human beings strive toward Nature. But—to take a significant point—you cannot help saying: Nature is round the young child too, for example. But in its life of soul-and-spirit the little child derives nothing from Nature. The little child has to get something from Nature by coming into relation with human beings with whom it can experience Nature in common. In a certain respect this holds good right up to very late years of youth. We must come together with human beings with whom we can experience Nature in common. This was not possible during the last decades because there was no language in which people, both young and old, could come to an understanding with one another about Nature. When the old speak of Nature it is as though they were darkening her, as though the names they give to the plants no longer fit them. Nothing fits! On the one side there is the riddle “plant” and we hear the names from the old, but they do not tally because the human reality is expelled; “objective” science is wandering about on the earth. This state of things came gradually but it reached a climax during recent decades.

In the nineteenth century it showed itself through a particular phenomenon in a significant way. When anyone with a little imagination cast an eye over the higher forms of culture in recent centuries, he made acquaintance at every turn with this objective creature “Science,” which came upon the scene in many different guises but claimed always to be the one and only genuine, objective science. And having made its acquaintance, having this objective science continually introduced to one, one perceived that another being had stolen away bashfully, because she felt that she was no longer tolerated. And if one were spurred on to speak with this being, secretly in the corner, she said: “I have a name which may not be uttered in the presence of objective science. I am called Philosophy, Sophia—Wisdom. But having the ignominious prefix ‘love’ I have attached to me something that through its very name is connected with human inwardness, with love. I no longer dare to show myself. I have to go about bashfully. Objective science prides itself on having nothing of the ‘philo’ in its makeup. It has also lost, as a token, the real Sophia. But I go about nevertheless, for I still bear something of the sublime within me, connected with feeling and with a genuinely human quality.”

This is a picture that often came before the soul, and it expressed an undefined feeling in countless young people during the last twenty or thirty years.

People have been trying to find forms of expression—for as there are forms of expression for the life of thought, so too for the life of feeling—they have always been trying to find expressions for what they were seeking. Possibly the most zealous, who felt the greatest warmth of youth, broke out into the vaguest expressions because all they really knew was: We are seeking for something. But when they came to express what it was that they were seeking, it was nothing, a Nothingness. In reality, the Nothingness was, as in the words of Faust, the “All,” but it presented itself as a Nothingness. It was a question of crossing an abyss. Such was the feeling, and it still is the feeling today. It can only be understood as part of history, but history in a new, not old sense.

And now I want to speak of something quite different, but gradually things will link themselves together. Human beings who lived at the beginning of our era were able to feel quite differently from the human being of today. This was so because in the life of feeling and human perception there still lived a great deal of what was old. Human beings had a heritage in their souls. Heritage was not there only at the beginning of our era; it continued far into the Middle Ages. But nowadays souls are placed into the world without it. The fact that souls come into the world without this heritage is very noticeable in the new century. That is one aspect. The other—well, my dear friends, suppose you were to ask anybody who lived at the beginning of our era if they spoke much about “education”. The farther back we go, the less we find that education is spoken about. Education, of course, may be spoken about in different ways, for instance: Through education the young should gradually be brought up to be what they want to be when they are old. For after all we must grow old in earthly life—however young we may still be.

In olden times human beings were young and grew old in a more natural way. Today people cannot be old and young in a way that is true to nature. People do not know any longer what it means to be young and what it means to be old. Nothing is known about it and that is why there is such endless talk about education, because there is a longing to know how to teach young people to be young in order that they may grow old respectably. But nobody knows how to direct things so that human beings should be truly young and how, in youth, they can decently assimilate what will enable them to become old in a worthy manner.

Centuries ago all this was quite a matter of course. Today a great deal is said about education. Mostly we do not realize the absurdity of what is said on this subject. Nowadays almost everyone is talking about education. And why? Usually he has but the vaguest realization of having been badly educated and yet difficulties in life are attributed to this cause. People talk about it because they find that they are uneducated. This they admit. But they do not experience anything real in this domain. Nonetheless conclusions are formed. The usual cry is: “We should have this program in education”—merely because people feel so insecure in themselves. One could also show that a strong will is present on all sides, but without any real content. And that is exactly what the young are feeling, that there is no content in this will. Why is there no content? Because only lately something genuinely new has arisen in earth-evolution.

The following can only be indicated in broad outline, but if you care to look at my book, Occult Science, it will be brought home to you. There you will find that the earth is shown as a heritage of other world-existences. The names are immaterial. I have called them the Saturn, Sun and Moon existences. But the first earth-epoch was only the repetition of earlier world-existences. On the earth there have been three periods of repetition: a Saturn, a Sun, and a Moon period. Then came the earth period proper. But this earth period proper, this Atlantean epoch, was again only a repetition at a higher level of earlier conditions.

And then came the post-Atlantean epoch—a still higher stage. But this again was a repetition. The post-Atlantean epoch was a repetition of a repetition. Until the fifteenth century A.D. mankind actually lived on nothing but repetitions, on nothing but a heritage. Up to the fifteenth century the human being, in his soul, was by no means an unwritten page. Before then, many things rose up of themselves in the soul. But from the fifteenth century onwards souls were really unwritten pages. Now the earth was new—new for the first time. Since the fifteenth century the earth has been new. Before then human beings lived on the earth with much they inherited. As a rule no heed is paid to the fact that since the fifteenth century the earth has become new for the first time. Before then human beings were fed on the past. Since the fifteenth century they have been standing face to face with Nothingness. The soul is an unwritten page. And how have human beings been living since the fifteenth century? Since then, the son has inherited from the father rough tradition what had once been inherited in a different way, so that from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century tradition was still always there. But as you can see, tradition has fared worse and worse.

Think for example of the Sphere of Rights. It would never have occurred to a man like Scotus Erigena to speak of Rights as modern people speak, because at that time there was still something in the souls which led human beings to speak as man to man. This is no longer so, because there is nothing in the soul that leads to the human reality; man has found nothing yet that leads out of the Nothingness. At one time the father could at least speak to the son. But at the end of the eighteenth century things had gone so far that the father had really nothing to say to his son any more. Then people began to seek, convulsively to begin with, for the so-called “Rights of Reason.” Ideas and feelings on the subject of Rights were supposed to be pressed out of reason. Then Savigny and others discovered that nothing more could be pressed out of reason. People began to establish Rights according to history, where it was a question of studying earlier conditions and cramming themselves with the feelings of men long since dead, because there was nothing left in themselves. Rights of reason were a convulsive clinging to what had already been lost. Rights according to history were a confession that nothing more was to be got out of the men of the day. Such was the situation at the onset of the nineteenth century: The feeling grew keener and keener that mankind was facing a Nothingness and that something must be got out of the human being himself.

In ancient Greece nobody would have known how to speak about objective science. How did man express his relation to the world? By reference to spiritual vision he spoke of Melpomene, of Urania, and so on; of the “Liberal Arts”. These Liberal Arts were not beings who went about on the earth, but for all that they were real. Even in the age of philosophy, the Greek's experience of his connection with the spiritual world was concrete. The Muses were genuinely loved; they were real beings with whom man was related and had intercourse. Homer's words: “Sing, O Muse, of the wrath of Peleus' son, Achilles” were not the mere phraseology they are thought to be by modern scholars. Homer felt himself a kind of chalice and the Muse spoke out of him as a higher manhood enfilled him.

