The Rudolf Steiner Archive

My dear friends!

For the kind of striving you are involved in, it is of primary importance to cultivate a true impulse for feeling yourselves within the spiritual world as well as striving towards the achievement of such an impulse, but taken from the viewpoint of your Movement, of which I intend speaking to you today. You see it really involves establishing a connection with a definite point to enable you to link to a spiritual impulse, if you want to be a sure, broad minded, active person, which you all want to be. It involves enlivening the appropriate impulses for this particular activity. From my observations in the spiritual world as such, it appears that the following will be helpful to you.

A connection can be established with the manifestation of the spirit of speech, the wielding of the speech genius. We must firstly be very clear, my dear friends, how far we are removed as a rule from the real spiritual, inner self-activation of grasping speech within ourselves. We basically are involved with speech but without its divine quality. We take up speech in such a manner that by the very act of applying it to ordinary life, we actually profane it. We allow ourselves as contemporary people to use speech by not venerating it in any way at all. We basically speak in sinfulness and this can awaken the awareness that our speaking sinfully enables us to acquire an attitude, I may say, to develop a relationship with speech towards obtaining a spiritual impulse. Examples to confirm this arise of course from all areas.

How many people today have obtained some guidance which empathises with any of the sounds in speech? This naturally means a large number of sounds are spoken conventionally and inhumanely, without comprehension, uttered as if without human input. Who feels at the moment the word “harden” is spoken, that in expressing the word the speaker's mood is permeated by something which hardens it like a mineral and simultaneously cools down his mood? Who feels, when the word “Word” is spoken that it is linked to life from ancient times, a past spiritual weaving which has been killed in the present time, the past crystallized in the present, and so on? We have absolutely no experience of the most important words any more. I would like to know how many people today have the experience with the word “thinking,” how many people have an experience with the word “feeling,” the word “willing.” This I'm only saying to you with reference to what I really want to entrust you with today.

You may of course name yourself in the most varied expressions of language. You can call yourself “I” as one does usually, or you can start to theorise about it and say to yourself you can be called a “human-being” (Mensch).¹ Then you substitute the speech genius and determine your own being out of the being of the language. However today a person has the feeling when he does something like that, he is applying a word which he designates to himself. When a person of today says to himself he can be called a “human-being,” he thinks that under all circumstances he has in a comprehensive way with a word, he believes, described an idea.

Now, when the starting point is feeling, it is good: in the true sense of the word language is so little understood, making the description which a person as a human-being applies to himself actually something whose understanding must first be wrestled with, whose understanding must first be arrived at. Feeling should actually always be a starting point so that when I believe I can describe myself in some or other words, even in my mother tongue, they designate an infinite pride in me. When we permeate ourselves with the feeling that we believe we can manage a language, even our mother tongue, so far removed from the spirit that we can legitimately name ourselves with the word “human-being,” if we consider this belief as terribly proud then we start to draw courage for the preparatory feeling towards a specific spiritual impulse such as I am indicating today. We should much more often be able to say: ‘I am placed on the earth as a human-being through some or other divine circumstances unknown to me and this leads me to call myself a “human-being,” but the basis for this description lies high above my horizon. It is the will of God who prevails here, who has lead me out of the unconscious deep substrate, to describe me as “human-being.” I have as a human-being, as this human individuality standing on earth, actually not the right to characterize myself.’ Then the next step must be to say to oneself: Before I can become capable at all of understanding the entire preliminary stages in existence which leads to me saying “I” to myself, I must undergo three developmental steps—right up to the judgement which I may express as the following: I have no right to call myself “human-being,” I need to first go through three steps of development, I must push through three tests. When I have passed these three tests to satisfy my own judgement, will I have earned the right to say to myself: ‘You are a human-being.’

This we should actually feel toward every spoken word: an extraordinary noble humility towards the point of origin for the development of spiritual impulses. We need to say to ourselves: Just like we as human-beings stand on earth today in our 5^th Post-Atlantean period, we may, if we are honest people, start by falling quiet, name nothing and then start to conquer the three steps which will give us the right to rename things out of ourselves. Through this can we first get a feeling for how extraordinary a meaningful cosmic experience it had been, as indicated in scripture, that in the presence of God Adam was permitted to name animals and things, which only God's proximity could enable. We come through such experiences which need indeed to be concrete personal experiences, to the necessary depths of the scripture, so that it, through its inner power which we can give it, reach the necessary nuances and coloration and out of every word in each verse let it ring out, to which we can't merely say: ‘We don't have the right to name things’—but we could say: ‘Through God the right has been given to us, to name things out of ourselves.’

These things must firstly be experienced through the depths of our soul in a priestly way to really encounter the world. Outer gestures do not make a priest, because the priest expresses what comes out of the deepest depths within. When we designate the words “human-being” as such to ourselves, we should only be able to do so when we have gone through these three stages:

The being to whom I want to ascribe the word “human-being”
has depths which I must first need to fathom;

The being to whom I want to ascribe the word “human-being”
has heights to which I need to rise first;

The being to whom I want to ascribe the word “human-being”
has widths which I first have to look at and grasp.

These three sentences contain something meaningful: being a human-being. By deepening these sentences through meditation, they can take you a long way.

In truth it is so: by the human-being placing himself in earthly existence he places himself outside spiritual heights. Solely through the fact that our earth existence is a cooperative task towards human development, cosmically validated, do we contribute a part of our totality as earthlings. Earth shapes us while we walk on it between birth and death, as earthlings, and everything which is shaped out of the earth come out of the depths which cooperates in everything, even in the most minute parts of the smallest organs in us. Just imagine the earth as a being in space has endless secrets within it which work creatively. How your eyes, your ears are formed, how every singular, how every smallest member of your body is formed and fashioned, for all this the creative forces lie within the earth. If we succeed in gradually grasping what the earth's expression of its inner being is in its countenance, with thinking, feeling and willing as an unveiling of her inner secrets, so we meditatively, gradually come to search for an answer to the question: How do I fathom the depths of the being of man?

When we succeed in placing ourselves into our bodies as the multitudinous ways of crystallised earth, which dissolves the crystallisation again, atomised to a powder, when we succeed in observing this development, pulverising and re-crystallising which in the course of time was characterised for the sensitive human-being, for example with Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva; if we succeed in experiencing this entire process which will be for us a kind of bed of the Godhead, by us being embedded in it, so that the bedding within this Brahma-Vishnu-Shiva process becomes something like a cosmic sleep for us during our earth existence, if we experience this crystallisation and dissolving as something which weaves through us with a cosmic urge for sleep, so that we could say: the human-being is so profound, so deeply fashioned in earthly existence that the depths of consciousness doesn't endure but with the entire created earth as a physical body it expires into a cosmic sleep—then we gradually approach the feeling of what it means: what it is for the human-being to be connected to the depths of the earth. If we can finally say to ourselves: the earth forms us out of its depths, permeates us out of its depths with earthly sleep, while out of the depths of earthly sleep the archetypal divine works fully consciously, then we experience something of this earthly depths within the human-being. If we could say something like: the harder the earth appears to us, diamond hard, the harder in its parts, just so more true, so powerfully speaks from this diamond hard heart the condition of sleep of the spiritual world, the light filled spirituality which works in the earth as awakened, active divinity.

Thus we need to go through our meditation in an ever more deepening feeling way and transfer the earthly foundation and say:

‘Oh man, before you can name yourself, before you can establish your depths, you need to ever more deepen yourself into the foundations of the earth.’ When we observe plants sprouting out of the earth, we may acquire a more lofty feeling of piety, a feeling of reverence, that in every plant morsel we can behold something of ourselves, something like a revelation of what is happening below in the earth. We must really clearly understand the exchange of activities taking place between the earth's depths and the breadths of the heavens. See how the blossoming roses grow out of the earth, look at the particular way the rosebud pinches its petals so tightly together as to complement the ground of the earth, counter positioned to the central point of the earth as a mighty rose of light, permeated with divine thought gestures which need to wait until the rose unfolds its bud upwards. Every sleeping rosebud you empathise with the waiting, creating, living light rose in the earthly depths. So it is with all plants. Look at the green cover of plants over the earth and experience that which sprouts out of the earth as green, in the depths of the earth, as quite light-filled but permeated with deep violet, which appears in the world, weaving through it with life. Then you have something which I have said to you: ‘I may only call myself a human-being, when I have explored myself in the earth's depths.’

So the feeling must be reached towards becoming worthy through such meditative penetration, through the conquering of this first step, for the word “human-being” to be used for people. When one takes what the profane person takes as obvious, as a level hovering high above and think one can only reach this level by climbing up to it; through humbling yourself three times more than an ordinary person, becoming three times more humble than an ordinary person believes himself to be, then one is only starting to sense oneself gradually approaching the calling of a priest.

When one has gradually in such a way led oneself to reach the first step, then one takes on the second step which lets us look into the infinite widths of the worlds and one says to oneself at the present moment: Oh, how trivial this world has become, where humanity has only developed trivial images of the wide world. Yes truly, wiser than the wisest student was Stifter's grandmother who was asked about the evening red glow and answered it was the mantle of God's mother, which is hung out in the heaven to be aired. This naive, picturesque imagination is in contrast to scientific knowledge much wiser, much wiser than the most learned astronomy.

This one must be able to absorb: To actually see the shining stars in wide space, stars with essentially the eyes of divine spiritual beings who glance down at us, children of the earth, while their spiritual hands reach out to us, while our spiritual hands reach up to their spiritual hands because we were with them before we came down to an earthly existence. The gods look after us out of space, out of the heights above worlds, in order to explore how we feel towards their predisposition while our spiritual hands reached their spiritual hands. When we are able to possibly develop many imaginations of the heights and become more and more empathic, how the being of humanity originate out of the heights, towards which it needs to climb up once again, then we will be able to come one step closer to earn the right to, as people, call ourselves ‘human beings.’

The word ‘human-being’ must first be dipped into the depths of the earth, as I have indicated, so that its absorption during this immersion becomes part of our minds and enable us to say: We understand this. Now this word ‘human-being’ need to rise up with the mists into the heights and give us the feeling that it will come again in the falling rain, when the word “human-being” will carry within itself the possibility of learning to understand it. We really must initially be clear about everything which works between the depths of the earth and the heavenly heights. In a lively way we must follow the haze rising from woods and mountains. We must not believe that the haze is rising from an area which belongs to the earth. We must develop every kind of modesty towards those people who see in a drop the dragon rising in a thermometer or a barometer, to facilitate measurements. The tendency is to immerse everything in earthly images only. We must reach a point where we can say: ‘How foolish to believe thunder develops out of the friction between clouds; clouds consist of water as every child knows, all moisture is completely kept away from a glass rod if electricity is to be created.’—Naturally this foolishness comes to the fore when a person tries to experience something in the heights of heaven which he experiences on earth for he has descended down from the heavenly heights and now he needs to feel related to it again before he can truly call himself a human-being. We must clearly understand that while the fog rises out of the mountains and forests, where water is somewhat different than it is on earth, in regions where water itself becomes spiritualised, it is ‘de-watered’ and goes through spiritual processes so that it can materialise once again until it descends again as rain out of spiritual spheres. We must know that if we rise up into such regions then we need to be familiar with these regions of our origination, out of which we descended from in a previous existence. We need to know that lightening is something which rules and weaves in spiritual regions and take the imagination of ancient times, where lightening was the arrow of the Gods, as an imagination far more wise than we can ever make today.

In total stillness we must be able to develop such meditative imaginations in the depths of our minds, enabling us to be the leaders turning a completely de-spiritualised world culture towards the Spirit. When we turn towards the hard earth, we must also turn towards the gentle, flowing water, combining with one another in the depths, right into the most concentrated minute matter, which expands in the heights and must atomise, then coalesce to become rain again in their descent to earth. We must discover all the secrets of water, everything relating to water and draw it all together in our minds. We must meditate over it, we must ask ourselves: ‘How does the sun's warmth come out of the world expanse during summer and into the earth to enable plants to bear fruit which turn ripe? How does this warmth of the sun sink into the earth to enable the farmer to entrust his seeds in the earth's warmth during winter?’ At the end of winter it is this warmth which expands again into the vastness of existence. This warmth, found in all areas of existence, working in all cosmic undertakings, is a communion of the opposites between the heavenly heights and the earthly depths. As human-beings we originate from both. We must fathom the earth's depths before we can enter into the world's expanse.

By increasingly entering into such meditations we come to a kind of feeling, a mindfulness, towards the second step, which gives us the right to apply the word ‘human-being’ to ourselves. We must achieve an awareness that all languages can only be provisional, until through the third step we have reached that union with the linguistic genius who actually speaks unconsciously within us while we, when we have made ourselves the tool of God's Word, only then need to have the right to apply the word ‘human-being’ to ourselves.

As a third step we must try and observe the world's expanse. This we can perceive when the rising and the setting sun becomes a reality in our minds. Similarly with the rising and sinking stars when we learn to understand the great journey of the sun chariot going through the world, then we are really able to recognise what the variations are between East and West, what is different from Southeast compared to Northwest and so on. This we can observe when we are able to say to ourselves: You as human-being may take five steps and so change your position on the earth's surface. For you to be able to do so, like the animal as well, is as a result of forces which draw from East to West in width and breadth, also working on you. You are also shaped out of the earth's depths. While the heights of heaven throw light on you from above and forms and enlivens you, you are all given the ability to be formed into beings able to walk on the earth's surface. The world's expanse you should sense and you can sense this by placing yourself in some distant landscape and experience the air as becoming something increasingly more real. In your immediate surroundings the air appears transparent to you, you don't see it; when you look at a mountain you can paint the air with it because it appears as dew on the surface; when you look at the air in the distance then you see the blue sky. Drenched with it you experience the beings of light as a feeling which becomes real because the experience is bound to actions of will. Thus you rise to the third step in your meditation which leads you to earn the right to name yourself a ‘human-being.’

When you deepen this step in the secret of breathing, you start to understand what the air and the widths of the world are; what is working in the heights and depths and in the horizon and you admit: what permeates your breathing lives in the wide world—it is how the wide world experiences you—and it is this that you must sense in your breath. Further, you must sense in your breathing that an act of will is the basis of penetrating your entire being with the powerful impulses of breathing. You get an inkling of how the depths of the earth give material cohesion to your entire body which you transform according to thoughts given to you from the wide world. So they work together in the whole person:

Depths of earth in your Physical
World widths in your Astral
Heavenly heights in your Etheric

Thus you can feel entire cosmic dimensions in yourself. You can sense when you enter with your feeling into the diamond hard earth how you are a sleeping being. You can feel, when you raise your gaze to the heavenly heights, you are snatched from sleep and become a dreaming being. Yet you can also feel how you are a being who is awake in the width of the world. Gradually you learn to recognise the comic human in the earthly human-being.

In this way you learn to recognise how the human-being is actually formed by God out of the entire cosmos, placed by God on earth. Thus you sense the threefold positioning in the cosmos. This is how you learn to feel how the Father God works out of the earth, whose lively activity must preferably be looked for in the past because what has remained is the firm ground on which we stand, the fixed forms repeated in the world, all that has remained appears to us in fixed images. By meditating with our mind sunk into the earthly depths we hear the words of the Father God sounding up to us. Out of the heavenly heights we hear how the presence of God speaks to us but the words are more profound and more complicated that human speech. God has descended from the heavens down to earth and had to go through the Mystery of Golgotha to allow heavenly speech to penetrate our words. The actual communion of the earthly with the heavenly we can depict in the rising water vapour, in the rain which falls down again, in the rising and again descending warmth of the world. When we allow that to work in us it will permeate us with spirit and we will sense the presence of Christ in those who we feel are under the influence of the heavenly heights. When we penetrate into our breath as coming out of the widths of space and we humbly link our feeling to what happens at every instant, when we in our physicality, ruled by the forces of earthly depths, feel formed and shaped under the leadership of Christ Jesus out of the heavenly heights then we come to really experience, and are permeated by, the activity of the Holy Ghost as the fulfilment of the Trinity and thus out of this our meditation could be:

The Father God has given me the strength which lies in my material existence, as solidified Spirit.

The Son God is always the heavenly which lives in me, which works and weaves like a watery cosmic existence, which is a symbol, an image of it. I sense Christ-God in all my weaving and living, in all which has made me from a child to an adult, in all which grows in me daily and needs to perish again, enabling me to be an earthling through my becoming.

I feel the Spirit God carry into the future that which Christ Jesus has become in us, in the past.

You see, when you meditate like this on the content born out of a word, a word previously only used provisionally, then you have earned the right to call a person a ‘human-being.’ We must begin by developing reverence towards the genius of speech because through such a meditation real reverence is cultivated. Our starting point must not be to refer to the outer impression of the human form only but as a human-being created by God, as a thought from God, as a God-filled human-being, when we speak.

When we prepare ourselves as we have through our meditation on a word such as ‘human-being,’ then the impulse is born for these three steps to be applied to some other words and for the human speech on earth to be implemented in this way. The genius of speech will teach us how we can become living tools for the Word of God when we allow the congregation to experience this Word of God. The Word of God is always there, and what we are doing, is but a moment's experience of the continuous spiritual cosmic weaving Word of God. In the very first beginnings the word existed, in ancient beginnings it was already divine. When we are however not in the position to sense the holiness in the words ‘human-being’ for the people, then our approach is not right, we do not have dignity to also express the first words of the St John's Gospel in the correct way. The priest today has not yet come so far as to be able to say these words in this way.

In our time the primary importance for priests, if they continue in their calling, is to further such things. What has actually been left over from the ancient words revealed from the holy heights above the earth? What has remained from the words such as “Deus,” “Christus,” “Spiritum”? Earthly sounds they now are, hardened by dogma. The truth within words need to be awakened in us, the truth of these words must live in us. We may not neglect anything which will still make it possible for the old, hardened and therefore dogmatic words to become alive again within us. We may no longer turn and twist in the way it was done with God's words in past times in which the Catholic Church extracted the Mystery of the Mass.

In the Old Mysteries priests were far more humble than those of today, when they are like I have just described them. The priest of old said to himself he couldn't be a priest if he was just as he was. As a result, before he was allowed to speak, those things were performed in which the last remainder of incense was still held. As a result of the sensing, which has come to its right in our Consecration of Man ritual, there is indicated that in the Mysteries of old, outer substances were used to shift the consciousness of the priests. This resulted in them feeling shifted out of their bodies and enchanted by the genius of speech, taking them to the higher Genius so that the priest of old, out of his body, experienced the Being of God. No priest was of the opinion that he could move his tongue when he expressed the Word of God; he knew he had to first go out of himself and allow his tongue to be moved from outside. We can no longer do this today and nor should we try. We should through inner spiritual means, with internalized feeling and will work towards the understanding of the foregoing, when we can call ourselves ‘human-beings.’

Just consider, my dear friends, what the Act of Consecration will become under your handling when you start from today taking these things I've spoken about into your priest meditations. These things can also just gradually be taken in by us. Mankind has distanced itself from the divine and must find its way back again. We have absorbed the Act of Consecration into the Christian Movement for Religious Renewal like religious artists. Today we have come to the point where what can only be accepted like a religious art must be taken up in such a way that we are in the position to make it into a lively organism, in order for the Act of Consecration to become really alive and in this way be experienced within the Christian Community as ever new at each fulfilment of the ritual, just like the physical body experiences something new each time it takes in nourishment.

My dear friends, take this into your souls: the Act of Consecration is to become alive. Through this you will earn the right to place yourselves in the earth's becoming and through the Act of Consecration be present within the earth's becoming. Then may you express the following truth: If this Act of Consecration is not performed then the earth will waste away and remain without nourishment. It would be just as if no plants would grow. Plants grow in the physical world; the Act of Consecration of Man must grow in the spiritual realm. If it was not enacted there on this higher level it would be the same as if on the lower level of the physical earth no plants would grow. A human-being only has the right to say this when he or she succeeds in continuously enlivening the Act of Consecration so that this self-expressed word ‘human-being’ has been achieved in the correct manner and being and weaving, within the earthly existence, through achieving the three steps of inner soul development.

Only then, my dear friends, when you have experienced it in this sensitive way can you really place yourself in the right way in our present time. According to your need to gather again after a certain time, I may say this to you, because it belongs to the entire development of the Christian Community. Thus you have taken something full of life into yourselves which can work in an enlivening way in yourselves. I wish that today's words are taken in all seriousness, in the right way.

• 1. Translator's note: “Mensch” has no English equivalent. Collins Dictionary considers mensch used in English as “a well-meaning person.” Reverso suggests ‘human,’ ‘person’ and ‘man.’ Google adds ‘individual’ to this list. The word ‘human’ is seen in contrast to ‘animal’ or ‘robot.’ To translate “Mensch” as ‘human-being’ is not quite correct, nor is ‘individuality’—the latter indicating a person being different from others in some way. “Mensch” has a humane as well as individual character so the best solution is using the expression “human-being” in this translation. As “the Word” is under examination, a hyphen is an attempt at forming a single inseparable concept.

Yes, my dear friends, I would like to supplement what I said yesterday. I wanted to offer it then already, but time was too short. This occasion gives us the opportunity to refer to our relationship we need to gradually re-establish with the Bible. The Bible, namely the New Testament, is a document which we must learn to grasp as a supersensible revelation, not in a dogmatic sense but through arriving at knowledge which indicates that religious documents originating up to about the time 4 AD were not only of human origin but were poured into the consciousness of humanity; knowledge which could not have come out of humanity. I would like to mention that you only need to bring humanity up to this point while a kind of instinctive atavistic consciousness still existed, presenting the most manifold images depicting the highest spiritual things and processes, yet these images were not conceptualised in human consciousness.

So it has come about that right at the time when intellectualism has become authoritative, religious documents are misunderstood in many areas. They are approached with intellectual thinking and basically it is quite natural that even with much goodwill, misunderstandings come to the fore. Thus it has happened that when today's presented texts are transcribed into a common language, they do not represent the original documents because a national language has an intellectual basis which is alien to the original elements in which the religious documents were embodied.

When religious documents, particularly the New Testament, are referred back to in its original language, it also becomes apparent that this original language can no longer be experienced in an adequate way in the constitution of souls of today. Actually, a kind of untruthful element enters into the understanding of ancient religious knowledge, also the New Testament. It is hopeless to think that translations done up to now can somehow be improved continually, because it must firstly involve finding the preconditions which will enable a kind of reawakening of ancient spirituality with the purpose of really understanding religious documents. This we can do, this everyone can basically do, if the trouble is taken to apply researchable spiritual scientific facts to, let's say, the New Testament.

I would like to give a small example and that from one of the most important places in the New Testament. I would like to stress from the start that representations in the New Testament are connected to a historic fact; the depiction in the New Testament can only be understood when it is very clear that the fact of the Mystery of Golgotha is placed within the rest of humanity's evolution, but as a fact which falls outside the rest of humanity's laws. The Mystery of Golgotha is a totally singular event and for its understanding should not be considered out of historical foundations but it should be grasped out of itself. Only when you take—I would like to call it super-historical fact—this cosmic fact in relationship with scientific spiritual knowledge about the development of humanity, only then can you actually start understanding the deep sense of the words and the sentence formation of the New Testament. If you don't do this, a far too strong trivial tone enters into the New Testament. We can remind ourselves of various impulses towards a possible understanding of the Bible where absolutely no preparatory understanding is regarded necessary and that it should simply be taken in a naive, primitive manner. You need to remind yourself of this fact in order to judge how strong the reluctance is to perceive the New Testament in its total profundity.

Just consider, my dear friends, that the Mystery of Golgotha, taken in its right sense, was fulfilled for the earth as a specific act of grace out of higher spiritual worlds at a specific time when a certain part of humanity was passing over from a previous state of consciousness to the next one. At the time of the Mystery of Golgotha the evolution of humanity's becoming in earthly life reached up to an inner ego reality. The “I” gradually unfolded at the same time as the Mystery of Golgotha. We may not look for the connection between these two facts, whether causal or just as a connection. We may only consider it a connection when it is compared with one seeing something happening and something is done towards it out of free will. The Mystery of Golgotha appears as a cosmic fact of free will which has come about within the development of humanity in such a way, that the ego consciousness is awakened. Now, you know the remainder of the important facts which are linked to the appearance of the ego consciousness. Something extraordinary may be added to this. It is necessary to know that with the embodiment of the ego consciousness in evolution there was a condition where people looked up at every opportunity of their conscious lives to gods, or—where monotheism existed—to that God who has remained as an image of the Father God. As long as we stand in the imagination of the Father God, the imagination is fulfilled so that we can say: ‘When a human being is aware of his ego nature then he feels that within his ego is the inner working of the Father God in his soul.’ The Father God distils in a certain way a drop of his own Being which remains connected to the entire spiritual sea of the Father God, to the beings of individuals and every person can say to himself: ‘The Father God is alive in me, the abundance of the Father God lives in me.’ However, the entire humanity is permeated with the being of the Father God. Experiencing all of this at present is to say to yourself: ‘I am!’ That is: ‘The Father God is in me.’—To live in this way in present times is becoming increasingly impossible. You must come to your own “I” via your own consciousness which makes it a product of yourself. This production of the individual “I” is in connection with the entire cosmic-spiritual world only possible when individuals identify themselves with Christ, thus with the Son of God.

What can be said about the relationship between people blessed by Christ and people who have not been enriched by Christ? Upon looking back at the consciousness of unblessed mankind, therefore the individual being of their souls, can you say: ‘I am the only one who has been blessed with an “I”?’—No, the soul could only say: ‘Within me the Father God lives and because He lives in me it enables me to say “I” to myself.’—People had not been completely individualised, the individual was a child of God, but as if the child was still connected to God by an umbilical cord. What the soul could have when it was aware of this divine capacity, it could have no more, later on. The Christ-blessed humanity acquired it in such a way that each single soul could take up their “I” out of this divine substance.

In this way the Christ-blessed people were able to take their own “I” out of the substance of their individual soul being.

Thus the Christ brought the same as what the Father God had given humanity on earth, but He brought it in a new way in order for every individual to find a connection to the ego being born within. Thus the Christ could say to humanity: ‘I bring to you what you are used to recognise out of the Logos but I bring it in a new way. I bring it to you through what the Father God has given to me, what He had given directly to you before, but for another state of consciousness. As his messenger I bring this treasure from the Father God to you, to each independent consciousness of yours, to every single individual. I don't want to just make you into some kind of member of the whole cosmos, I will by virtue of the full authority given to me by the Father God make each single one of you, if you want to come, into an “I” filled person with a divine consciousness.’

That the manner in which the divine consciousness should come to people now in a different way to what it had been in earlier times, is because of the Mystery of Golgotha. Similarly, it also applies to the Words of the Gospels taking on quite a different sense as a result of the Mystery of Golgotha. It is for instance possible to refer back to the stages of evolution of humanity from the contents of the Our Father prayer. It doesn't refer to the contents in this case but that the Our Father comes across in a different and in a newer way to the “I” filled conscious soul even though given in the same words, in the same sentences. Penetrating this event with spiritual powers makes it possible again for us to research it ourselves. This fact brings us back to the original meaning of the Gospels. This original meaning must be revealed again today. Humanity should not be allowed to be fobbed off with misunderstandings of Gospels not taken from a lofty view. One should overcome the point of understanding the matter in such a way as to ask oneself: Can you, when you are quite honest in your soul, today still, discover meaning in the words of John 17, verse 1 to 9?

My dear friends, much can be said and repeated about this if you want to disregard the facts that a clear understanding can't really be found. In an artificial way (of the commentator) no meaning can be linked to these words. Only through belief can meaning be connected to them because nothing actual is touched when you have one these sentences (of some or other terrible translation) in front of you. By contrast when you make an attempt to empathise with the (original) texts in a word-for-word translation into your mother tongue (original text says “German”—translator note), then a deeper meaning comes into it. You should not allow, if you are honest with yourself, to say these words would be simplified and be comprehensible to every ordinary human mind, through artificial comments. Actually you realise the deeper meaning in the original and this fact must be your starting point.

Humanity today would prefer not to have to search for such deep meaning in the Gospels. One can't escape the fact that there is deeper meaning which we need to discover. We can't deny it. It would be a subjective fantasy to say: ‘Don't interpret anything in the Gospels, simply remain with the contents.’ That as such is the interpretation. When we go back to the meaning which is there on quite a mundane level then we could translate it in the following way:

After Jesus saved him, he lifted his eyes to heaven and said: Father, the hour has come, let your son be revealed so that he may reveal you, as You have given him power over all who have flesh, so that he may give everlasting life to them. This now is everlasting life, that You are recognised as the only true God and Jesus Christ as your emissary. I have revealed Your being on earth, to fulfil the work You have given to me. And now reveal me, Father, with the light of revelation which came through You to me before the world began. I have brought You into manifestation to humanity which You assigned to me out of the world. They were Yours and You gave them to me and they have remained fulfilled with Your Word. Thus they can see that everything which You have given me comes from You. For the power of thought which You have given me, I have brought to them. You have linked yourself to them and seen how I come from You and that You have given them to me. I pray for each single individual, not for humanity in general, but for those you have given me, for they are yours, created by you.