Klopstock was unwilling to speak in the phrases which were already prevalent in the world into which he was born; he said: “Sing, immortal Soul, of sinful man's redemption.” But this “immortal soul” too has disappeared little by little. It was a slow and gradual process. In the first centuries of Christendom we find that the once concrete Muses had become dreadfully withered ladies! Grammar, Dialectic, Rhetoric, Arithmetic, Geometry, Astrology, Music—they had lost all concrete reality. Boethius makes them appear almost without distinct features. It is impossible to love them any longer. But even so they are buxom figures in comparison with the objective science that goes about as a being among men today. Little by little the human being has lost the connection he had in olden times with the spiritual world. This was inevitable because he had to develop to full freedom in order to shape all that is human out of himself. This has been the challenge since the fifteenth century, but it was not really felt until the end of the nineteenth and particularly in the twentieth century. For now, not only was the inheritance lost but the traditions too. Fathers had nothing to tell their sons. And now the feeling was: We are facing a Nothingness. People began to sense: The earth has in fact become new.

What I have said here can be put in another way, by considering what would have become of the earth without the Christ Event.—Suppose there had been no Christ Event. The earth as it lives in man's life of soul and spirit would gradually have withered. The Christ Event could not have been delayed until the modern age. It had to occur somewhat earlier than the time when the old inheritance had gone, in order that the Christ Event could at least be experienced through the old inherited qualities of soul. Just imagine what it would have been like if the Christ Event at the beginning of our era had come about at the end of the nineteenth or in the twentieth century. How our contemporaries would laugh to scorn the pretension that an event could be of such significance! Quite a different kind of feeling was necessary. The feeling of standing before a Nothingness could not, at the time of that Event, have been there. The Christ Event came during the first third of the fourth Post-Atlantean epoch of civilization. And in the same epoch, in the first third of which there fell the Christ Event, the old era came to an end.

A new era begins in the fifteenth century, with the fifth Post-Atlantean epoch of civilization in which we are now living. In this epoch there were only traditions. They have gradually faded out. In this epoch, as regards the Christ Event, as regards the deeper, more intimate religious questions, men are clearly facing a Nothingness. It has even become impossible for theologians to understand the Christ Event. Try to get from contemporary theology an intelligible conception of the Christ Event. Those who argue the Christ away from Jesus pass as the greatest theologians today. Quite obviously, people are facing the Abyss.

I am only describing symptoms. For these things take place in the deeper layers of man's life of soul. These layers of soul conjure into those who were born on earth to become the young of recent decades, something that makes them feel cut off from the stream of world happenings. It is as though a terrible jerk had been given to the evolution of the soul.

Suppose my hand were capable of feeling and were chopped off. What would it feel? It would feel cut off, dried up; it would no longer feel itself to be what it actually is. This is what the human soul has been feeling since the last third of the nineteenth century in regard to the stream of world happenings. The soul feels cut off, chopped off, and the anxious question is: How can I once again become alive in my soul?

But then, when one strives to speak out of what can bring this life back again, those who want to muddle along on the lines of the old spiritual life simply show no understanding. Just think how little is understood about the essence of the founding of the Waldorf School, for example. For the most part people hear about the Waldorf School something quite different from what they ought to hear. They hear things that were also said decades ago. The mere words that are spoken today about the Waldorf School can be found by them in books. They find every single word in earlier books. But when one wants to use different words, or perhaps only different ways of putting the sentences together, then people say: That is bad style. They have not the remotest notion of what must be done now, when human beings who still have a soul in their bodies must inevitably face the Nothingness.

Waldorf School education must be listened to with other ears than those with which one hears about other kinds of education or educational reform. For the Waldorf School gives no answer to the questions people want to have answered today and which are ostensibly answered by other systems of education. What is the aim of such questions? Their usual aim is intelligence, much intelligence—and of intelligence the present time has an incalculable amount. Intelligence, intellect, cleverness—these are widespread commodities at the present time. One can give terribly intelligent answers to questions like: What should we make out of the child? How should we inculcate this or that into him? The ultimate result is that people answer for themselves the question: What pleases me in the child, and how can I get the child to be what I like? But such questions have no significance in the deeper evolutionary course of humanity. And to such questions Waldorf pedagogy gives no reply at all.

To give a picture of what Waldorf Education is, we must say that it speaks quite differently from the way in which people speak elsewhere in the sphere of education: Waldorf School Education is not a pedagogical system but an Art—the Art of awakening what is actually there within the human being. Fundamentally, the Waldorf School does not want to educate, but to awaken. For an awakening is needed today. First of all, the teachers must be awakened, and then the teachers must awaken the children and the young people.

An awakening is needed, now that mankind has been cut off from the stream of world-evolution in general. In this moment humanity fell asleep—you will not be surprised that I use this expression. They fell asleep, just as a hand goes to sleep when it is cut off from the circulation of the body. But you might say: But human beings have made such progress since the fifteenth century, they have developed such colossal cleverness, and, moreover, are aware of the colossal cleverness they have developed If the War had not come—which, by the way, was not the experience that it might have been, although people did realize to a slight extent that they were not so very clever after all—heaven knows to what point the phrase, “We have made such splendid progress” would have got. It would have been unendurable! Certainly in the sphere of the intellect tremendous progress has been made since the fifteenth century. But this intellect has something dreadfully deceptive about it.

You see, people think that in their intellects they are awake. But the intellect tells us nothing about the world. It is really nothing but a dream of the world. In the intellect, more emphatically than anywhere else, man dreams and because objective science works mostly with the intellect that is applied to observation and experiment, it too dreams about the world. It all remains a dreaming. Through the intellect man no longer has an objective relation with the world. The intellect is the automatic momentum of thinking which continues long after man has been cut off from the world. That is why human beings of the present day, when they feel a soul within them, are seeking again for a real link with the world, a re-entrance into the world. If up till the fifteenth century men had positive inheritances, so now they are confronting a “reversed” inheritance, a negative inheritance. And here a strange discovery can be made.

Up to the fifteenth century, men could welcome with joy what they had inherited from the evolution of the world. The world had not been unrolled and human beings were not altogether cut off from it. Today, after the switching off has occurred, one can again ponder what is to be got from the world without personal activity. But then a strange discovery is made, like a man who is left a legacy and forgets to inform himself about it accurately. A calculation is made and it is discovered that the debits exceed the assets. The opportunity of refusing the legacy has been missed. But this means a definite amount of debts which have to be paid. It is a negative inheritance. There are such cases. And so a negative inheritance comes to the soul, even concerning the greatest Event that has ever happened in evolution.

Before the time of Golgotha it was not necessary for human beings to understand the Mystery of Golgotha, because it had not taken place. Then it happened, and with the remains of ancient inheritance it could still be dimly understood in the age that followed. Then came the fifteenth century when these inherited remains were no longer there, although it was still possible for father to pass on to son the story of what took place in the Mystery of Golgotha.

None of this helps any longer. People are dreadfully clever. But even in the seventh and eighth centuries they would have been clever enough to perceive the contradictions in the four Gospels. The contradictions were, after all, very easy to discover. They began to be investigated for the first time in the nineteenth century. And so it is in every domain of life. The value of the intellect was too highly assessed and a consciousness, a feeling, for the Event of Golgotha was lost. Religious consciousness was lost in the deepest sense. But in its innermost essence the soul has not lost this consciousness, and the young are asking: “What was the Mystery of Golgotha in reality?” The elders were unable to say anything about it. I am not implying that the young are capable of this either, or that anything is known at the Universities. What I am saying is that something ought to be known about it.

To sum up, what is taking place chaotically in the depths of human souls: a striving to understand once again the Mystery of Golgotha. What must be sought for is a new experience of Christ. We are standing inevitably before a new experience of the Christ Event. In its first form it was experienced with the remains of old inherited qualities of soul; they have vanished since the fifteenth century, and the experiences have been carried on simply by tradition. For the first time, in the last third of the nineteenth century it became evident that the darkness was now complete. There was no heritage any longer. Out of the darkness in the human soul, a light must be found once again. The spiritual world must be experienced in a new way.

This is the significant experience that is living in the souls of profounder natures in the modern youth movement. By no means superficially but in a deeper sense, it is clear that for the first time in the historical evolution of mankind there must be an experience which comes wholly from out of the human being himself. As long as this is not realized it is impossible to speak of education. The fundamental question is: How can original, firsthand experience, spiritual experience, be generated in the soul?

Original spiritual experience in man's soul is something that is standing before the awakening of human beings in the new century as the all-embracing, unexpressed riddle of man and of the world. The real question is: How is man to awaken the deepest nature within him, how can he awaken himself? Zealous spirits among growing humanity—I can only express it in a picture—are like one who only half wakes in the morning with his limbs heavy, unable to come fully out of sleep. That is how the human being feels today—as if he cannot completely emerge from the state of sleep.

This lies at the root of a striving in many different forms during the last twenty or thirty years and is still shining with a positive light today into the souls of the young. It expresses itself in the striving for community among young people. People are looking for something. I said yesterday: Man has lost man, and is seeking him again. Until the fifteenth century, human beings had not lost one another. Naturally evolution cannot be turned back to an earlier condition and it would be dreadful to attempt it. We do not wish to become reactionaries. Nevertheless it is a fact that up to the fifteenth century man could still find man. Since that century dim thought-pictures were to be found in tradition and in what the father was still able to hand on, saying: “The other person over there is really a human being.” Dimly it was realized that this form going about was also a human being. In the twentieth century this has altogether vanished. Even tradition has gone, and yet the quest is still for the human being. Man is really seeking for man. And why? Because in reality he is seeking for something quite different.

If things continue as they were at the turn of the century, then no one will wake up. For the others too are in the state where they are incapable of awakening anybody. In short, human beings, in community life, must mean something to one another. It is this that has from the beginning radiated through Waldorf School Education, which does not aim at being a system of principles but an impulse to awaken. It aims at being life, not science, not cleverness but art, vital action, awakening deed. That is, what matters is a question of awakening, for evolution has made human beings fall into a sleep that is filled with intellectualistic dreams. Even in the ordinary dream—which is nothing compared with the intellectual dreaming that goes on—man is often a megalomaniac. But, ordinary dreaming is a mere nothing compared with intellectualistic dreaming.

An awakening is at stake and it will simply not do to go any further with intellectualism. This objective science which goes about and has discarded all its old clothes because it fears that something genuinely human might be found in them, has surrounded itself with a thick fog, with the mantle of objectivity, and so nobody notices what is going about in this objectivity of science. People need something human again: human beings must be awakened.

Yes, my dear friends, if an awakening is to take place, the Mystery of Golgotha must become a living experience again. In the Mystery of Golgotha a Spirit-Being came into the earth from realms beyond the earth. In earlier times this was grasped with ancient powers of the soul. The twentieth century is challenged to understand it with new powers. Modern youth, when it understands itself, is demanding to be awakened in its consciousness, not in the ancient and slumbering powers of the soul. And this can only happen through the Spirit, can only happen if the Spirit actually sends its sparks into the communities people are seeking for today. The Spirit must be the Awakener. We can only make progress by realizing the tragic state of world-happenings in our day, namely, that we are facing the Nothingness we necessarily had to face in order to establish human freedom in earth-evolution. And in face of the Nothingness we need an awakening in the Spirit.

Only the Spirit can open the shutters, for otherwise they will remain tightly shut. Objective science—I cast no reproaches, for I am not overlooking its great merits—will, in spite of everything, leave these shutters tightly closed. Science is only willing to concern itself with the earthly. But since the fifteenth century the forces which can awaken human beings have disappeared. The awakening must be sought within the human being himself, in the super-earthly. This is indeed the deepest quest, in whatever forms it may appear. Those who speak of something new and are inwardly earnest and sincere should ask themselves: “How can we find the unearthly, the super-sensible, the spiritual, within our own beings?” This need not again be clothed in intellectualistic forms. Truly it can be sought in concrete forms, indeed it must be sought in such forms. Most certainly it cannot be sought in intellectualistic forms. For if you ask me why you have come here, it is because there is living within you this question: How can we find the Spirit? If you see what has impelled you to come in the right light, you will find that it is simply this question: “How can we find the Spirit which, out of the forces of the present time, is working in us? How can we find this Spirit?”

In the next few days, my dear friends, we will try to find this Spirit.

Today I shall speak in the most concrete way about the Spirit in order to lay a foundation for the next few days, and I must appeal to you to try to arouse a fundamental feeling for what is here meant by the Spirit.

What is taken into account by the human being today? He attaches importance only to what he experiences consciously, from the time he wakes up in the morning until the time he goes to sleep at night. He reckons as part of the world only that which he experiences in his waking consciousness. If you were listening to the voice of the present and had accustomed yourselves to it, you might say: Yes, but was it not always so? Did human beings in earlier times include in what they meant by reality anything in addition to what they experienced in their waking consciousness?

I certainly do not wish to create the impression that we ought to go back to the conditions in earlier epochs of civilization. That is not my intention. The thing that matters is to go forward, not back. But in order to find our bearings we may turn back, look back, rather, beyond the time of the fifteenth century, before the age I attempted to describe radically to you yesterday. What men of that time said about the world is looked upon today as mere phantasy, as not belonging to reality. You need only look at the literature of olden times and you will find, when men spoke of “salt,” “mercury,” phosphorus and so on, that they included many things in the meaning which people are anxious to exclude today.

People say nowadays: “Yes, in those days men added something out of their own phantasy when they spoke of salt, mercury, phosphorus.”

We will not argue about the reason why this is so anxiously excluded today. But we must realize that people saw something in phosphorus, in addition to what is seen by the mere senses, in the way modern men see color. It was surrounded by a spiritual-etheric aura, just as around the whole of Nature there seemed to hover a spiritual aura, although after the fourth or fifth century A.D. it was very colorless and pale. Even so, men were still able to see it. It was as little the outcome of phantasy as the red color we see. They actually saw it.

Why were they able to see this aura? Because something streamed over to them from their experiences during sleep. In the waking Consciousness of that time man did not experience in salt, sulphur, or phosphorus any more than he does today; but when people in those days woke up, sleep had not been unfruitful for their souls. Sleep still worked over into the day and man's perception was richer; his experience of everything around him was more intense.

Without this knowledge as a basis we cannot understand earlier times. Later on the experience of the ancients in connection with sulphur, phosphorus and so on became a mere name, an abstraction. The Spirit continued as an abstraction in tradition, until, at the end of the nineteenth century, the word spirit conveyed nothing to the mind, nothing by way of experience. External culture, which alleges such great progress, naturally attaches the greatest importance to the fact that the human being acts with his waking consciousness. Naturally, with this he will build machines; but with his waking consciousness he can work very little upon his own nature. if we were obliged to be always awake we should very soon become old-at least by the end of our twentieth year—and more repulsively old than people today. We cannot always be awake, because the forces we need to work inwardly upon our organism are active within us only during sleep. it is of course true that the human being can work at external, visible forms of culture when he is awake, but only in sleeping consciousness can he work upon himself. And in olden times much more streamed over from sleeping consciousness into the waking state.

The great change took place in the middle of the fifteenth century: this trickling of sleep consciousness into waking consciousness ceased. Pictorially I would say: In the tenth and eleventh centuries of western civilization man still grew up in such a way that he felt: Divine-spiritual powers have been performing deeds within me between my going to sleep and waking up. He felt the influx of divine-spiritual forces just as in waking consciousness he experienced the health-bringing light of the sun. And before going to sleep there was in every human being an elemental mood of prayer, full of Nature-forces. People entered sleep—or if they were men of knowledge they at least strove to do so—by giving themselves over to divine-spiritual powers.