As I have said to you before, this entire version is nothing other, my dear friends, than the facts of humanity's evolution depicted within the Gospels. The precise truth in the Gospels can be found when you enter into the spiritual facts within them. With this, the kind of awareness develops, I might say, for the right light to be thrown on the words. Is it not true, it is certainly not my intention to utter some idle criticism when I say it is not possible to say the words: “Father, the hour has come for You to reveal your son, so that Your son can reveal you.” If you are honest, you will admit: this doesn't really say anything, even by trying to make it comprehensible through the human heart. In contrast the truth becomes obvious by taking the Greek Text which says: “Father, the hour has come, reveal your son ...” which asks the Father to reveal the Son. The δοξα is no statement, the δοξα is to reveal, to announce, to-bring-to-recognition, and thus it is meant: “... so that your son is revealed out of You.” The mediation of the Father-contents through the power of the Son are expressed directly in these words in a naive idea. Earlier, humanity had the substance of the Father God within them, as described. Now the Father God has brought the Son to becoming the mediator for humanity. This is really written here and is no lie: “... as You have given him power over all who have flesh ...” The expression “flesh” (Fleisch) is difficult to translate here because it can be misunderstood in ordinary speech. In fact, it should say: “... as You have given him power over all human physical bodies so that he can give everlasting life for those given to him.”—When one contemplates these facts, that the human body originally had the consciousness of being filled with God and thus earned everlasting life, you realise that while this power no longer fills the consciousness, the bodies can no longer reflect back the gift of everlasting life. This is why the Christ had to be sent to humanity. ‘This now is everlasting life, that You are recognised as the only true God and Jesus Christ your emissary. I have revealed Your Being on earth, to fulfil the work You have given to me. And now reveal me, Father, with the light of revelation which came through You to me before the world began. I have brought You into manifestation for humanity which you assigned me out of the world. They were Yours and You gave them to me and they have remained fulfilled with Your Word.’

Christ Jesus has made it possible to stop the Word from dying and for the contents of the Father substance to remain in humanity. If the Mystery of Golgotha had not taken place, humanity would have forgotten about this content. The Father God would have been forgotten if the Son had not perpetuated the Fatherly content. Thus they have seen that everything which You have given me comes from You. For the power of thought which You have given me, I have brought to them. You have linked yourself to them and seen how I come from You and that You have given them to me. I pray for each single individual, not for humanity in general, but for those you have given me, for they are yours, created by you.

I add here ‘for humanity in general’ instead of ‘for the World’. This is no longer understood. This spiritual connectivity experience has just been referred to which at the time was an acceptable image: For them as individuals, not only for humanity in general.

In truth, the New Testament does not become less beautiful, magnificent and sublime through our understanding of its contents. This concerns your correct positioning in the present, in the spiritual life of the present, in a religious movement of the present to once again return to the reality contained in the Gospels. How often the request surfaces for the necessity to return again to original Christendom! It fails because nothing can be achieved by an attempt to grasp the Logos in its ancient meaning and then one repeatedly comforts oneself conveniently that the Gospels should be taken up as simple content. However, simple content would not fail if one would actually enter into what is written there. We may not forget, my dear friends, that words do essentially change in their feeling-value in the course of time. It is not possible simply to translate a word out of the ancient language lexicographically. Already today when one translates something lexicographically, the results are entirely different. This applies even more when translating historical events. It does not come down to directly taking the sentimental value attached to words of the present and applying this to ancient wording, but the task is to go back to the feeling within the contents of the ancient working. We can find examples of these facts everywhere in the New Testament where the Gospels were expressed in a time when revelation was given through grace from the spiritual cosmos to mankind which had not yet moved from the partially developed ego consciousness into the fully developed ego consciousness. All other facts need to be judged according to this basic fact. We may not remain fixed in an opinion and say that the earlier, the simple people emerging from the lowest levels could not understand the meaning in it. If the meaning of the Gospels is so simple to understand, we must reveal the other side of this wonderful fact: How were these simple people capable of relating such a profound meaning in the Gospels?—It is far more spiritual to say these simple people born from the folk could not have understood the meaning. Such a conclusion depends on another opinion.

I don't know if any of you—perhaps those of us who are older—have had this kind of experience of going with a loving heart among the country folk. You go there as an educated person feeling tremendously clever and you speak to the folk of what you've learnt. They don't understand you. Yet if you go along with them, you discover an unbelievable deep wisdom among these simple people which outshines anything you can offer out of yourself. The wisdom of naive people is actually deeper than that of educated people. The theory of simplicity among primitive people is an intellectual theory of educated people. For example, the meaning in some of Jakob Bohme's sentences could have been learnt from a herb gatherer forty years ago rather than in a university. This can't be denied. However faithfully an old text can be translated is something from which Professor Beckh can create a song for you, concerning Sanskrit in oriental texts. One will not be going too far by saying Indian philosophy becomes unrecognizable in translation, which for example was done by Professor Deußen (after the visit of Swami Viviknanda to Germany in 1896-translator note). If one wants to examine the original human contents of Deußen's translation, simply the straight forward word combination, you experience it as empty words in which no sense can be found at all. These things are of the utmost importance and are related to the deepest questions of our time. As a result, I do not want to hesitate to decide our future meeting in relation with this consideration, because I believe that it is necessary precisely at this time.

I hope you can experience it as the truth—what I mentioned yesterday—that for the Religious Movement the Act of Consecration becomes the deepest and most everlasting fact which is not merely rich in imagery but that it must become alive and remain capable of becoming ever new and more rich. I hope that we can continue with our working together in this lively unfolding way with which we have started with so much hope.

Werner Klein expressed in closing the wish of the good will remaining so powerfully in the work that in a year's time another meeting will be held where they could ask Dr Steiner's advice.

Rudolf Steiner: We wish for this as well and will hold this in our hearts.

The science of spirit, about which I have had the honor to lecture for many years now, here in Stuttgart, as well as in other places, is, I believe, based upon a need arising out of the cultural and spiritual life of the present time. It does not arise simply because someone may feel it to be a good idea. In order to realize that it is just at the present time that this science has to make a start, it is perhaps necessary to see how particular spiritual impulses arise at certain moments during the whole evolution of human spiritual and cultural life. It is not so difficult to see that the science of spirit has a connection with the present time similar to the connection that the Copernican outlook had with its time. Just as the latter could not have existed at an earlier period, so, too, with the science of spirit. We only have to compare, on the basis of true knowledge, the way the scientific outlook obtains its results—and has obtained them for some time—with the way this outlook is taken up by the widest circles of humanity in order to provide a basis for questions concerning the soul and the spirit. We need only to look at the method of research and the way it has spread and to compare it with the scientific outlook of centuries ago, which had prevailed for thousands of years of human evolution. In those earlier times people looked at nature and its phenomena in quite a different way from today and the last two, three, four hundred years. In earlier times when people looked at nature and its processes they took something spiritual, something of a soul nature, into their own soul and spirit life. It was not like today when the phenomena of nature are investigated purely as phenomena, as far as possible eliminating everything of a spirit-soul nature.

This is not a criticism of the modern scientific outlook—on the contrary. The success of the scientific outlook, which certainly has a significant purpose both for the present and the future, is due to its efforts to eliminate everything of a spirit-soul nature from the observation of natural phenomena. It concentrates solely on observing processes in nature without bringing into these processes anything of a spirit- soul nature. On the other hand it has become absolutely necessary to satisfy the unquenchable need of the human soul to approach the great riddles of existence scientifically from a different viewpoint. It is just because natural science has to keep to its serious and conscientious method and is obliged to eliminate spirit-soul nature that a science of spirit, based on the example and ideal of natural science, must take its place alongside natural science, working in the same way as natural science, but from different sources.

It cannot be said that the present time has got very far in formulating a view about the relationship of natural science to any endeavors of a more spiritually scientific kind. It is just the most serious questions about the life of the soul and the spirit, about the eternal nature of the being of man, about human freedom and all that is connected with it, that are excluded and have been banned from the outlook based on natural science since the middle of the 19th century. And it is a fact that great and outstanding scientists of the present time find themselves in a strange position. We have already seen how it is only recently that outstanding scientists have shaken off the scientific romanticism of Darwinism prevalent in the second half of the 19th century.

We could take hundreds of scientists and thinkers to illustrate our point, but we shall take one as an example. We have seen how a scientist like Oskar Hertwig has managed to bring the fantastic tendencies of naturalism, which have threatened to run wild, back on to a saner basis. And a book such as Oskar Hertwig's Das Werden der Organismen, Eine Darwinische Zufallstheorie, a book by an eminent pupil of Haeckel,—such a book, even from a scientific viewpoint, has great significance. Much could be added in this respect that is equally significant or nearly so. We can see from such achievements, which cannot be sufficiently recognized in their own sphere, what predicament serious scientists are in regarding questions of the soul and spirit. In reading Oskar Hertwig's influential book we have just referred to, we cannot help being aware of a certain feeling or attitude toward questions of spiritual life. We find that a scientist like Oskar Hertwig makes quite clear that he cannot approach questions of the soul or spirit with the means at his disposal, the means of a stringent science. On one page he says this clearly and definitely: Science can only concern itself with the transitory sense world; science cannot approach the eternal in human nature.

So far, so good—and one would think that the way is now open for a science of spirit, for the scientist himself points out that a science of spirit should exist alongside natural science. But, unfortunately, there is something else to be found among scientists, which is not said explicitly, but which can be read quite clearly between the lines. The opinion is spread abroad—albeit unconsciously—that the method employed by the scientist is the only exact one, and that it is possible to be scientific only so long as one keeps to the outer sense world.—People then believe that a departure from the sense world is bound to lead into a world of fantasy and dreams.—What is so dangerous in this is that it is not clearly expressed, but arises as a kind of feeling out of what is achieved and spreads into the widest circles of people. It is to be found in those who believe they understand a lot about the scientific outlook and wish to draw conclusions affecting spiritual life from the scientific outlook, and also in those who think themselves enlightened because they read the supplement of their local paper every Sunday which breathes this kind of feeling I have described as spreading into the widest circles.

Thus, on the one hand, the scientific outlook points with great emphasis to the need for the coming into being of a science of spirit, but on the other it takes the ground away from under its feet. This was crystallized in a famous speech by Dubois-Reymond, the great physiologist, which I have referred to here in Stuttgart, and which he gave before an obviously enlightened meeting of scientists in Leipzig in the 70's. It was crystallized in his lecture, The Limits of Natural Knowledge, where he stated that natural knowledge is not able to give any information about even the simplest phenomena of the life of the soul, and that science comes to an end where the super-sensible begins.—With this it is admitted on the one hand that natural science is not able to say anything about the super-sensible, but on the other it emphatically takes away the ground for all super-sensible investigation. The science of spirit has to struggle against these aims and efforts today. For it sets out to face and treat scientifically the questions which the human soul turns to in great longing—the question of the eternal nature of the human soul, of the freedom of human action and the countless other questions which are connected to these two main questions.

But now from another viewpoint we come to much the same result. If in trying to inform ourselves about such matters we turn, not to science, but to the work of philosophers, we find just as little satisfaction there. What is offered is, on the whole,—for someone really seeking spiritual substance in cultural life—nothing more than a collection of abstract concepts, which do not offer anything pertaining to the pressing questions about the life of the human soul and spirit. But it is perhaps just in this subject that we can ascertain why it is not possible at the present time to find out anything substantial about these questions outside the actual sphere of the science of spirit. And it is just the work of philosophers which reveals something rather odd, which is also the reason why I have called today's lecture a study of man as a being of spirit and soul.

In looking into a modern textbook on psychology or into anything philosophical in order to inform ourselves about the questions we are considering, we come across a way of regarding things which, even if we go beyond purely materialistic thinking, is completely tied up with the idea that man is a being of body and soul. This idea of man as a being of body and soul governs the enlightened and impressive philosophers of today. It is therefore imperative to show that this outlook leads us astray when it comes to investigating the complete being of man. If in investigating the human being we start with the premise that everything that arises in connection with the soul and body should be divided into body and soul, we are doing the same as a chemist who assumes from the start that a substance he is investigating can have only two constituent parts. Therefore when he makes his chemical analysis, he finds he cannot get very far. Another person discovers that a result was not possible because the substance the chemist took was composed of three elements, and not of two as the chemist had imagined. It is just the same with the way people look at the being of man. It is imagined that we have to find two elements, body and soul. In fact, we can make progress only by dividing the being of man into three parts: body, soul and spirit. Otherwise, we always arrive at an impossible mix-up between spirit and soul, which is no more use for acquiring enlightenment concerning the human being than a mix-up of the bodily life and soul life which comes about through not differentiating them .properly. What is really meant by dividing man not only into a being with a soul and a body on the one hand, but into a being with a soul and a spirit on the other, becomes clear in looking at the way the physical sciences of man, biology, physiology, anatomy, and so on, arise out of purely human experience, out of the experience of physical life of the human being. Let us take a particular case. The human being experiences hunger, satisfaction, need to breathe, and so on, in life. These are immediate, I would like to say, inner experiences. In the first place they are really dependent on material substances, but hunger, satisfaction, the need to breathe, are also experienced in the soul. The scientist investigates the bodily basis of hunger, satisfaction, the need to breathe, and the like. If we want to found a physical science, a science of the human body, we cannot stop at the fact that hunger is experienced in different ways. If we wanted to experience being very hungry or not very hungry, very thirsty or not very thirsty, or different kinds of hunger or thirst, we would not be able to found a science of the physical body. We have to go beyond the purely inner experience and investigate the body with scientific methods. We then discover that hunger, thirst, the need to breathe, evolve certain chemical, physical processes in the physical body and we arrive at a physiological and biological science of man. We have to go beyond what we experience purely inwardly, and subject the body by itself to scientific investigation.

Just as on the one hand we have to go beyond our immediate experience to lay the basis for a physical science, just as the body provides the physical basis for our soul experience, so on the other we have to go beyond our soul experience to find the spiritual reality that underlies it.

In examining our physical nature the ordinary scientist discovers certain physical processes in the digestive system which correspond to the inner experiences of hunger, thirst and the need to breathe. The question is bound to arise: Is there something—if I may use what is naturally a paradoxical expression—that corresponds to the soul experience from the other direction, which could be called a kind of “spiritual digestion” as compared to physical digestion? Of course it sounds like a paradox, speaking on the one hand about ordinary digestion, which is perfectly acceptable because it belongs to the province of a recognized science, and on the other hand about a spiritual digestion, a change which takes place in the spirit. Nevertheless we shall attempt to show today that this paradoxical expression does in fact correspond to a real situation.