The education of those who were destined for the spiritual life was such that this mood was deliberately cultivated. At the end of the nineteenth century those who regarded themselves as the most spiritual men had for a long time replaced this by another method of preparation. I have often witnessed how people prepare themselves for sleep: “I must take my fill of beer to prepare for sleep.” This sounds grotesque. Yet we see it is historically true that vision into the spiritual world through sleep was a deliberate and conscious striving among human beings of past epochs, apart from the fact that the candidates for initiation—the students of those days-were prepared in a sacred way for the temple-sleep in which they were made aware of man's participation in the spiritual world.

At the present time when one considers the development of civilization people do not ask: What has come about in modern mankind from the educational point of view? The question is not asked because people do not think of the whole human being but only of part of him. One has a strange impression if one sees a little further than the nearest spiritual horizon: people believe they at last know the truth about certain things, whereas the men of old were altogether naive. Read any current history of physics and you will find that it is written as if everything before this age were naive; now at last things have been perceived in the form in which they can permanently remain. A sharp line is drawn between what has been achieved today and the ideas of nature evolved in “childish” times. No one thinks of asking: What educational effect has the science that is absorbed today, from the point of view of world-historical progress?

Let us think of some earlier book on natural science. From the modern point of view it is childish. But now let us put aside the modern point of view and ask: What educational effect had such a book at that time and what effect has a modern book? The modern book may be very clever and the older one very phantastic, but if we consider the educational value as a whole, we shall have to admit that when a book was read—and it was not so easy to read books in those days, there was something ceremonial about it—it drew something out of the depths of men's souls. The reading of a book was actually like the process of growing: productive forces were released in the organism and human beings were aware of them. They felt something real was there. Today everything is logical and formal. Everything is assimilated by means of the head, formally and intellectually, but no will-force is involved. And because it is all assimilated by the head only and is thus entirely dependent upon the physical head-organization, it remains unfruitful for the development of the true man.

Today there are people who struggle against materialism. My dear friends, it would be almost more sensible if they did not. For what does materialism affirm? It asserts that thinking is a product of the brain. Modern thinking is a product of the brain. That is just the secret—that modern thinking is a product of the brain. With regard to modern thinking, materialism is quite right, but it is not right about thinking as it was before the middle of the fifteenth century. At that time man did not think only with the brain but with what was alive in the brain. He had living concepts. The concepts of that time gave the same impression as an ant-hill, they were all alive. Modern concepts are dead. Modern thinking is clever, but dreadfully lazy! People do not feel it, and the less they feel it the more they love it. In earlier times people felt a tingling when they were thinking—because thinking was a reality in the soul. People are made to believe that thinking was always as it is today. But modern thinking is a product of the brain; earlier thinking was not so.

We ought to be grateful to the materialists for drawing attention to the fact that present-clay thinking is dependent upon the brain. Such is the truth and it is a much more serious matter than is usually imagined. People believe that materialism is a wrong philosophy. That is not at all true. Materialism is a product of world-evolution but a dead product, describing life in the condition where life has died.

This thinking which has evolved more and more since the fifteenth century and which has entrenched itself in civilization the farther west we go, (oriental civilization in spite of its decadence has after all preserved some of the older kind of thinking) has quite definite characteristics. The farther west we come the more does a thinking, regarded by the orientals as inferior, take the upper hand. It does not impress the oriental at all; he despises it. But he himself has nothing new; all he has is the old kind of thinking and it is perishing. But the European, and more so the American, would not feel at ease if he had to transfer himself into the thinking of the Vedas. That kind of thinking made one tingle and the Westerners love dead thinking, where one does not notice that one is thinking at all. The time has come when people confess that a millwheel is revolving in their heads—not only when someone is talking nonsense but when they are talking about living things. They merely want to snatch at what is dead.

Here is an example which I am only quoting for the sake of cultural interest, not for the sake of polemics. I described how it is possible to see an aura of colors around stones, plants and animals. The way in which I put this in the book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds was such that it made living thinking, not dead thinking, a necessity. A short time ago a professor at a University who is said to have something to do with philosophy, came across this description. To think livingly! Oh, no? that won't do; that is impossible! And there is supposed to be an aura of colors around stone, plant, animal!—He had only seen colors in the solar spectrum and so he thinks that I too can only have seen them in the solar spectrum and have transferred them to stone, plant and animal. He cannot in the least follow my way of describing, so he calls it just a torrent of words. For him, indeed, it is so. He is incapable of understanding it at all. And for a great number of University professors it can be the same. A millwheel is going round in their heads, so away with the head; and then, of course, nothing can possibly come out of it!

The living human being, however, demands a living kind of thinking and this demand is in his very blood. You must be clear about this. You must get your head so strong again that it can stand not only logical, abstract thinking, but even living thinking. You must not immediately get a buzzing head when it is a matter of thinking in a living way. For those whose characteristic was pure intellectualism had dead thinking. The purpose of this dead thinking was the materialistic education of the West. If we look into it, we get a very doubtful picture.

The earlier kind of thinking could be carried over into sleep when the human being was still an entity. He was a being among other beings. He was a real entity during sleep because he had carried living thinking with him into sleep. He brought it out of sleep when he woke up and took it back with him when he fell asleep. Modern thinking is bound to the brain but this cannot help us during sleep. Today, therefore, according to the way of modern science, we can be the cleverest and most learned people, but we are clever only during the day. We cease to be clever during the night, in face of that world through which we can work upon our own being. Men have forgotten to work upon themselves. With the concepts we evolve from the time of waking to that of sleeping we can only achieve something between waking and sleeping. Nothing can be achieved with the real being of man. Man must work out of the forces with which he builds up his own being. During the period when he has to build himself up, when he is a little child, he needs the greatest amount of sleep. If ever a method should be discovered for cramming into babies all that is taught to seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds, you would soon see what they would look like! It is a very good thing that babies are still provided for from the mother's breast and not from the lecturing desk. It is out of sleep that man must bring the forces through which he can work upon his own being.

We can carry into sleep nothing from the concepts we evolve through science, through external observation and experiments and the controlling of experiments; and we can bring nothing of what is developed in sleep into these concepts of the material world. The spiritual and the intellectual do not get on well together unless united in the world of full consciousness. Formerly this union was consummated, but in a more subconscious way. Nowadays the union must be fully conscious, and to this human beings do not wish to be converted.

What happened when a man of earlier times passed with his soul into sleep? He was still an entity, because he had within him what hovers around material things. He bore this into sleep. He could still maintain his identity when in sleep he was outside the physical body and in the spiritual world. Today he is less and less of a real entity. He is well-nigh absorbed by the spirituality of Nature when he leaves his body in sleep. In true perception of the world, this is at once evident to the soul. You should only see it!—well, you will be able to see it if you will exert yourselves to acquire the necessary vision. Humanity must attain this vision, for we are living in an age when it can no longer be said that it is impossible to speak of the Spirit as we speak of animals or stones. With such faculties of vision you will be able to see that even though Caesar was not very portly in physical life, yet when his soul left his body in sleep it was of a considerable “size”—not in the spatial sense, but its greatness could be experienced. His soul was majestic. Today a man may be one of the most portly of bankers, but when his soul steps out of his body in sleep into the spirituality of Nature, you should see what a ghastly, shrunken framework it becomes. The portly banker becomes quite an insignificant figure! Since the last third of the nineteenth century humanity has really been suffering from spiritual under-nourishment. The intellect does not nourish the Spirit. It only distends it. That is why the human being takes no spirituality with him into sleep. He is well-nigh sucked up when with his soul as a thin skeleton, he stretches out into the world of spiritual Nature between sleeping and waking.

That is why the question of materialism is far from theoretical. Nothing is of less importance today than the theoretical strife between materialistic, spiritualistic and idealistic philosophy. These things are of no reality, for the refutation of materialism achieves nothing. We may refute materialism as often as we like, nothing will come of it. For, the reasons we bring in order to refute it are just as materialistic as those we quote for or against idealism. Theoretical refutations achieve nothing one way or the other. But what really matters is that in our whole way of looking at the world we have the Spirit once again. Thereby our concepts will regain the force to nourish our being. To make this clear, let me say the following.

Now, I really do not find any very great difference between those people who call themselves materialists and those who in little sectarian circles call themselves, let us say, theosophists. For the way in which the one makes out a case for materialism and another for theosophy is by no means essentially different. It comes down to whether people want to make out a case for theosophy with the kind of thinking entirely dependent upon the brain. If this is so, even theosophy is materialistic. It is not a question of words, but whether the words express the Spirit. When I compare much of the theosophical twaddle with Haeckel's thought, I find the Spirit in Haeckel, whereas the theosophists speak of the Spirit as if it were matter, but diluted matter. The point is not that one speaks about the Spirit but that one speaks through the Spirit. One can speak spiritually about the material, that is to say, it is possible to speak about the material in mobile concepts. And that is always much more spiritual than to speak un-spiritually about the Spirit.

However many come forward today with every possible kind of logical argument in defense of the spiritual view of the world; this simply does not help us, does not help one bit. During the night we remain just as barren if during the day we ponder about hydrogen, chlorine, bromine, iodine, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, silica, potassium, sodium and so on, and then evolve our theories; as if we ponder about the human being consisting of physical, etheric, and astral bodies. It is all the same so far as what is living is concerned. To speak in a living way about potassium or calcium, to treat chemistry as really alive, this is much more valuable than a dead, intellectual theosophy. For theosophy too can be taught in a dead, intellectual way. It does not really matter whether we speak materialistically or intellectually, what matters is that the Spirit shall be in what we say. The Spirit must penetrate us with its livingness. But because this is no longer understood, it is very disagreeable when anyone takes this seriously.

I did this in one of my last Oxford lectures, and to make myself quite clear I said: It is all the same to me whether people speak of spiritism, realism, idealism, materialism or anything else When I need language to describe some external phenomenon I use materialistic language. This can be done in such a way that the Spirit too lives within it. If one speaks out of the realm of the Spirit, what one says will be spiritual although the language may have materialistic form. That is the difference between what is cultivated here as Anthroposophy and what is pursued in other places under similar names. Every other week books against Anthroposophy are brought out. They contain statements which are supposed to be leveled against what I have said, but what they attack is always quite new to me for as a rule I have never said such things. They collect all sorts of rubbish and then write voluminous books about it. What they attack has usually nothing whatever to do with what I actually say. The point is not to fight materialism but to see to it that the concepts come out of the world of the Spirit, that they are really experienced, that they are concepts filled with life. What is here presented and accepted as Anthroposophy is quite different from what the world says about it.

People fight today against Anthroposophy—and sometimes also in defense of it—quite materialistically, un-spiritually, whereas what really matters is that experience of the Spirit should be made a reality in us. People easily get muddied, for when one begins to speak of spiritual beings as one speaks of plants and animals in the physical world, they take one for a fool. I can understand that; but there is just this, that this folly is the true reality, indeed the living reality for human beings! The other kind of reality is good for machines but not for human beings.

This is what I wanted to say quite clearly, my dear friends, that in what I intend here and have always intended, the important thing is not merely to speak about the Spirit, but out of the Spirit, to unfold the Spirit in the very speaking. The Spirit can have an educative effect upon our dead cultural life. The Spirit must be the lightning which strikes our dead culture and kindles it to renewed life. Therefore, do not think that you will find here any plea for rigid concepts such as the concepts physical body, etheric body, astral body, which are so nicely arrayed on the walls of theosophical groups and are pointed out just as, in a lecture room, sodium, potassium and so on are pointed to with their atomic weights. There is no difference between pointing at tables giving the atomic weight of potassium and pointing to the etheric body. It is exactly the same, and that is not the point. Interpreted in this way, Theosophy—or even Anthroposophy—is not new, but merely the latest product of the old.

The most incredible twaddle is heard when people suddenly feel themselves called upon to uphold the spiritual. I do not mention these things for the sake of criticism, but as a symptom. I will tell you two stories; the first runs as follows. I was once at a meeting in the West of Europe on the subject of theosophy. The lectures had come to an end. I fell into conversation with someone about the value of these lectures. This personality who was a good disciple of theosophical sectarianism told me of his impression of the lectures in these words: “There are such beautiful vibrations in this hall.” The pleasant sensation, you see, was expressed in terms of vibrations—in other words, materialistically.

Another time people pestered me about some discovery that had been made on the spiritual plane. It was stated that repeated earth-lives—which as a matter of fact can only be revealed to the soul by genuinely spiritual perception—must also be perceived in an earthly guise, must be clothed in terms of materialistic thinking. So these people began to speak of the “permanent atom” which goes through all earth-lives. They said: If I am now living on the Earth, and come back again after hundreds of years, the atoms will be scattered to the four winds—but one single atom goes over into the next earth-life. It was called the “permanent atom”. Quite happily the most materialistic ideas were being introduced into the truth of repeated earth-lives, into a truth that can only be grasped by the Spirit. As if it could profit anyone to have a single atom say from the fourth or filth century going around in his brain! Surely it is the same as if a surgeon in the world beyond had managed to equip me in this life by having preserved my stomach from a former incarnation and inserted it in my present body. In principle, these things are exactly the same.

I am not telling you this as a joke, but as an interesting symptom of people who, wanting to speak of the Spirit, talk of the pleasant sensation coming from spiritual “vibrations” and have only absorbed through imitation what others have known about repeated earth-lives, clothe this in such a way that they talk about the permanent atom. Books have been written by theosophists about this permanent atom—books with curious drawings showing the distribution of hydrogen, oxygen, chlorine and so on. And when one looks at them they seem no less outrageous than the sketches which materialists have made of the atoms. It does not matter whether we say: This is spiritual, or that is material. What matters is to realize the necessity of entering the living Spirit. I do not say this in a polemic sense but to make it clear to you.

The following is characteristic. There lives at the present time a very gifted Benedictine Father Mager, one of the finest minds in the Order—and the Benedictines have exceedingly fine minds. Mager has written an extremely interesting little book on “The Behaviour of Man in the Sight of God.” It belongs, in thought, to the time when Benedict founded his Order. Had it been written then it would have been quite in accordance with the times. When someone writes a book about the “Behaviour of Man in the Sight of God” one can admire it. And I do admire it. The same priest has, however, also given his opinion on Anthroposophy. And now he becomes the densest of materialists. It is really terribly difficult for one to force one's way into such a rigid kind of thought in order to describe the statements made by this priest. What he censures most is that the perception in Imaginative knowledge, which I put first, is of such a nature that for Father Mager it amounts to a lot of pictures. He gets no farther. And then he says, in accordance with his scientific conscience, that Anthroposophy materializes the world. He takes violent exception to the fact that Anthroposophy materializes the world, in other words, that Anthroposophy does not confine itself to the unreal, abstract concepts he loves—for this Father loves the most abstract concepts. Just read any Catholic philosophy and you will find—Being, Becoming, Existence, Beauty and so on—all in the most abstract form. Whatever you do, don't touch the world! And the Father notices that Anthroposophy contains living concepts which can actually come down to real things, to the real world. That is an abomination to him.