It is no more possible to arrive at a science of spirit by investigating inwardly the nature of the soul, which surges to and fro in our thinking, feeling and willing as our inner experience, than it is to found a physical science only on the basis of an inward observation of hunger, thirst, and the need for breath. We have to appreciate that as far as our normal, everyday consciousness is concerned, our physical nature only reveals its outer surface. What does the human being in his everyday life know about all the complicated processes, the physical, chemical processes, which physical science brings to the light of day as the basis of what we experience as hunger, thirst and the need to breathe? Just compare what we see of the body in everyday life, which is more or less its outward form, its capacity for movement, its physiognomy, just compare this, which is something everyone can know about without bothering about science, with the picture of the human being as shown in anatomy, physiology or biology, and you will see how our ordinary experience of our bodies is related to the investigation of science.

But now on the other hand it is also a fact that the spirit reveals itself no more to the human being than does the body reveal itself beyond its outward form, and that from the sphere of the spirit just as little or just as much is hidden to the human being as is hidden to him in ordinary life of those processes which have first to be investigated by science.

What is it then that belongs to the spirit which is actually orientated toward our inner experience? We shall see today that the part of his spiritual life that is orientated toward the human being, but which he does not always even recognize as such, is nothing other than what is encompassed in the simple, unequivocal but significant word “I.” This “I” we shall see belongs to the spirit, but it is related to the whole spirit in the same way that our outward form, our physiognomy, the movement of our limbs which is all orientated toward the ordinary body, are related to physiology, biology, to the science of the body. We can never arrive at a science of the body by feeling a little or very hungry, or by comparing one state of hunger with another, or by immersing ourselves in our hunger; neither can we arrive at a science of the spirit of the human being by immersing ourselves in our experience of feeling, thinking and imagination. We have to realize that so-called mysticism, which is supposed to be an immersion in one's own inner being, and which seeks to experience this inner being in a somewhat different way from our normal experience, that mysticism, this kind of inward immersion, cannot lead to a science of spirit any more than a differentiated experience of hunger, thirst and the need to breathe can lead to a science of the body. We have to start with our purely inner experience of hunger and thirst and proceed from there to the body, to the things that are arrived at through scientific method. Likewise we have to start with our purely mystical soul life and proceed from there to what lies spiritually outside this soul life. And this spiritual nature has naturally to be investigated according to scientific method in the strictest possible way, just as the life of the human body is investigated.

Now it is true that the methods of investigating spiritual life are in fact spiritual, and therefore are quite different from the means employed by natural science. And so my first task is to indicate the purpose and significance of the methods used by the science of spirit. It is not possible to embark upon the investigation of spiritual life without first having arrived at certain things in ordinary, everyday soul life. Without having reached a certain point in our ordinary soul life, in which we follow the course of our own inner being, we are not able to train ourselves to be a scientist of spirit. As long as we are satisfied with our ordinary, everyday soul life, as long as we derive full satisfaction from mystical experience and revel in it in order to immerse ourselves in our soul life, we shall never be able to train ourselves as real scientists of spirit. The preliminary qualification for the science of spirit is that in a particular respect we feel the insufficiency of our ordinary soul life as a result of our own experience of it.

I have pointed out in earlier lectures that it is particularly a study of the so-called border areas of science that can help us to acquire this feeling. In dealing with this subject I am fond of citing a really significant question which arises in connection with these border areas, and which the eminent scientist, Friedrich Theodor Vischer, came upon as he was struggling to clarify his own outlook. He came to ask—and you can find this in his beautiful treatise, Die Traumphantasie—what is the real connection between the soul and the bodily nature? And here he lighted upon a real question relating to the border-area of human knowledge. Vischer says: it is quite certain that the soul nature cannot be in the bodily nature, but it is also just as certain that it cannot be sought outside the body.—Hence he arrives at a complete contradiction. Such contradictions often arise where we do not simply consider knowledge as concerning outward, tangible facts alone, but where we really have to struggle inwardly to acquire our knowledge. Those who know what it is to have to struggle for knowledge speak of hundreds of such border-points occurring in knowledge. It is only a superficial mind which, when faced with such questions, is content to say that human cognition can go only a certain distance and no further. In contenting ourselves with this information, we are blocking our own way to a real science of spirit. For here we are not concerned with evolving all sorts of logical thoughts about such questions, but with steeping our wrestling souls in them and really experiencing them, and this means giving up the logical approach where it can no longer be applied. We have to get to the heart of what for normal human cognition is a contradiction in such a border-area, and feel the full weight of it on our souls.

If we do not simply regard these questions as comfortable cushions upon which to rest and proceed no further, but if on the contrary we really seek to experience them, then we find that it is just what lives and moves in such a living contradiction that kindles our inner soul life in a way that does not happen in normal life, that it is at just such a point as this that our inner soul life can reach a stage beyond its normal experience. In order not to become lost when we reach such a point in the experience of a border-area, we have to be able to grasp inwardly how in certain moments of his life the human being is unable to get beyond himself, but yet is able to point to something beyond himself. What is needed is that a particular inner feeling is developed which can be the result of living at such border-points of knowledge. This feeling can be characterized in the following words. It can be characterized very easily, for the experience which this feeling brings is something that cuts deep down into the soul. If we experience the questions of the border-areas properly, we do not say that there are limits to human knowledge, but we say that we are unable to cross the threshold with all the things we have acquired through our thinking and research into the outer sense world. We can impose a certain resignation, a certain renunciation upon ourselves, we can learn at such points not to want to judge the super-sensible with what we have learned and experienced in the sense world.

It is here that the main obstacles lie for most people in entering upon the science of spirit. They see the limits of knowledge but they do not then have the courage to renounce or resign. They do not say that they cannot try to enter into the spiritual world with what they have learned and experienced in the sense world, but they try to penetrate beyond these limits, even if only in a negative sense, by using the kind of concepts and ideas acquired in studying the sense world. The one person does it by constructing all sorts of hypotheses about what could exist in the super-sensible, the other by rejecting the super-sensible completely on the basis of his study of the sense world; in other words, taking upon himself the capacity to make judgments about the super-sensible with the concepts he has acquired from the sense world. Those also have not understood the experience of the border-areas of knowledge who, like materialists, monists and the like, begin to decide that nothing exists beyond the sense world on the basis of the ideas and concepts acquired through the life of the senses.

This is the point where something quite special must arise within human soul life, where what I have just characterized, this renunciation of the concepts acquired through living in the sense-world, where we do not just wish to make a statement or bring something intellectual and logical to expression, but that this renunciation becomes an inner intellectual virtue, something that—if I may be excused the phrase—cuts into human soul life, so that at certain points we really acquire a subtle feeling that we should not proceed further with what we have learned in the sense-world. For if this renunciation is not just a logical admission or an intellectual conclusion, but an inner virtue, then this virtue arising out of the renunciation radiates toward the inner life of the soul, and then what we have renounced outwardly is taken up into the inner life of the soul. The renunciation makes us fit for undertaking in course of time the two spiritual functions necessary to penetrate from the sphere of the soul in human experience into the spiritual world. For this two inner functions are necessary, but which, as you can see from my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment, involve many individual functions and exercises, which are contained in these two main aims, for which there are two main functions. The first is that we achieve real self observation; the second consists in striving to experience the soul-spirit sphere that is no longer dependent on the bodily nature, but proceeds purely in the spirit. However paradoxical it may appear to present-day humanity, it must nevertheless be said that this second function consists in the human being forming his soul-spirit life in such a way that when he investigates the spirit, his soul-spirit experience is no longer in the body, but outside it. This is no doubt something that appears quite ridiculous to those who think they keep firmly within the province of the scientific outlook. But the science of spirit will bring home to people that many of our ideas will have to be changed, even into the opposite of what we are accustomed to, just as the Copernican outlook meant a complete reversal in the way people thought about the relationship of the planets to the sun.

What is normally called self-observation, an introversion of the soul, is not what is meant by true self-observation by the science of spirit. It is true that one can start from this brooding in oneself in order to find the way one has to go toward true self-observation, but real self-observation has to be taken in hand much more seriously and much more energetically. For it includes something which even earnest psychologists maintain is impossible. I have already pointed out in earlier lectures that when philosophers speak about the human soul they find it characteristic that in certain respects the life of the soul is not able to observe itself. They point out that if we have learned a poem by heart and then wish to recite it, but at the same time observing ourselves as we recite, we begin to falter and interrupt ourselves. It is not possible to carry out something and at the same time stand by and observe ourselves. This is cited as being something characteristic of the human soul, that it cannot do this. Now it must be said that those who find that this is in fact so, that it is impossible, will not get anywhere with the science of spirit, because this “impossibility” is just what the scientist of spirit has to achieve. The ability or capacity which is brought to our notice in normal life when we observe ourselves reciting and make ourselves falter, this ability has to be acquired by the scientist of spirit. We have to be able to split our soul-life wide open so that we can observe scientifically what we ourselves do. It is not all that important to learn a poem to achieve this, although this is one way of doing it, providing we do the necessary practice, and it is also good preparation for the real exercise of self- observation if we do it. It is a form of preparation to achieve reciting a poem with all its shades of feeling sufficiently automatically—if I may use such a crude expression—that we do not interrupt ourselves when we observe ourselves while reciting. The important thing, however, is not to concentrate on the outer aspects, but to apply such activity to the life of the soul itself. This means that we have to observe how one thought follows another, our thinking and imaginative life, so that at the same time we can allow the thought processes to proceed while on the other hand we can observe them in full consciousness. It would lead too far now to describe how this is done, but you can read about it in my books, Knowledge of Higher Worlds and its Attainment, in Riddles of Man, and similar books. It is absolutely possible to achieve real self-observation in this way. It is not then a mere intellectual process, but it is something real, for it is a first beginning of the emergence of the spirit- nature out of the soul-nature. The experience of the soul is observed by the spirit which has really tried to separate itself from the soul-nature. But this is only one aspect of what can be observed.

Now it is necessary to add that renouncing entering the super-sensible with the concepts and according to the laws taken from the sense world becomes a virtue and permeates the entire life of the soul, and when this has happened it not only produces the kind of modesty we are used to from normal life, but it produces an inward, intellectual modesty and humility which make us suited in the first place to exercising self-observation of the kind I have just been speaking about. We are not intimately organized enough, as it were, to be able to carry out such self-observation until we have radiated this intellectual virtue over our own souls.

But, on the other hand, something else is necessary. What then is attained when we achieve such self-observation? What is achieved when self-observation is practiced is that what normally disturbs the human being when he carries out a soul function is taken in hand, and our will is strengthened and driven out of the sphere of the soul into the sphere of the spirit. Then there is something further that has to be striven for: the will itself has to take on a new direction, has to acquire a new mode of activity in the soul. This can happen only if the human being does not employ the will as he normally does in ordinary life in carrying out outward functions, but if he employs it in carrying out inner functions. In living in his sense perception and in the ideas and images derived from these perceptions, the human being is accustomed in the way and sequence in which his thoughts are constructed to being led by the sense world. He allows one thought to follow another because he first experiences one event in the sense world, then a second one, and so on.

The human being allows his thoughts to follow the sequence of outer events and in ordinary life he hardly ever gets used to leading his will into his thought life, into the inner processes of his soul, which are to be perceived just by this true self-observation. But this he has to do if he is to become a scientist of spirit. He has to try—for a long time, energetically and patiently—to lead his will into his thinking and power of imagination. Again and again he has to try to carry out a process of the soul which in an objective and genuine sense can be called meditating, an inner reflection, though not a dreamy, mystical reflection, but one which represents a real process in the inner life, so that the will is really led into the thinking. Whereas we are normally accustomed to arranging our ideas according to outer events, we endeavor in moments set aside for the purpose, to formulate ideas whose sequence is determined solely by the inner will working according to a much greater view of life. We guide the will into our life of images and ideas. In this way we come to recognize what sort of relationship can exist between the inner will of man and his life of images and ideas. We do not become acquainted with this at all in our normal consciousness. In order to make this point perfectly clear, I would like to give the following illustration. Imagine a person living in a semi-sleeping state in dreams. He knows full well that these dreams are pictures passing before his soul according to certain laws. These pictures surge to and fro. Because they appear, so far as normal life is concerned, as dream pictures, the human being cannot control them with his will. If in his semi-sleeping state he were able to pull himself together to such an extent that he could control the sequence of dream pictures, he would then more or less be in the position I have been talking about, where our own will controls the ideas and images we ourselves make.

But this is not the point that matters ultimately. Everything we have discussed so far is only a preparatory exercise. For we naturally do not arrive at anything real only by the inner will controlling the sequence of ideas, which we know are not remembered, but arise out of the body. We do not arrive at anything special by piecing together ideas we have made, and can survey. But we do attain something when we set to work on the exercises with the mood which makes the renunciation into an intellectual virtue. Then we gradually notice something quite special in the life of the soul. And I may be allowed to say that what I have to say here about the science of spirit, by means of which we can really penetrate into spiritual spheres and which should be imagined as already having attained a certain development, and which also empowers one to say something about the spiritual world, that it should not be thought that it is like maintaining that natural science has its strict method which takes years to learn, and now the science of spirit comes along and talks about such inner ideas and images. This is not the case. Those who have acquainted themselves with biology and physiology, and know about their scientific methods and have then taken up the science of spirit know that however difficult it may be and that however much patience is demanded over the years by scientific method, significant results can be experienced in the science of spirit only if even more patience and even more work, even when this work is purely spiritual, are employed. Years of inner work are necessary to achieve anything of any consequence that can penetrate into the spiritual world, work which has been characterized as the leading of the will into our thought life by means of the inner functions or exercises which you can find in the above-mentioned books. We only have to know the one and the other to realize that the seriousness of the one is not inferior to the seriousness of the other. But what is important is not that we do the exercises, but that we achieve what we are able to achieve by means of the mood of renunciation. And we gradually notice that it is not our will alone, not the will which we have led into our thinking and imagination, that lives in what happens in our souls, but something else lives in them.

In our observation of the outer world we see how one event follows another, how one object is related to another, and how the sequence of our ideas follows what we see, follows the thread of outer events. Now we discover what it is that permits one idea to arise out of another, what it is that ensures that we do not add just any soul experience to another, but order such experiences according to an inner process. We discover a continual current in the life of the soul. Just as outer sense-nature is inner physical nature, so spiritual nature lives in the life of the soul. Whoever believes that we can still act arbitrarily or out of prejudice does not know this inner necessity. It is just as much a necessity as is necessity in ordinary life, and it fashions an inner, spiritual experience just as our ordinary experience comes to us by necessity according to the course of events in the physical world.