One ought to answer him: If knowledge is to be anything real, it must follow the course taken by God in connection with the world. This course started from the Spiritual and was materialized. The world was first spiritual and then became more and more material, so that real knowledge must follow this course. It is not sought for in Anthroposophy, but one comes to it. The picture slips into reality; but Father Mager condemns this. And yet it is exactly what he must himself believe if he wants to give his faith a reasonable content. But he calls it in our case the materialization of knowledge.

Of course, there is no satisfying those who insist: For heaven's sake no living concepts, for they will slip into reality, and concepts must be kept away from that! In such cases we can only have concepts belonging to waking consciousness and none that is capable of working upon man from the spiritual world. And that is exactly what we need. We need a living evolution and a living education of the human race. The fully conscious human being feels the culture of the present day to be cold, arid. It must be given life and inner activity once again. It must become such that it fills the human being, fills him with life. Only this can lead us to the point where we shall no longer have to confess that we ought not to mention the Spirit, but it leads us to where the good will to develop within us the inclination not for abstract speaking, but for inward action in the Spirit that flows into us, not for obscure, nebulous mysticism, but for the courageous, energetic permeation of our being with spirituality. Permeated by spirit we can speak of matter and we shall not be led astray when talking of important material discoveries, because we are able to speak about them in a spiritual way. We shall shape into a force that educates humanity what we sense darkly within us as an urge forward. Tomorrow, we will speak of these things again.

Today I shall begin with a review of ethics up to the end of the nineteenth century. I do not wish to convey that philosophical expositions can give rise to an impulse for the renewal of the moral life, but rather to show that forces which work from other sources to determine the moral life are symptomatically expressed in the philosophical expositions of ethics.

We must give up the view that systems of philosophy which start from the intellect can give a sound direction. Yet the whole impulse of the age expresses itself in what the philosophers say. No one will declare that our reaction to the temperature of a room is influenced by the thermometer; what the thermometer registers is dependent upon the temperature of the room. In the same way we can gauge, from what philosophers write about morality, the condition of morals in general.

You see, I treat philosophical expositions of ethics in rather a different way, merely as a kind of thermometer for registering conditions. Just as we know the temperature of a room by reading the thermometer, so we can find out a great deal about the undercurrents of the life of humanity in a particular region or period by knowing what the philosophers express in their writings.

Consider the following only from this point of view as I read you a passage printed in 1893 in the periodical Deutsche Literaturzeitung that deals with Spencer's Principle of Ethics. The reviewer says: “It contains, as I think, the most complete argument, supported by a crushing weight of material, that there is absolutely no such thing as one universal morality for all mankind, nor is there an unchangeable Moral Law: that there exists only one norm which underlies all judgments of human characteristics and actions, namely, the practical fitness or unfitness of a character or action for the given state of the society in which the judgment is made. On this account the same things will be very differently judged according to the different cultural conditions in which they occur. The view of the present writer is that this masterpiece (Spencer's Principles of Ethics) must, from a scientific point of view at least, strike dumb any recent attempts to base ethical judgments upon intuition, inborn feelings, or the most evident of axioms and the like.”

This passage is characteristic of the attitude of most of the civilized world at the end of the nineteenth century, so that it could be expressed in philosophical terms.

Let us be clear as to what is said. The attempt is made in this very important work, Spencer's Principles of Ethics, to prove—as the reviewer rightly says—with crushing weight of material, that it is impossible to draw forth from the human soul moral intuitions, moral axioms, and that we must stop talking about moral intuitions. We can only say with certainty that man acts according to his natural endowments. Any action is judged by a man's social environment; he is forced to bring his action into line with the judgment of this social environment. Hence conventional moral judgments are modified as human society changes from century to century. And a reviewer in the nineties of last century says that it is at last possible to silence, so far as science is concerned, all attempts to speak of ethics and moral views in such a way that moral intuitions arise out of the soul.

I have chosen this example because it characterizes what faced one when one thought about ethics and moral impulses.

Into this mood of the age, my dear friends, I sent my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity which culminates in the view that the end of the nineteenth century makes it eminently necessary that men, as time goes on, will only be able to find moral impulses in the very essence of the soul; that even for the moral impulses of everyday life, they will be obliged to have recourse to moral intuitions. All other impulses will become gradually less decisive than the moral intuitions laid bare in the soul. In view of the situation which I faced, I was obliged to say, “The future of human ethics depends upon the power of moral intuition becoming stronger; advance in moral education can only be made as we strengthen the force of moral intuition within the soul, when the individual becomes more and more aware of the moral intuitions which arise in his soul.”

Over against this stood the judgment—a universal one, for we only speak here of what holds good universally—that it is proven with overwhelming evidence that all moral intuitions must be silenced. It was therefore necessary to attempt to write a book that would present in a virile way the very point of view which, with equal vigor, science declared should be forever silenced.

This example shows clearly that the turning-point of the nineteenth century was a time of tremendous significance for the spiritual evolution of the West. It goes to show those who have been growing up since the end of the last century are faced with quite a different situation in the life of soul from that of previous centuries. And I said with regard to the Spiritual, that at the end of the nineteenth century, man stood, in his soul-being, face to face with “Nothingness”. It was necessary to emphasize, because of man's deeper spiritual nature, that for the future, moral intuition is confronted with what had come from the past, with the Nothingness. This turning-point of the nineteenth century revealed itself in German culture in a most tragic way. We need only mention the name of Nietzsche.

For those who lived through the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century with alert and wide-awake consciousness, Nietzsche represents an experience of real tragedy. Nietzsche was a personality who through the successive periods of his life poignantly experienced that he was faced with the Nothingness, that Nothingness which he had at first assumed to be a “something,” a reality.

It will not be superfluous for our study during the next few days to say a few words about Friedrich Nietzsche. In a certain respect Nietzsche, through his tragic destiny, clearly indicates the twilight in the spiritual evolution of mankind at the end of the nineteenth century, making a new dawn necessary for the century just beginning.

Nietzsche started from a mature scientific standpoint; this he first met in philology in the middle of the nineteenth century. With a mind of extraordinary inner flexibility Nietzsche assimilated the philological standpoint of the middle of the nineteenth century and with it he absorbed the whole spirit of Greek culture.

Nietzsche was not a personality to shut himself off from the general culture. The very reverse of a theoretical scholar, he accepted naturally what he found in the middle of the nineteenth century, namely, Schopenhauer's philosophical pessimism. This made a profound impression upon him, because he realized more deeply than Schopenhauer the decline of the spiritual life in the midst of which he was living.

The only form in which the light that pointed towards the future came to him was in Richard Wagner's music. As you know, Wagner was a follower of Schopenhauer at the time he made Nietzsche's acquaintance.

Thus, towards the beginning of the last third of the nineteenth century, Nietzsche developed the view that was no theory but the very substance of life to him—that already in Greek culture there had dawned the age in which the full human content was being crushed by intellectualism. Nietzsche was not correct in regard to the complete development of intellectualism, for in the form in which Nietzsche experienced intellectualism as an all-destroying spirit, it had, as I said yesterday, come upon the scene only since the fifteenth century. What Nietzsche experienced was the intellectualism of the immediate present. He dated it back to the later age of Greek culture, and held that the influence working so destructively upon what was livingly spiritual began with Socrates. And so Nietzsche became anti-Socratic in his philosophy. With the advent of Socrates in the spiritual life of Greece he saw intellectualism and the faculty of understanding driving away the old spirituality.