One who has had to do with the science of spirit for decades may well be allowed to speak of his experience, and this is, that this experience reveals what it is like through its own nature, its own character; arbitrariness ceases, and it is the spirit that orders the sequence of soul experiences. This comes to light when we set out to penetrate a particular sphere of the spiritual world with assumptions, acquired according to our images of the sense world, that spiritual beings or processes have to behave in a particular way. In countless cases—and this is so significant, so incisive for a true scientist of spirit—we experience that things turn out to be quite different from what we had expected, having formed a judgment according to the standards of the outer sense world. It transpires that on this path once we have grasped the inward spiritual necessity, we achieve results that cannot in any way be imagined on the basis of what we know from the sense world, because as far as the sense world is concerned they are quite contradictory. In experiencing this, which can in no way be compared to anything in the sense world, we know what it means to say that the spirit, which we have discovered, orders the sequence of our soul experiences just as our ideas which we formulate about the outer sense world are ordered according to the physical sequence of events.

And these two things come together: what we have acquired in inner strength by means of true self-observation, and what we have acquired of the objective course of the spirit, which is like the course of the outer sense-world. These come together and lead the human soul into a region of the spirit to which it belongs with its spiritual organs, just as the ordinary scientist is led into the bodily organization when he proceeds from hunger to non-physical processes in the body. When we use the soul as the starting point for investigating the spirit, certain phenomena of human soul life take on a new aspect. When the scientist of spirit is touched in this way by the real form, the real character, of the spirit, certain phenomena of human soul life become quite different. This happens, above all, when, by means of the spiritual nature he has acquired through self-observation, the human being has come to recognize the spiritual which gives direction to the soul life. It is only then that he is able to formulate a true idea, a true concept, of what we call the ego of the human being, which bestows as much of the spirit on the human soul as is bestowed of the body on normal human consciousness by the visible form and physiognomy. We cannot investigate the ego by philosophizing about it, but only by making the will into thinking and the thinking into an act of will. By means of self-observation the will becomes an instrument of thinking and the thinking an instrument of will. This is a 'change of spirit' rather like the change of matter which is sought and found in the physical world in our digestion. We then approach the ego not by philosophizing, speculation or hypotheses, but we first acquire a real spiritual observation of the ego and are only then in a position to formulate a correct view of it. This correct view of it proves to us that it is impossible to achieve such a view of the ego in ordinary life, in our ordinary consciousness. The picture which this ordinary consciousness (which is also prevalent in natural science) has of the ego, is that the latter gradually evolves as the body grows. A child does not appear to have an ego. As the body develops and gradually acquires its proper configuration the ego appears to wrestle its way out of the body. This view is held as a matter of course, and with the normal outlook of today it is not possible to arrive at any other view. And this is just what one has to achieve as a scientist of spirit—that one has to give the ordinary outlook its due in its own sphere and not become intolerant because one realizes that only one view is possible in the sphere in which materialism can operate.

In achieving spiritual observation and observation of the ego it is possible to see where the error of the ordinary outlook lies. It can be characterized in the following way. If we reflect about the relationship of the lungs to the air, we know that lungs and air belong together. But because in this case ordinary observation suffices to ascertain the true relationship, no one knowing things only from a superficial viewpoint would come to any other view than that air comes from outside, penetrates into the lungs, is then breathed out of the lungs and returns to the atmosphere outside. Because this kind of observation suffices, no one could maintain that the lung itself creates the air, that the air which is breathed out somehow has its origin in the lung itself, that the lung produces air. Our ordinary observation gives us insight into the relationship of the lungs to the air. Likewise our higher, spiritual observation gives us insight into the human ego. When we can use this observation which I have described, we know that the human ego is no more connected to the bodily nature, that is, to everything we have inherited from our father and mother, than the air which comes from outside has to do with the lungs. We get to know the ego as it really is and we know that in taking over what is inherited at birth or conception, in a sense it inhales out of the spiritual world. As a mass of air that at a particular moment is in our lungs, has flowed in from outside, so the ego flows out of the spiritual world into the bodily nature, out of the world in which it existed before the body could even be thought of in terms of conception and birth. Likewise, when the human being goes through the gate of death it flows out again, just as air which has been used up by the body flows out again from the lungs. We get to know the connection of the ego to a spiritual world that is independent of the world of the human body, just as in physics we learn about the connection of air to a greater mass of air which is independent of the human lung. This is how we rise to real knowledge of the ego, and it is the first thing we come to know about the nature of the ego. From this point we learn more and more by intensifying our spiritual observation by means of the methods described in the above-mentioned books. We learn about the ego as something independent of the life of the body in the same way that we learn about the body by using hunger and thirst as our starting points for investigating the chemical and physical processes of the body with physical methods. Only we discover the spiritual, which gives us our first view of the ego, as a state where the ego is embedded in spiritual beings. In order to know the physical body in all its aspects, we divide it into its various members. In a similar way we have to link the ego to other spiritual beings, which can be observed by spiritual observation with the methods I have described. The ego is linked to them and we find a complete ego-organism. This then extends beyond the individual life of the body.

Starting from the ego, from the part of our soul life that is directed toward the ego, we find that it is embedded in a spiritual life that exists before birth and continues after the gate of death is passed through. In the spiritual world we find a soul-spirit world that in the first instance is independent of the physical world. The ego belongs to this soul- spirit world. The first entities that we find there are spirit- soul beings with whom the ego of man is connected, beings that are human souls before or after death, with whom the human being is himself connected, and also other beings. When we observe the sense world we find a kingdom below man, the animal kingdom. In the soul-spirit world we find first of all a sphere to which the human ego belongs, which it fits into organically, where it performs its transformation of spirit, its spiritual digestion—a spirit-soul sphere which in the first instance is of a purely spirit-soul nature. Then we find a sphere ranking above this one, just as the animal kingdom ranks above the plant kingdom, and it ranks higher because in these higher spheres beings are to be found which are not only connected to us in our soul and spirit nature, in our inner life, but which are still more powerful because they bring about the harmony existing between the spirit-soul and the physical-bodily nature. For our spirit- soul nature has to be brought into relationship with our physical-bodily nature. This relationship is brought about by higher spiritual beings than we first meet.

Having made a start with spiritual investigation, we should not hesitate to speak about these real, concrete, spirit- soul beings that we really discover. The spiritual regions are discovered in which the ego performs its transformation of spirit, just as the physical kingdoms are discovered when we direct our attention to the animals, plants and minerals. And we discover further where lies the mystery of the soul entering and leaving the body. For we come to know how the relationship of the ego to the body of the human being works.

Here, it is true, we are entering a sphere which is quite remote from the present-day outlook, but which in future will have to become more and more a part of this outlook. If we observe the ego in this way we find it is related with the spirit-soul beings of the higher spiritual spheres, which range above the purely natural spheres. But in the transformation of spirit, which is analogous to the transformation of matter in digestion, the ego undergoes a certain process. To begin with, it can only be associated with spirit- soul beings. This is the case before birth and after death, where it has a purely spiritual being for its organization and this is linked to the rest of the spirit world. As the ego proceeds through the spirit world, as it develops in the spirit world, it increasingly acquires a self-orientation and becomes gradually separated from the spirit world. The picture we have of the ego from the science of spirit is that long before birth or after death it has a special connection to many, many spiritual beings. Then as its development proceeds, it separates itself off and becomes in a sense dependent upon itself. It is in undergoing this separation and limitation that it evolves the power of attraction toward the bodily nature. This power of attraction impels it to unite itself—as the air unites itself to the lungs—with the bodily nature that arises in the course of human generations as a result of heredity. The ego enters into this when it comes from the spirit world.

Thus we gain a true view of the eternal working within the bodily nature of man, within the human being as a whole, not by philosophical speculation, but by laying bare this eternal, by entering into the eternal ourselves with our souls. This is the way spiritual observation works. We must be quite sure to realize that everything I have described—the striving for self-observation, the striving to guide the will into our thought and imaginative life, the striving to attain the transformation of spirit—that all this is really only a preparation. Everything else has to be waited for. Just as we have to wait for what the sense world speaks to us when it approaches the soul from outside, so we have to wait for what the spirit-world speaks to us. Self-observation, the guidance of the will into the thought and imaginative life, these have to be striven for in order to prepare the soul to experience the spirit. Spiritual life then begins, but it has to penetrate toward the sphere of the soul and of the spirit.

Thus I have outlined the ways which lead us to see our real soul life in thinking, feeling and willing as an expression of the spiritual, just as hunger, thirst and the need to breathe are an expression in the soul of what lives in the body. This then leads to the differentiation of the eternal-spiritual from the soul nature.

Tomorrow we shall have to describe how something of the eternal in the human being finds its way into ordinary consciousness as a revelation of the unconscious. My intention today was to show how we rise from the sphere of the soul to the spirit. This description, which is a description of knowledge gained by the science of spirit, appears, it is true, to be paradoxical to the normally accepted concepts of today. But you will perhaps have seen that the science of spirit takes its science just as seriously as does natural science. Natural science leads to the perishable and transitory, the science of spirit leads to the eternal, to the imperishable, without which the perishable can[not], in fact, be explained. Thus we can say that from the vantage point of the science of spirit we are able to have an overall view of what is portrayed in natural science. It is only then that we can really appreciate the value of natural science, and are then in a position to judge it. If we get no further than natural science we arrive at the judgment or belief that a stringent science is only possible within the sense world, that it cannot rise to the eternal. If we take up the science of spirit, we know why the natural scientist has to say this if he does not get beyond the position of natural science. But by developing our normal consciousness, by laying bare the spiritual forces slumbering in the soul, we recognize that man can penetrate into the eternal of his own being, into what is really immortal in himself, for this immortal part of him, in fact, makes its own existence known itself. The red color of the rose does not have to be proved. The spirit in us that goes through birth and death also testifies to its own existence when we are able to observe it.

Anyone basing his observation on the science of spirit has an overall view of natural science as well, and he also gives the latter its due. He does not do what those who follow only natural science do, who—consciously or unconsciously—undo what the science of spirit does and wish to take the ground away from under its feet. We may well say that the scientist of spirit has nothing to be afraid of. He need not fear the objections which come from various quarters, for he knows what these objections are worth, and can also recognize why they have to be made. He is quite justified in thinking that he does not need to try to prevent someone from recognizing the methods and progress of natural science. On the contrary. The scientist of spirit is able to say to someone wishing to go into natural science: Go your way to natural science and if you do not only look at it with the eyes of the natural scientific outlook, but with the eyes of the spiritual way of investigation, you will not only find no contradiction between natural science and the science of spirit, but you will also find everywhere in natural science the confirmation and revelation of what the science of spirit says. And we should not believe that the scientist of spirit has any wish to prevent those whom he addresses from following any particular religious confession. It is the greatest misunderstanding of all to believe that we wish to set up any sort of religious gulf between a religious approach and the science of spirit. Dr. Rittelmeyer has shown quite clearly in an admirable article in Christliche Welt how in a quite objective way the science of spirit can be a foundation for religious life, that it does not take anyone away from true religious life, but, on the contrary, leads them toward it.

The science of spirit does not need to keep people away from religious life. Just as it can say: go to natural science in order to realize what the science of spirit is, so it can also say: go to religion, come to know religion, experience religion, and you will find that what the science of spirit is able to give to the soul gives religious life its foundation and strengthens it.

Go out into life itself and you will find that the concepts given in the science of spirit do not deaden you to life or make you unfit for life, but that they make the spirit mobile, agile, and place the human being into life, ready for action. Practical life, too, will be a confirmation and proof of what the science of spirit is able to give to the human being.

Because natural science has to keep to its own course, has to direct its attention solely to nature and may not mix nature with anything of soul and spirit, it is imperative for the science of spirit to find its place alongside it as equally justified. The science of spirit must penetrate from the soul to the spirit, just as natural science has to penetrate from the soul to the physical body. The time will then come when the real essence, the real basic concept of the science of spirit, will be understood, when the intentions of the scientists—to take the ground away from the science of spirit—will be seen in their true light. Forty or fifty years ago Dubois-Reymond was able to say: “Science ends where the super-sensible begins.” In the future this saying will be confronted by another arising out of the spiritual scientific view: What was really happening when natural science wanted to formulate a system of thought, a view of the world that is super-sensible, when it restricted itself to nature above? In a sense one could see that there is something that surrounds the human being in his existence and in which he has his roots, that comes from a particular origin. One saw it rooted in the spirit, but could not penetrate into this spirit.

The science of spirit shows how we can penetrate into spiritual life. The kind of position which natural science has occupied regarding the spirit—if I may use the comparison—is rather as if one were to see a tree which has its roots in the ground. The tree cannot be seen entirely, for the roots are in the ground. The tree is then dug up in order to see it in its entirety, for nothing of the tree may remain hidden. The tree will dry up and will no longer be able to flourish.—This is what has been done by the scientific outlook. It has dug up the being of man out of its foundations in order to acquire an overall view. The resulting view is then like the tree that has been taken out of the ground. The tree has to wither away, and the life that arises out of this view of the world has to wither away. Once this is realized, the way to the science of spirit will be found.

In order to acquire an overall view, the being of man has been deprived of its roots. For the sake of life, for the sake of real life, the human being will once again be immersed in what is popularly called the unconscious, but which, when it is revealed in the sphere of consciousness, can be raised into the sphere of real knowledge of the super-sensible. Then the time will come when the view will be firmly implanted in the human mind that the eternal core of man's being is rooted in the spirit and that if we want to get to know the human being in his entirety we have to penetrate to the spirit. Then it will no longer be said, as Dubois-Reymond did, that science cannot find the super-sensible, not even in its simplest form of manifestation, that this is where science stops, but the science of the future will say that all science that is not rooted in the super-sensible will not be in a position to explain existence, will not be able to lead us into the life of existence, but will only be able to kill existence. It will not be said that science ends where supra-naturalism, the super-sensible, begins, but, the life of science ends where the human being no longer takes his stand in the super-sensible, and the death of science enters where the super-sensible is abandoned.

I had intended during the time I am able to spend here to give a kind of supplement to many of the things which I brought before you last year in our introductory educational courses. However, the days are so few, and according to what I have just learned there are so many things to be done during this time, that I am hardly able to say whether we shall get further than these scanty words of introduction today. It is hardly possible to speak of any kind of program.

What I would like to speak of in this introduction is this: to what I gave you last year I should like to add something about the teacher himself, about the educator. Of course what I shall have to say about the nature of the teacher should be taken quite aphoristically. It would indeed be best if it were to take shape in you gradually, if it were to develop further through your own thinking and feeling.

It is especially teachers whose attention should be drawn to the fact—and in doing so we are taking our stand on an anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, and it is our intention to shape out of this the education necessary for the present time—it is this crucial fact above all, to which attention should be drawn: the teacher must really have a deep feeling for the nature of the esoteric.

In our time—an age of democracy and journalism—it is of course true that we hardly have a real sense, a valid sense for what is meant by the esoteric. We believe today that what is true is true, what is right is right, and that it should be possible to proclaim what is true and right before the world, once it has been formulated in a way one deems to be correct. Now in real life this is not so: here matters are quite different. The essential point is that you can unfold a certain kind of effectiveness in your actions only if the impulses that produce them are guarded in the soul as a most sacred, hidden wealth. And it would be necessary for the teacher especially to guard much as sacred, hidden wealth, regarding it as something that plays a role only in the proceedings and debates taking place within the body of teachers. The meaning of such a statement is not particularly clear to begin with; nonetheless it will become clear to you. I should have to say a great deal to make it fully understandable, but it will become clearer if to begin with I say the following.

The principle I have just stated has a universal significance, embracing the entire civilization of our time. If we think of the education of young people today, we must always bear in mind that we are working on the feelings, the ideas, the will impulses of the next generation. We must be clear that our present work is to prepare this next generation for definite tasks that will have to be accomplished sometime in the future of mankind. When something of this sort has been said, the question at once arises: what is the real cause for mankind having fallen into the widespread misery in which it is today? Mankind has come into such misery because it has for the most part made itself dependent, dependent through and through, on the manner of thinking and feeling peculiar to western man. We can say that if someone in Central Europe today speaks of Fichte, Herder, or even of Goethe, then—if he is active in public life (say as a journalist, as a writer of best-selling books, or the like)—he is much farther removed from the true spiritual impulse living in Fichte, Herder or Goethe when he is active or thinking in Berlin or Vienna, than he is from what is being felt and thought today in London, Paris, New York or Chicago. Fundamentally speaking, matters have gradually worked out in such a way that our whole civilization has been flooded by impulses arising from the world view of the western peoples; our entire public life lives according to the philosophy of these nations.

We have to admit that this is particularly true where the art of education is concerned, for from the last third of the 19th century onwards the peoples of Central Europe have taken their lead in such matters from the people of the West. It is taken for granted today among men who debate educational matters among other topics that they should utilize the habits of thought that come from the West. If you were to trace back all the educational ideas considered reasonable in Central Europe today, you would find their source in the views of Herbert Spencer or men of his sort. We do not pay attention to the numerous pathways by which the views of such men enter the heads of people who set the tone in spiritual matters in Central Europe. Nonetheless these paths exist and are to be found. And if you take the spirit of an educational philosophy such as appeared through a man like Fichte (I will not lay any special importance on its details), you will find it not merely totally different from what is generally considered sensible pedagogy today; it is fact that the men of our time are hardly capable of bringing their souls into the way of thinking and feeling that would permit them to conceive how the intentions of a Fichte or Herder might be developed farther. Thus what we experience today in the field of pedagogy, in the art of education, what has become the rule there, is precisely the opposite of what it ought to be. Let me draw your attention to something Spencer has written.

Spencer was of the opinion that object lessons should be so handled that they would lead over into the experiments of the naturalist, into the research of the man of science. What, according to this, should be done in school? We should teach children in such a way that when they are grown up and the opportunity presents itself, they can pursue further what they have learned from us in school about minerals, plants, animals, etc. and become then proper scientific researchers or thinkers. It is true, this sort of idea is frequently contested; nonetheless it is done in practice, and for the reason that our textbooks are written with this in mind (and it would occur to nobody to alter, re-think or do away with textbooks.) It is a fact, for example, that textbooks about botany are written more for a future botanist than for human beings in general. Similarly, textbooks for zoology are so conceived that they serve the future zoologist but not human beings in general.

Now the peculiar thing is, that we should be striving today for precisely the opposite of what Spencer laid down as a true educational principle. It would be hard to imagine a graver error in elementary school teaching, than to train children to deal with objects, say plants or animals, in such a way that, if pursued further, the child could become a botanist or zoologist. If, on the contrary, we could plan our lessons, when presenting facts about plants or animals, so that it is made difficult for children to become botanists or zoologists, we would then be closer to the mark than if we were to follow the Spencerian axiom. For nobody should become a botanist or zoologist because of what he learns in elementary school. A man should become a botanist or zoologist solely because of his special gifts, and these reveal themselves quite simply in the choice that must result when life unfolds within a true art of education. Because of his talent! Which means, if his gifts predispose him to be a botanist, he can become one; if he has the natural ability to become a zoologist, he can become one. This must come about through the individual™s ability, i.e. through his predetermined karma, the laws of destiny. This must follow from our insight: in this child a botanist is hidden, in that one a zoologist. It must never be the result of an elementary school curriculum designed to prepare him for this scientific speciality. But just reflect on what has happened of late. It has come about, sad to say, that it is the scientists who have designed our education. People accustomed to thinking scientifically have the largest voice in education. That is to say, it has been deemed that the teacher as such has something in common with the scientist. This has gone so far that a scientific training is taken to be a teacher training, whereas the two must be different, through and through. If the teacher becomes a scientist, if he gives himself up in the narrow sense to thinking scientifically—this he may do as a private person but not as a teacher—then he deserves what frequently happens, that the teacher cuts a ridiculous figure in his class, among his students, among his colleagues, and he is poked fun at. Goethe's 'Baccalaureus' is not such a rarity at the higher levels as is ordinarily supposed.

And truthfully, if we were to ask ourselves whether we should be more on the side of the teacher when the students poke fun at him, or more on the side of the students, then, in the present state of affairs in education, we would sooner take the students' part. For the direction things have taken can be observed best in our universities. What are our universities in fact—institutions for teaching mature young men and women, or research institutes? They try to be both, and precisely for this reason they have become the caricatures they are today. People usually go so far as to point to this as a particular advantage of our universities, that they are at one and the same time teaching and research institutions. But this is the very thing that introduces into the higher centres of learning all the harm that is done to education when it has been planned by scientists. And then the mischief is passed on down the line to the secondary schools and ultimately to the elementary schools as well. This is what we cannot sufficiently bear in mind: an art of education must proceed from life and cannot issue from abstract scientific thinking.

Now this is the peculiar state of affairs: to begin with, out of the Western culture comes a pedagogy with a scientific, even a natural-scientific basis, and on the other hand we have a forgotten pedagogy based on life, a pedagogy drawn directly from life, when we recall what lived in Herder, Fichte, Jean Paul, Schiller and similar minds.

It is, however, the world-historical mission of the Central European peoples to cultivate this particular pedagogy, to have so to speak, an esoteric task of developing this pedagogy. There is much that will become possible for mankind to do as a community, and this must be so, if there is to be improvement in social matters in the future. But what is emerging as an art of education from the whole of the spiritual culture that is specifically Central European this the peoples of the West will not be able to comprehend. On the contrary it will infuriate them. We can first speak to than of this when they decide to take their stand on the esoteric foundations of spiritual science. With regard to all those things which have been looked upon with such pride over the last 40 years in Germany, on which the claim to major advances in Germany has been based, Germany is lost. All that points to the dominance hegemony of the Western peoples. There is nothing to be done about it, and we can only hope that we arouse sufficient understanding for the Threefold Social Order, so that on the basis of this understanding, the peoples of the West will take it up.

With regard to what has to be given for the art of education, we have something to give the world from Central Europe which nobody else can give—neither an Oriental, nor a man from the West. Yet we must have the discretion to keep this in those circles capable of understanding it. We must know how to guard it, with a certain confidence, knowing that it is this guarding which gives effectiveness to our affairs. We have to know what things to be silent about in the presence of certain people, if we want to be effective. Above all we must be clear that we cannot hope to influence the mode of thought, proceeding from the West, which is indeed indispensable for some branches of modern civilization. We must know that we have nothing whatsoever to hope for from that quarter for what we have to foster as an art of education.

Herbert Spencer has written something of unusual interest about education. He compiles a list of axioms, or 'principles' as he calls them, concerning intellectual education. Among these principles is one on which he lays great emphasis: in teaching, one should never proceed from the abstract, but always from the concrete—one should always elaborate a subject from an individual case. So he writes his book on education, and there we find, before he enters into anything concrete, the worst thickets of abstractions, really nothing but abstract chaff, and the man fails to notice that he is carrying out the opposite of the principles which he has argued are indispensable. We have here the example of an eminent and leading philosopher of the present time, in complete contradiction with what he has just advocated.

Now you saw last year that our pedagogy is not to be built upon abstract educational principles, upon this or that which might be affirmed, such as that we shouldn't introduce things to the child which are foreign to his nature but rather develop his individuality, etc. You know that our art of education should have its foundation in genuine empathy with the child's nature, that it should be built up in the widest sense on a knowledge of the evolving human being. And we have compiled sufficient material in our first course, and then later in the teachers' conferences, concerning the nature of the growing child. If we as teachers were able to engage ourselves with this unfolding being of the child, then out of this perception itself would spring awareness of how we should proceed. In this regard we must as teachers become artists. Just as it is quite impossible for the artist to take a book on aesthetics in hand, and then to paint or carve according to the principles laid down there, so should it be quite impossible for the teacher to use one of those instructors' manuals in order to teach. What the teacher needs is true insight into what the human being is in reality, what he becomes as he develops through the stages of his childhood. Here it is above all necessary that this be clear: We are teaching to begin with, let us say, the six or seven year old children in a first class. Now our teaching will be bad every time, will never have fulfilled its purpose, if after working for a year with this first class we do not say to ourselves—who is it now that has really learned the most? It is I, the teacher! If on the contrary we are able to say to ourselves something like this—At the start of the school year I was equipped with noble educational principles, I have followed the best authorities on teaching, I have done my best to carry out these principles.—If we really had done this, we would most certainly have taught badly. But we would most certainly have taught the best of all if we had entered the classroom each morning in great trepidation, without very much assurance in our own capacity, and then at the end of the year could say, it is really I myself who have learned the most. For our ability to say this depends on how we have acted, on what we have done, on always having the feeling: 1 am growing by helping the children grow. I am experimenting, in the purest sense of the word. I can't really do very much, but a certain capacity grows in me by working with the children. From time to time we will have the feeling, with, one or another kind of child there is not much to be done, but we will have taken pains with them. Through the special gifts of other children we will have learned certain things. In short we leave the campaign quite a different person from when we entered it; we have learned to do what we were incapable of doing when we began teaching a year before. We say to ourselves at the end of the year—yes, now I can really do what I ought to have been doing. This is a very real feeling in which a secret lies hidden. If we had really been capable, at the beginning of the year, of everything we were able to do at the year's end, then our teaching would have been bad. We have given good lessons because we have had to work at them as we went along. I must put this in the form of a paradox. Your teaching has been good if you did not know to start with what you have learned by the end of the year; your teaching would have been harmful, had you known at the beginning what you have learned at the end. A remarkable paradox!

For many people it is important to know this, but it is most important of all for teachers to know it. For this is a special instance of a general truth and insight: knowledge as such, no matter what its content, knowledge that we can grasp in the form of abstract principles, that we can bring to mind as ideas—such knowledge can have no practical value. Only what leads to this knowledge, what is on its way to this knowledge, is of practical value. For the kind of knowledge we gain after a year's teaching, achieves its value only after a man has died. This knowledge only rises after the man dies, into the kind of reality where it can then shape him further, can develop his individuality further. Thus it is not ready-made knowledge that has value in life, but the work that leads to this finished knowledge. And in the art of teaching this work has especial value. In reality it is no different here than in the arts. I cannot consider anyone a right-minded artist who doesn't say to himself on finishing a work: only now are you able to do this. I don't consider a man properly disposed as an artist, if he is satisfied with any work he has done. He can have a certain egotistical respect for what he has made, but he can't really be satisfied with it. In fact, a work of art when finished loses a large share of its interest for the man who made it. This loss of interest comes from the intrinsic nature of knowledge that is being gained when we make something. On the contrary what is living, what is life-spending in it, lies precisely in that it has not yet become knowledge.

Ultimately, it is the same with the whole of the human organism. Our head is as finished as anything could be, for it is formed out of the forces of our previous earth-life and is 'over-ripe'. (Men's heads are all over-ripe, even the unripe ones.) But the rest of our organism is only at the stage of furnishing a seed for the head of our next incarnation. It is full of life and growth, but it is incomplete. Indeed, it will not be until our death that the rest of our organism shows its true form, which is the form taken by the forces active in it. The constitution of the rest of our organism shows there is life flowing in it; ossification is at a minimum in these parts of the body, while in the head it reaches a maximum.

This proper sort of inward modesty, this sense that we ourselves are still in becoming—this is what must sustain the teacher, for more will come from this feeling than from any abstract principles. If we stand in our classroom, conscious of the fact that it is a good tiling we do everything imperfectly—for in that way there is life in it—then we will teach well. If on the other hand we are always patting ourselves on the back over the perfection of our teaching, then it is quite certain we shall teach badly.

But now consider that the following has come to pass. You have been responsible for the teaching of a first class, a second and third class, etc., so that you have actually been through everything that is to be experienced—excitements, disappointments, successes too, if you will. Consider that you have gone once through all the classes of an elementary school and at the end of each year have spoken to yourself in the spirit I have just described, and now you take your way back down again, say from the eighth to the first class. Yes, now it might be supposed that you should say to yourself- now I am beginning with what I have learned, now I shall be able to do it right, now I shall be an excellent teacher! But it won't be that way. Experience will bring you something quite different. You will say to yourself at the end of the second, the third and each of the following years just about the same (and out of an attitude proper to it): I have now learned by working with seven, eight and nine-year-old children what I could learn only in this way. At the end of each school year I know what I should have done. And then when you have come the second time to the fourth or fifth school year, again you will not know what you should really do. For now you will correct what you came to believe after teaching for a year. And thus, after you are finished with the eighth school year and have corrected everything once more, and if you have the good fortune to begin again with the first class, you will find yourself in the same position. But to be sure you will teach in a different spirit. If you go through your teaching duties with inwardly true and noble and not foolish doubts, such as I have described, you will draw out of this diffidence a new and imponderable power, which will make you particularly fitted to accomplish more with the children entrusted to you. This is without doubt true. But the effect in life will actually only be a different one, not that much better, just different. I would say the quality of what you are able to make out of the children will not be much better than it was the first time; the effect will simply be a different one. You will achieve something qualitatively different, not achieve much more in quantity. You will achieve something different in quality, and that is really enough. For everything that we acquire in the way described, with the necessary noble diffidence and heartfelt humility, has the effect that we are able to make individualities out of those we teach, individualities in the widest sense. We cannot have the same class twice over and send out into the world the same copies of a cut and dried educational pattern. We can however turn human beings over to the world that are individually different. We bring about diversity in life, but this does not derive from the elaboration of abstract principles. In fact this diversity of life is founded on a deeper grasp of life, as we have just described.