Not many have grasped with such innate power the contrast between the character of Greek culture as it appears in the writings of Aeschylus, of Sophocles, in the early sculpture and in the mighty philosophies of men like Heraclitus, Anaxagoras and others; the contrast of this life of soul, still full of spiritual impulses—and that other life of soul which gradually began to paralyze the true spirituality. According to Nietzsche this began with Socrates who confronted all world-questions with intellectual questions, with Socrates who established his art of definition, about which Nietzsche felt: “When it began man no longer looked at the immediate and living Spirit in the old natural way.” Provided this idea is not carried too far and thus made intellectual, it shows that Nietzsche felt something of great significance.

Real experience of the Spiritual, wherever we meet it, always becomes individualism. Definition inevitably becomes generalization. In going through life and meeting individuals we must have an open heart—an open mind for the individual. Towards each single individual we should be capable of unfolding an entirely new human feeling. We only do justice to the human being when we see in him an entirely new personality. For this reason every individual has the right to ask of us that we should develop a new feeling for him as a human being. If we come with a general idea in our heads, saying that the human being should be like this or like that—then we are being unjust to the individual. With every definition of a human being we are really putting up a screen to make the human individual invisible.

Nietzsche felt this in regard to the spiritual life—hence his opposition to the Socratic teaching. And so, during the sixties and early seventies of the nineteenth century there grew in his soul the idea that the true and living Greek culture has a kind of pessimism at the root of its feeling about the world. He thought the Greeks were convinced that immediate life, in its elementary form, cannot give man satisfaction, a complete feeling of his dignity as man. Therefore the Greeks took refuge in what art was to them. And to the Greeks, the art they cultivated in the time of their prime was the great comforter, helping to overcome what was lacking in material existence. So that for Nietzsche, Greek art could be understood only out of a tragic feeling about life, and he thought that this mission of art would again be revived by Wagner and through his artistic impulse.

The seventies approached and Nietzsche began to feel that after all this was not so, because in his time he failed to find the impulse which the Greeks had set up as the great consoler for the material life around them. And so he reflected: “What was it that I wanted to find in Wagner's art as a renewal of Greek art? What was it? Ideals.” But it dawned upon him, as he let these ideals work upon his soul, that they were no different from those of his own epoch.

During the last third of the nineteenth century there came a terribly tragic moment in Nietzsche's life, the moment when he felt his ideals to belong to his own times. He was forced to admit: “My ideals are no different from what this present age calls its ideals. After all, I am drawing from the same forces from which my own age draws its ideals.” This was a moment of great pain for Nietzsche. For he had experienced the idealistic tendencies manifest in his day. He had found, for example, a David Friedrich Strauss—revered by the whole age as a great man—but whom he had unmasked as a philistine. And he realized that his own ideals, stimulated by his absorption in Wagner and in Greek art, strongly resembled those of his time. But these ideals seemed to him impotent and unable to grasp the Spiritual.

So he said to himself: “If I am true to myself, I cannot have any ideals in common with my time.” This was a tragic discovery although not expressed in these words. Anyone who has steeped himself in what Nietzsche lived through during the years of which I am speaking, knows that there came for Nietzsche the tragic moment when, in his own way, he said: “When a man of the present day speaks of ideals and these coincide with what others call their ideals, then he is moving in the realm of the ‘empty phrase’, the ‘empty phrase’ that is no longer the living body but the dead corpse of the Spirit.”

This brought Nietzsche to the conviction: I must resolutely put aside the ideals I have evolved hitherto. And this putting aside all his ideals began in the middle of the seventies. He published his Human All Too Human, The Dawn of Day and The Joyful Wisdom—works in which he pays some homage to Voltaire but which also contain a certain view of human morals.

An external inducement to forsake his former idealism and steer towards the views of his second period was his acquaintance with the works of Paul Rée. Paul Rée treated the moral nature and its development from a purely scientific point of view, entirely in line with the natural science of the day. Paul Rée has written the very interesting little book, On the Origin of Moral Perceptions and also a book on The Genesis of Conscience. This book, which everyone should read who wants to know about the thought of the last third of the nineteenth century, had a very deep influence on Nietzsche.

What is the spirit of this book? Again, I am not describing it because I think that philosophy has a direct influence upon life; I do so because I want to have a thermometer for culture by which we can read the state of the ethical impulses of the time. Paul Rée's view amounted to this: The human being, originally, had no more than what in his opinion a child has, namely, a life of instinct, impulses of unconscious, instinctive activity. The individual human being, when he becomes active, comes up against others. Certain of these activities unfolded towards the outer world happen to suit other human beings, to be beneficial to them; other activities may be harmful. From this there arises the judgment: What proceeds from the instinctive activities of the human being as beneficial is gradually seen to be “Good;” what proves harmful to others is branded as “Evil.” Life becomes more complicated all the time. People forget how they put labels on things. They speak of good and evil and have forgotten that in the beginning the good was simply what was beneficial and the evil what was felt to be harmful. So finally what has arisen has become instinct, has recast itself as instinct. It is just as if someone struck out blindly with his arm—if the result is a caress, then this is called good; if it is a box on the ears, then it is evil. And so judgments pile up. The sum of such judgments becomes instinct. People know how they raise their hand just as little as they know why a voice comes out of the soul and utters this or that moral judgment. This voice they call conscience. This voice of conscience is simply what has arisen out of instinctive judgments about the beneficial and the harmful. It has become instinct, and because its origin has been forgotten, it speaks from within as if it were the voice of conscience.

Nietzsche realized fully that not everyone would agree with Paul Rée. But he was also quite clear that when views on natural science were such as they were in his day, it is impossible to think about Ethics otherwise than in the way Paul Rée did. Nietzsche was thoroughly honest; he deduced the ultimate consequences as Paul Rée had done. Nietzsche bore the philosopher no grudge for having written such things. This had not much more significance for Nietzsche than what was circumscribed by the four walls of the room in which Paul Rée did his writing, just as a thermometer indicates nothing more than the temperature of the immediate environment. However, it shows something universal, and Nietzsche felt this. He felt the ethical sediment of the times in this book and with this he agreed. For him there was nothing more important than to put aside the old “empty phrase” and to say: “When people talk about nebulous ideals they make nothing clear. In fact everything is instinct.”

Nietzsche often said to himself: Here is someone who says, I am an enthusiast for this or that ideal and I rejoice that others too should be enthusiastic about it. And so, Nietzsche comes to the conclusion that when all is said and done, a man who is an enthusiast for certain ideals and wants to enthuse others, is so constituted that when he is thinking of these ideals he can work up the juices in his stomach in the best way for the digestion of his food. I am putting this rather inelegantly but it is exactly what Nietzsche felt in the seventies and eighties. He said to himself: People talk about all sorts of spiritual things and call them ideals. But in reality it is there for no other purpose than to enable people, each according to his constitution, to digest and carry out bodily functions in the best way. What is known as human must be divested of the “empty phrase,” for in truth the human is all-too-human.

With a magnificent devotion to honesty, Nietzsche declared war on all idealism. I know that this aspect of Nietzsche has not always been emphasized. A great deal that has been said about him is pure snobbery, without anything serious in it. So Nietzsche found himself facing the “Nothingness” at the end of the first period of his spiritual development, consciously facing the Nothingness in a second period which began with Human All Too Human and ended with The Joyful Wisdom. Finally, only one mood remained, for it is impossible to reach a real spiritual content when all ideals are traced back to bodily functions. One example will show what Nietzsche's view became. He said to himself: There are people who work towards asceticism, that is to say, towards abstention from physical enjoyment. Why do they do this? They do it because they have exceedingly bad digestion arid feel most comfortable when they abstain from physical enjoyment. That is why they regard asceticism as the highest aim worth striving for. But unconsciously they are seeking what makes them most comfortable. They wish to feel the greatest enjoyment in the absence of enjoyment. That absence of enjoyment is their greatest enjoyment shows us how they are constituted.