So you see what matters more than anything else in a teacher is the way he regards his holy calling. That is not without significance, for the most important things in teaching and in education are the imponderables. A teacher who enters his classroom with this conviction in his heart achieves something different from another. Just as in everyday life it is not always what is physically large that counts, but sometimes it is precisely what is small, so it is not always what we do with big words that carries weight. Sometimes it is that perception, that feeling which we have built up in our hearts before we enter the classroom.

One thing in particular is of great importance, however, and that is that we must quickly cast off our narrower, personal selves like a snake's skin, when we go into the class. The teacher may (since he is 'only human', as is often said with such self-complacency) on occasion have experienced all sorts of things in the time between the end of class on one day and the beginning of the next. It may be that he has been warned by his creditors, or he may have had a quarrel with his wife, as does happen in life. These are things that put us out of sorts. Such disharmonies then provide an undertone to our state of soul. Of course happy moods can arise also. The father of one of your pupils who likes you particularly may have sent you a hare, after he has been out hunting, or a bunch of flowers, if you are a lady teacher. It is quite a natural thing to carry moods of this kind around with us. As teachers we must train ourselves to lay aside these moods and to let what we say be determined solely by the content of what we are to present. Thus we should really be in a position as we picture one thing to speak tragically (but out of the nature of the thing itself) and then to shift over to a humorous vein as we proceed with our description, surrendering ourselves completely to the subject. The important thing however is that we should now be able to perceive the whole reaction of the class to tragedy or sentimentality or humour. If we are able to do this, then we shall be aware that tragedy, sentimentality and humour are of extraordinary importance for the souls of the children. And if we can let our teaching be buoyed up by an alternation between humour, sentimentality and tragedy, if we lead over from one mood to the other and back again, if we are really able, after presenting something for which we need a certain heaviness, to pass over again into a certain lightness (not forced, but arising as we surrender ourselves to the content), then bring about in the soul's mood something akin to in and out- breathing in the bodily organism.

As we teach, our object is not simply to teach with and for the intellect, but rather to be able to really take these various moods into account. For what is tragedy, what is sentimentality, what is a heavy mood of soul? It is exactly the same as an inbreath for the organism, the same as filling the organism with air. Tragedy means that we are trying to contract our physical body further and further so that in this contraction of the physical body we become aware how the astral body comes out of it, more and more as we do so. A humorous mood signifies that we enervate the physical body, but in contrast we expand the astral body as much as we can, spreading it out over its surroundings, so that we are aware, say when we do not merely behold redness but when we grow into it, how we spread our astrality over the redness, pass over into it. Laughing simply means that we drive the astral out of our facial features; it is nothing else but an astral out- breathing. Only we must have a certain sense for dynamics, if we want to apply these things. It is not always appropriate on the heels of something heavy and sustained to go straight over into the humorous. But we can always find the ways and means in our teaching to prevent the childish soul being imprisoned by the serious, the breathing between the two soul moods.

These are some instances, by way of introduction, of the sort of nuances of soul mood that should be taken into consideration by the teacher as he teaches, and which are just as important as any other aspect of teaching.

It is not possible, naturally, to educate or give instruction if in our education and instruction we are not able to sense inwardly the whole human being. For during the period of a child's development this whole man needs to be considered far more than later on. We know this whole man embraces the ego, the astral body, the etheric body and the physical body. These four members of our human nature are of course not subject to uniform development but unfold in quite different ways. We must distinguish accurately between the development of the physical and the etheric bodies and that of the astral body and ego. The outer signs of this differentiated development are furnished—as you know from the various hints I have given here or there—by the change of teeth and by that alteration in the human being which is announced by the change of voice accompanying sexual maturity in the male, appearing as clearly but in a different way in the female. The nature of this phenomenon in the female organism is fundamentally the same as in the man's change of voice, but it emerges in a broader way, not perceptible in a single organ only, as with the man, but spread more over the entire organism. You know that between the change of teeth and the change of voice or puberty lies the period of instruction with which we have to do preferably in elementary education. But the years that follow the change of voice (or what corresponds to it in the female organism) must also be given our close attention in education and teaching.

Let us call to mind what the change of teeth signifies. The change of teeth is the outer expression for the fact that in the child's organism up to then—that is, between birth and the second dentition—the physical and etheric bodies have been influenced strongly by the nerve-sense system, operating from above downward. The physical body and the etheric body are influenced most powerfully from the head until about the seventh year. These forces—particularly active through the years in which imitation plays such a major role—are concentrated so to speak in the head. And what happens formatively in the rest of the organism, in the trunk and limbs, takes place through rays proceeding from the head downward to the organism of trunk and limbs, to the physical and etheric bodies. What streams from the head into the whole of the physical and etheric bodies of the child, reaching the tips of his fingers and toes, this is soul activity, notwithstanding the fact that it proceeds from the physical body. It is the same soul activity that works in the soul later as intelligence and memory. It is only that later, after the change of teeth, the child's thinking begins to use his memories more consciously. The thorough modification of the child's soul life demonstrates that certain psychic forces, working earlier within the organism, are from his seventh year onward active in the child as forces of soul. The whole period up to the change of teeth, while the child is growing, is effected by the same forces that appear after the seventh year as forces of intelligence, as intellectual forces.

Here we have an interplay between soul and body that is quite real—by which the soul, on reaching the age of seven, emancipates itself from the body, is active no longer in the body but for itself. In the seventh year forces begin to be active, arising in the body anew as soul-forces, to work on and on into the next incarnation. Then it is that what streams upward from the body is thrust back, and conversely the forces shooting downward from the head are held in check. Thus during the time the teeth are changing, the most active of battles is taking place between forces striving downward from above and others springing upward from below. The change of teeth is the physical expression for this struggle between the two sets of forces—those that later appear in the child as his powers of understanding and intellect, and those that need to be used especially in drawing, painting and writing. We put all of these up-welling forces to use when we develop writing out of drawing, for what these forces really strive for is to pass over into sculptural activity, drawing, etc. These are the forces that have their termination at the change of teeth, having previously shaped the body of the child, the sculptural forces which we use later, when the second dentition is completed, to introduce the child to drawing and painting, etc. In the main these are forces planted in the child from the spiritual world in which the child's soul lived before conception. They are active first as bodily forces shaping the head and then from the seventh year onward as soul forces. Thus in the period after the seventh year we simply draw forth from the child for our authoritarian purposes, what the child had previously made unconscious use of in imitation, inasmuch as these forces had taken their course unconsciously within the body. If later on the child turns out to be a sculptor, a draughtsman or an architect (but a proper architect, one who works with forms), the reason is that such a man has the predisposition to retain in his organism somewhat more of the down-raying forces, to retain rather more of them in the head, so that later on these childhood forces are still raying downward. However, if they are not sustained, if with the change of teeth everything translates into the soul sphere, then we have children who have no talent for drawing, for the sculptural or for architecture—who could never become a sculptor.

The secret is this: such forces are related to what we have experienced between death and our new birth. We acquire the reverence we need in our teaching activity, something that can have a religious quality, if we raise this to consciousness: the forces I draw forth from the child around his seventh year, which I make use of when he learns drawing or writing—these are really furnished me by heaven. It is the spiritual world that sends these forces down—the child is the medium—and I am in fact working with forces directed down from the spiritual world. This reverence before the divine-spiritual, when it permeates my teaching, is actually a wonder-worker in teaching. If I have the feeling that I am in contact with forces that are unfolding down from the spiritual world, from the time before birth, if I have this feeling, it generates a deep reverence. And you will see that the presence of this feeling will accomplish more than all the intellectual speculation as to what you should do. The feelings that a teacher has are his most important teaching tools. And this reverence is something that works on the child with enormous formative effect.

Thus in what is happening to the child at the change of teeth we have something that is a direct transference of spiritual forces from the spiritual world through the child into the physical world.

Another process takes place during the years of puberty, although it has been preparing itself slowly throughout the cycle of years from seven to fourteen or fifteen. During this time something is stirring to life in the regions of the soul which are not already irradiated by the consciousness—for the consciousness is only now forming itself, and something is streaming into us continuously from the outer world unconsciously—something that is gradually emerging into consciousness wakens to life now, something that has irradiated the child from the outer world since his birth, that has collaborated in the building up of the child's body and has entered into the child, into his formative forces.

These are different forces again. Whereas the formative forces enter the head from within, these forces come now from outside and proceed from there down into the organism. These forces, working from the outer world through the head and into the body, forcing their way through the formative forces and sharing in what happens as the child's body is built up from the seventh year onward—I cannot characterize these otherwise than to say, they are the same forces that are active in speech and in music. They are forces taken in from the world.

Such forces as are of a musical kind are taken up more from the outer world, from the world outside of man, from the observation of nature and its processes, above all from observation of its rhythms and a-rhythms. A secret music pours through every natural occurrence—the earthly projection of the music of the spheres. In truth, a tone of this spheric harmony is incorporated in every plant, in every animal. This is true as well of the human body, but it lives no longer in human speech—that is to say, not in the expressions of the soul—yet most certainly in bodily structures and functions. All of this the child is taking in unconsciously, and for this reason are children musical to such a high degree. All of this they are taking up into their bodily organism. Whatever they experience of formed movement, of the linear, of the sculptural, this comes from within, proceeding from the head. Whatever, on the contrary, is taken up by the child as a configuration of tones or the content of language, this comes from outside. And against what is coming from outside works—but now somewhat later, around the 14th year—the spiritual element of music and language, developing gradually from within outward. This is compacted now, in the female in her entire organism, in the male more in the region of his larynx, bringing about the change of voice. All of this is caused by an element from within, bearing more the character of will, that is living itself out in battle with a willed element from outside. This struggle finds expression in the change of voice and what otherwise emerges at puberty. This is a battle between inner forces of music and language and outer musical-1inguistic forces.

The human being is basically up to the seventh year permeated more by the formative and less by musical forces, that is to say less by forces of music and language glowing through his organism. From the seventh year on, however, the activity of music and speech becomes particularly strong in the etheric body. Then the ego and astral body turn against this; a willed element from outside battles with a willed element from within, and this comes to visibility at puberty. The difference that exists between male and female has another outer manifestation in the difference of vocal pitch. The voice levels of a man and woman coincide only in part; the voice of the woman reaches higher, that of a man descends deeper into the bass. This corresponds precisely to the structure of the rest of the organism, formed out of the struggle between these forces.

These matters witness that in the life of the soul we have to do with something that also has a Share in the build-up of the body, but for quite definite purposes. All the abstract chatter you find today in books on psychology or in psychological discussions based on contemporary science, all the high-flown words about psychosomatic parallelism, are no more than a testimonial to the ignorance of our philosophers, who know nothing of the real relationship between the psychic and the bodily. For the soul is not related to the body in accordance with the nonsensical theories thought out by the psychosomatic parallelists. We are concerned with an influence of the soul in the body that is quite concrete, and then again with the reaction. Of the latter we are about to speak. Up to the seventh year the formative-structural works in collaboration with the musical lingual. This changes in the seventh year only insofar as from then on the relation between the musical-lingual on the one hand and the formative-structural on the other is a different one. But through the whole period of human life up to puberty such cooperation takes place between the formative-structural, proceeding from the head and having there its seat, and the musical-lingual, proceeding from the outer world, coming from outside, using the head as a point of entry to disperse itself throughout the organism.

From this we see that human speech too, but above all the musical element collaborates in the shaping of the human being. At first it helps form the man, and afterwards it stems itself, pausing at the larynx; it does not pass through this gate as before. Up to now it has been language which modified our organs, as deeply as into the skeletal system. A person who views a human skeleton with a true psycho-physical eye (and not with the purblind psycho-physical eye of today's philosophers) and focusses on the differentiation between a male and female skeleton, will see in the skeleton an incorporated musical achievement, played out in the interaction between the human organism and the outer world. The human skeleton can be understood figuratively thus: as if someone were to play a sonata and were then to preserve it by some sort of spiritual crystallisation process—in this way we would get the principle forms, the arrangement of forms in the human skeleton! This would also demonstrate for you the difference between man and animal. In an animal what is taken in of the lingual-musical element (very little of the lingual but very much of the musical) passes right through the animal, since it lacks in a certain way the human isolation that leads then to the change of voice. In the skeletal form of the animal we have a musical imprint too, but it is such that a musical coherence would be provided only if various skeletons were placed together as in a museum. The animal always manifests a one-sidedness in its structure.

These are matters we should consider carefully; they show us what feelings we should develop. If our reverence grows, as we cultivate our connection and intercourse with pre-natal forces, (as we have already characterized this) so do we gain more animation and enthusiasm in our teaching through immersing ourselves in the other human forces. A Dionysian element irradiates our musical and language instruction, while we acquire more of an apollonian element as we teach the plastic arts, painting and drawing. The instruction that has to do with music and speech we give with enthusiasm, the other with reverence.

The formative forces offer the stronger resistance; hence they are arrested as early as the seventh year. The other forces, counteracting more weakly, are not retarded before the fourteenth year. This you must not take to mean physical strength or weakness; meant is the answering pressure that is called forth. Since the formative forces, being stronger, would overrun the human organism, the counter pressure is greater. For this reason they must be arrested earlier, whereas the other forces are allowed to remain longer in the organism by a higher guidance. The human being is permeated longer by the musical than by the formative forces.

If you allow this insight to ripen in you and have the necessary enthusiasm for it, then you will be able to say: with what you permit to resound in the child in the way of language and music, precisely in the elementary school years, when that battle is still present and you are working also upon his bodily nature and not merely on his soul—with this you are preparing what will work beyond death, what man carries with him beyond death. In essence it is to this we are contributing through everything we impart to the child in the way of music and language during the elementary years. And because we know we are working into the future in this way, this provides us with a certain enthusiasm. If we are dealing with the formative forces, on the other hand, then we are in touch with what already lay in the human being before birth, before conception; this gives us reverence. But with the other forces we are working into the future; we are combining our own forces with these, knowing that we are fertilizing the musical-linguistic germ with something that, after the physical aspects of language and music have been laid aside, works over into the future. Music is physical by being a reflection of the spheric in the air. The air serves as medium for the tones to become physical; the air in the larynx in turn renders speech physical. But it is the non-physical in the air of speech, the non-physical in the air of music, that unfolds its true effect only after death. We gain a certain enthusiasm for our teaching by this, knowing that these are the means by which we weave the future.

I believe the future of education will consist in this: teachers will no longer be spoken to in the manner of today, but only in ideas and inner pictures that are capable of translation into feelings. For nothing will be of greater importance than this, that we are able as teachers to develop in ourselves the necessary reverence and the necessary enthusiasm, so that we may teach with reverence and enthusiasm. Reverence and enthusiasm—these are the two hidden, fundamental forces that must lend spirit to the teacher's soul.