In Nietzsche, who was thoroughly honest, this mood intensified to moments when he gave vent to words like these:

“Ich wohn' in meinem eigenen Haus,
Hab' niemand etwas nachgemacht,
Und lache jeden Meister aus,
Der sich nicht selber ausgelacht.”

(I dwell within my own house and
have imitated no single man; and I
laugh at every master who has not
laughed at himself.)

In its poetic anticipation this verse is a magnificent description of the mood that came to its climax about the turn of the nineteenth century, yet it was already there earlier, in a form that made itself felt in the life of soul. Nietzsche found his way out of this second period of facing the Nothingness by creating what is implicit in two ideas to which he gave poetic expression. The one was the idea of the “Superman.” Ultimately there was nothing left but to call upon something which must be born out of the human being but was not yet there. After his grandiose experience of facing Nothingness, there arose the idea of the eternal recurrence of the same, which came to him out of the theory of evolution. In his scientific period he had become familiar with the idea of evolution. But as he steeped himself in what came from these thoughts about evolution he discovered nothing that would bring evolution forward; these only gave him the idea of eternal recurrence. This was his last period, which need not be described any further, although from the point of view of psychology a very great deal might be learnt from it.

I do not wish to draw a character-study but only to indicate how Nietzsche, who was forced through illness to lay down his pen at the end of the eighties, had experienced in advance the mood that dominated deeper souls at the turn of the century. During the last third of the nineteenth century Nietzsche tried to express a mood drawn from his store of ideas, from Greek philosophy and art, from art as found in Wagner, from the philosophy of Schopenhauer, and so on. But time and again Nietzsche himself abandoned his own views.

One of his last works is called The Twilight of the Idols, or How to Philosophize with the Hammer. He felt himself as a destroyer of the old ideas. It was really very remarkable. The old ideas had already been destroyed by the spirit of cultural evolution. During Nietzsche's youth the store of ideas was already destroyed. Up to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, ideas continued through tradition but came to an end in the last third of the nineteenth century. The old spirit was already in ruins. It was only in the “empty phrase,” the cliché, that these ideas lived on.

Those who thought in accordance with spiritual reality in Nietzsche's day would not have felt that they had to smash the ideals with a hammer but that they had already been smashed simply in the course of the evolution of the human race. Mankind would not have reached freedom unless this had happened. But Nietzsche who found these ideals still blossoming in the empty phrase was under the illusion that he was doing what had already long been done.

What had been the inner fuel of the spiritual life in the former age, the fuel whereby the Spirit in man could be kindled and, once kindled, illuminate both Nature and his own life—this had passed away. In the realm of the moral this is expressed by people saying: There can be no moral intuitions any longer.

As I mentioned yesterday, theoretical refutations of materialism as world-conception are sheer nonsense, for materialism has its justification in this age. Thoughts which our age has to recognize as right are products of the brain. Therefore a refutation of materialism is in itself of the nature of the empty phrase, and no one who is honest can see the good of refuting materialism theoretically for nothing is to be gained by it. The human being has come to the stage where he no longer has an inner, living Spirit but only a reflection of the Spirit entirely dependent upon the physical brain. Here materialism is fully justified as a theoretical world conception. The point is not that people have a false world-conception or refute it, but that little by little they have come to an inner attitude of life and soul that is lacking in Spirit. This rings tragically, like a cry, through Nietzsche's philosophy.

This is the situation of the spiritual life in which souls with natural feeling among the young of the twentieth century found themselves. You will not come to any clear view, to any tangible experience, of what is brewing indistinctly, subconsciously in your souls and what you call the experiences of youth, unless you look into this revolution that has inevitably taken place in the spiritual life of the present period of evolution.

If you try to characterize what you experience on any other basis, you will always feel after a time that you must brush it aside. You will not hit upon a truth but only on clichés. For unless the human being today honestly admits: I must grasp the living, the active Spirit, the Spirit which no longer has its reality but only its corpse in intellectualism—unless I come to this, there is no freedom from the confusion of the age. As long as anyone believes that he can find Spirit in intellectualism, which is merely the form of the Spirit in the same way as the human corpse is the form of a man, man will not find himself.

To find oneself is only possible if man will honestly confess: Intellectualism has the same relation to the living essence of the Spirit as a dead corpse to the man who has died. The form is still there but the life of the Spirit has gone out of intellectualism. Just as the human corpse can be treated with preparations that preserve its form—as indeed Egyptian mummies show—so too can the corpse of the Spirit be preserved by padding it out with the results of experiment and observation. But thereby man gets nothing of what is livingly spiritual, he gets nothing that he can unite naturally with the living impulses of the soul. He gets nothing but a dead thing, a dead thing that can wonderfully reproduce what is dead in the world, just as one can still marvel at the human form in the mummy. But in intellectualism we cannot get what is truly spiritual any more than a real human being can be made out of a mummy.

As long as importance is attached to conserving what the union of observation and intellect is intended to conserve, one can only say: The achievements of the modern age are great. The moment the human being has to unite in the depths of his soul with what his Spirit inwardly holds up before him—there can be no link between intellectualism and the soul. Then the only thing is for him to say: “I am thirsting for something, and nothing I find out of intellectuality gives me water to quench my thirst.”

This is what lives in the feelings of young people today although, naturally, it is not so clear when expressed in words. Young people today say many things, annoying things when one gets to the bottom of what is said. But one soon overcomes it. The annoyance is due to the fact that bombastic words are used that express anything rather than what the speaker really feels. The empty phrase over-reaches itself and what appears as the character of the youth movement is, for one who lives in the Spirit, like a continuous bursting of bubbles; it is really intellectualism overreaching itself. I do not want to hurt any of you personally, but if it does hurt—well, I cannot help it. I should be sorry, but I still think it right to say it. I cannot say only pleasant things; I must sometimes say things which will not please everyone. Moreover I must say what I know to be true. So, in order to characterize what is rightly there in the souls of young people today, we need something more than a revival of old concepts over-reaching themselves in empty phrases; we need a highly-developed feeling for truth.

We need truth at the bottom of our soul. Truth is the alpha and the omega of what we need today, and when your Chairman said yesterday that we have got to a point where we do not want to utter the word “Spirit” any longer, that is in itself a confession of the truth. It would be much more clever if our age, which has lost the Spirit, would stop there and not want to talk about the Spirit, because then human beings would again begin to thirst for the Spirit. Instead of this, anything and everything is termed “Spirit,” “spiritual.” What we need is truth, and if any young person today acknowledges the condition of his own soul, he can only say: This age has taken all spirit out of my soul, but my soul thirsts for the Spirit, thirsts for something new, thirsts for a new conquest of the Spirit.

As long as this is not felt in all honesty the youth movement cannot come into its own. Let me add the following to what I have said in characterization of what we must seek. In the deepest, innermost being of the soul, we must seek for light; above all else we must acquire the most profound feeling for honesty and truth. If we build upon honesty and truth, then we shall progress, for humanity must indeed progress. Then we shall speak of the Spirit which is so like our human nature. The soul is most of all like the Spirit, therefore it can find the Spirit if only it so wills. In our time the soul must strive beyond empty phrase, convention and routine; beyond the empty phrase to a grasp of truth; beyond convention to a direct, elementary warm-hearted relation between man and man; beyond routine to the state in which the Spirit lives in every single action, so that we no longer act automatically but that the Spirit lives in the most ordinary everyday actions. We must come to spirituality in action, to the immediate experience of human beings in their relations to one another and to honest, upright experience of truth.