To help you understand the matter still better, I should just like to mention that the musical element is at home particularly in the astral body. After death a man still bears his astral body for a time; as long as he does so, until he lays it aside—you are familiar with this from my book Theosophy—there still exists in man after death a kind of recollection TIT is no more than a memory) of earthly music. Thus it is that the music a man absorbs during his life works on after death as a musical memory, and endures roughly until the time he lays his astral body aside. Then in the life after death the earthly music is transformed into the music of the spheres and remains as spheric music until some time before the new birth. It will bring the matter closer to your understanding, if you know that the music a person takes in here on earth plays a powerful role in fashioning his soul-organism after death. This is fashioned during the period of kamaloca. This is the positive side of kamaloca, and if we know this we are essentially in a position to ease for people what the Catholics call the fires of purgatory. Not, certainly, by removing their contemplation of it; this they must have, or they would remain imperfect, not perceiving the imperfect things they have done. But we introduce a possibility that the human being will be better formed in his next life, if he can have many memories of musical experiences during the time after death when he still has his astral body. This can be studied on a relatively inferior plane of spiritual experience. You need only wake up during the night after hearing a concert; you will become aware that you have experienced the whole concert once more before waking. Indeed, you experience it still better now, on awaking in the night after the concert; the experience is most accurate. Thus is the musical impressed into the astral body, where it remains in vibration; some thirty years after death it is still there. A musical impression remains active much longer than a vocal one. The spoken word, as such, we lose relatively soon after death; only its spiritual distillation remains behind. The musical is preserved as long as the astral body maintains itself.

The spoken word can be of great benefit to us after death, particularly if we have taken it in often in the form I now frequently describe as the art of recitation. I have naturally every reason to point this out, when in describing the art of recitation I say that these things cannot be grasped properly unless we take into account the typical course of the astral body after death. But we need to describe things the way I do in lectures on eurythmy. We have to talk to people as if speaking the most primitive of languages. And it is truly so—from the standpoint of the other side of the threshold, men here are actually like savages; only beyond the threshold are men really men. We only work our way out of our primitive standpoint when we work our way into the spiritual. To this we can attribute the fury of primitive people against our efforts, which is becoming increasingly evident.

Now I would like to draw your attention to a fact that must have our particular concern in an art of education and can be worked on there. In the struggle I first described, whose outer expression is the change of teeth, and in the later battle whose equivalent is the change of voice, a certain characteristic is to be noted: everything which proceeds downward from the head in the period before the seventh year takes the form of an attack on what is coming to meet it from within in the nature of up-building forces. And everything that works outward from within, rising up towards the head to counter the stream originating there, acts like a defence against this descending stream. The one has the appearance of an attack, the other, working from within outward, gives the appearance of a defence.

It is analogous again with the musical. What emerges from within has the appearance of an attack, and what passes through the head organisation from above on its way downward shows itself as defence. Were we not to have music, then truly frightful forces would rise up in a human being. I am fully convinced that up to the 16th and 17th centuries traditions from the ancient mysteries were at work, and that people in these times still wrote and spoke subject to the after effects of the mysteries, but no longer knowing the full significance of these traditions; also that in much appearing in relatively later times we simply have recollections of ancient mystery knowledge. Thus I have always been particularly moved by the words of Shakespeare: The man that hath no music in himself...is fit for treason, murder and deceit...let no such man be trusted.¹ It was imparted to pupils in the ancient mystery schools: what acts as an attack from within man, what must be warded off continuously, what is damned back for the sake of man's human nature—that is treason, murder and deceit, and it is the music working in man that counteracts it. Music is the means of defence against the Luciferic forces rising up out of the inner man: treason, murder, deceit. We all have treason, murder and deceit within us, and it is not for nothing that the world contains the musical-lingual element, apart from the pleasure it affords man. The world includes this element in order that man may become Man. We must naturally keep in mind that the teachers in the ancient mysteries spoke rather differently. Their expressions were more concrete. They would not have said: treason, murder, deceit (in Shakespeare this has already been toned down), but rather: serpent, wolf and fox. The serpent, the wolf, the fox—these are repelled from man's inner nature by the musical element. The teachers in the ancient mysteries would always have used animal forms to describe what is rising up out of man, what must first be transformed to become human. And thus it is that we gain the right sort of enthusiasm, when we see the treacherous serpent rising up out of the child and combat it with our instruction in music and language, or similarly deal with the murderous wolf and the deceitful fox or cat. This is what can permeate us with a proper, reasoned enthusiasm—not with the glowing, Luciferic enthusiasm that alone is acknowledged today. In sum, we must come to know: attack and defence.

There are two levels in man on which this warding-off takes place. The defence is first in himself, finding visibility in the seventh year with the change of teeth. Then further, through what he has taken in of music and language, is warded off what is trying to rise up in him. Both battlefields are within man, the musical-lingual more towards the periphery, toward the outer world, the architectonic—formative more toward the inner man, toward the inner world. But there is a third battlefield as well, and that lies on the boundary between the etheric body and the outer world. The ether body is always larger than the physical body, reaching out beyond it on all sides. There we find another such battlefield. Here the battle is taking place more under the influence of the consciousness, whereas the other two are fought more in the unconscious. The third and more conscious battle manifests when everything that has been converted in the interplay between man and the formative-architectonic on the one hand, between man and the musical-lingual on the other hand, works itself out, when this lives itself into the etheric body and thereby takes hold of the astral body, thus to be displaced more toward the periphery or outer boundary. This is where that which pours through the fingers when we draw or paint, etc. has its origin. This is what makes the art of painting one that operates more in the environment of man. The man who draws or sculpts must work more out of an inner disposition, the musician more out of a devotion to the world. That which lives itself out in painting and drawing, for which we train the child when we have him draw forms or lines, that is a battle taking place wholly on the surface, a battle in essence between two forces, the one working inward from outside, the other working outward from within. The force working outward from within actually tends to dissipate a person constantly, it tends to prolong the formative activity in him, not strongly but in a delicate way. This force has the tendency (I must express this more drastically than it really is, but in this exaggeration you will see what I mean), this force working outward from within would make our eyes bulge, give us the goitre, make our nose puff out and our ears grow—everything would swell outward. But another force is present, one which we suck in from the outer world, by which this swelling is counteracted. And if we make no more than a line—draw something—this is a striving, using a force working in from the outer world, to counter the force from within that is trying to deform us. This is a complicated reflex motion we execute as men in painting, in drawing, in graphic activity. When we draw or set up a canvas before us, a feeling is actually glimmering in our consciousness: you are not letting something outside of you in, you are making thick walls—or barbed wire—out of your forms and strokes. In drawings we actually have such barbed wire, by which we constrain something that tends to destroy us from within, retarding its influence. For this reason our drawing classes will have their best effect, if our study of drawing begins with man. If you study the kinds of movement the hand tends to make, if you have a child in a eurythmy class contour these forms or movements that he wants to make of himself, then you have controlled the line that would work destructively and its effect is no longer destructive. If you begin by having the children draw eurythmic gestures and then let drawing and finally writing develop their forms from these, then you have something that man's nature really wills, something related to the being and becoming in human nature. This too we should know when we do eurythmy: there is always in the etheric body a tendency to do eurythmy. This is simply something the etheric body does of its own accord. Eurythmy is no more than a reading of all of its movements from what the etheric body wants to do; these are actually the movements it is making, and it is only inhibited when we cause these movements to be executed by the physical body. By allowing the physical body to execute them, these movements are checked in the etheric body, but react upon us again, this time with a health-giving effect.

This has a certain visible effect on man, both in a hygienic- therapeutic and a didactic-pedagogical way. But such things can only be understood if we know that something, striving to manifest in the etheric body of man, must be restrained at the periphery by the movements of the physical body. In one case an element pertaining more to the will is restrained through eurythmy, in the other case a more intellectual element through drawing and painting. But fundamentally speaking, these are merely the two poles of one and the same process.

If now we feel our way into this process and incorporate it into our sensitive capacity as teacher, then we arrive at the third feeling we have need of. This feeling should really permeate us through the whole of our elementary school teaching, namely that the human being on entering the world is exposed to things from which we must actually be shielding him through our teaching.

Otherwise he would flow out too actively into the world. In fact, a man always has the tendency to become rachitic in soul, to make his limbs rachitic, to become a gnome. While we instruct and educate him, we are forming him. We sense this formative activity best when we follow the way a child makes a form drawing and then smooth it out somewhat, so that the result is not what the child wants and also not what I want, but the product of both. If I am able to do this—to improve what the child lets happen through his fingers, yet having my feeling, my sympathy flow into it and live with the child—then the best will come of it. If I now transform this into a feeling and permeate myself with it, its result is a shielding of the child from being drawn too strongly into the outer world.

We have to let the child grow slowly into the outer world; we dare not let this happen too quickly. We hold a protective hand over the child at all time; this is the third feeling.

Reverence, enthusiasm and a sense of guardianship—these three things actually form the panacea, the universal remedy in the soul of the teacher and educator. And if we wanted to create something externally, artistically, that as a group¹ would incorporate art and education, then we should have to create this:

Reverence for what has preceded the child's earthly existence. Enthusiasm in regarding what is to follow the child's life. A protective gesture over all that the child is experiencing.²

By such a fashioning of the teacher's nature, its outer manifestation would also come to its best expression.

In speaking of such matters, drawn from the intimacies of world-mysteries, we sense how unsatisfactory it must always be to make use of conventional language. If we are forced to say such things in ordinary language, then we have the feeling a supplementation is needed. Something is always there that would shift over from the more abstract lingual form to the artistic. For that reason I wanted to make this final point.

This is something we must learn. We have to learn to carry in us something of that future conviction, which will consist in this: the possession of science alone turns a man into something like a dwarf in soul and spirit. No one who is merely a scientist will have the urge to transform the scientific into the artistic, even in the shaping of his thoughts. But only through the artistic do we grasp the world. And we can always say, the man to whom nature reveals her secrets feels a hunger for art.

You should have the feeling, that insofar as you are simply a scientist you are a moon-calf. Only when you transform your organism of soul, spirit and body, only when your knowledge assumes an artistic form, do you become a man. In essence, developments in the future—and in these education will have to play its part—will lead from science to an artistic grasp of the world, from the moon-calf to the full human being.

• 1. This is not an exact quotation, but altered slightly to correspond with the teachings of ancient mystery schools
• 1. cf. in this regard the Group statue at the Goetheanum. Tr.
• 2. Rudolf Steiner accompanied each of these sentences with a gesture. An indication for the first is missing; for the second a guiding, pointing hand; for the third both hands raised with finger-tips inclined toward each other.

It is essential, in life, that man's connections with his environment are properly regulated. Produce supplied by the outer world can be eaten and digested by us in a suitable way; but we would not be feeding ourselves properly if we were to imbibe produce that had already been partly digested by man. This shows you that the essential thing is that certain things should be taken in from outside in a particular form, and acquire their value for life by being worked on further by man himself.

The same thing applies at a higher level also, for example in the art of education. Here, the essential thing is to know what we ought to learn and what we ought to invent out of what we have learnt, when we are actually taking a lesson. If you study education as a science, consisting of all kinds of principles and formulated statements, that is roughly the same, in terms of education, as choosing to eat food already partly digested by man. But if you undertake a study of the being of man, and learn to understand the human being in this way, what you are then receiving corresponds to food in its natural form. And then, when we are giving the lesson, from out of this knowledge of man there will arise in us, in a very individual form, the art of education itself. This has actually to be invented by the teacher every moment of the time. I want to put this point as an introduction to today's talk.

In teaching and education two elements interweave in a remarkable way. I would like to call one of them the musical element, the element of sound that we hear, and the other one can be called the pictorial element, the element we see. Other sense qualities are intermingled with what we hear on the one hand and see on the other, of course, and in certain circumstances these can be of secondary importance for the lesson, but they are not as important as seeing and hearing.

Now is is essential that we really understand these processes right down to the point where we understand what is actually going on in the body. You will know that nowadays external science sees a difference between man's so-called sensory nerves, that apparently run from the senses to the brain or the central organ, conveying perception and mental imagery, and his motor nerves, that apparently run from the central organ to the organs of movement and set them in motion. You will realise that from the standpoint of initiation science we have to challenge this classification. There is absolutely no such difference between the so-called sensory nerves and the motor nerves. Both are one and the same, and the motor nerves do not really perform any function other than perceiving the moving limb and the actual process of movement the moment it happens; they have nothing to do with actually giving the impulse of will. So we can say that we have nerves that run from our periphery more towards the centre, and we also have nerves that run from the centre to the ends of the organs of movement. But they are basically the same nerve strands, .and the essential thing is only that there is an interruption between these uniform nerves; that is, the soul streaming through the sensory nerves to the centre for instance, undergoes a break, as it were, at the centre, and has to jump across, without however becoming any different, to the so-called motor nerve, which also does not alter in any respect, but is exactly the same as the sensory nerve—just like, say, an electric spark or an electric current that jumps across a switch-board when transmission is interrupted. It is just that the motor nerve has the capacity to perceive the process of movement and the moving limb. But there is something that gives us the possibility of looking very closely into this whole organic process where soul currents and bodily processes interwork.

Let us begin by supposing we are living in the perception of a picture, in the perception of something that is principally conveyed by the organ of sight, a drawing, a form of any kind living in our environment, that is, anything that becomes the property of our soul because we have eyes. We must now distinguish three very distinctly different inner activities. Firstly perception as such. This perception as such actually takes place within the organ of sight.

Secondly we have to distinguish understanding. And here we have to be clear about the fact that all understanding is conveyed by man's rhythmic system, not by his system of nerves and senses. Perception, alone, is conveyed by the nerve-senses system, and we only understand a picture process, for example, because the rhythmical process regulated by the heart and the lungs proceeds through the brain fluid to the brain. The vibrations going on in the brain receive their stimulus in man's rhythmic system, and it is these vibrations that are the actual bodily conveyers of understanding. We can understand, because we breathe.

You can see how frequently these things are misinterpreted by physiology today! The belief is that understanding has something to do with man's nervous system. Yet in reality it is due to the rhythmic system receiving and assimilating what we perceive and visualise. Through this fact though, that the rhythmic system is connected with understanding, understanding becomes intimately connected with man's feeling. And whoever looks at himself very closely will see the connections between understanding and actual feeling. Actually we have to see the truth of something we understand before we can agree with it. For it is our rhythmic system that supplies the meeting place for our understanding of knowledge and the soul's element of feeling.

Then there is a third element, which is the absorbing of information so that our memory can retain it. Thus with each process of this kind we have to distinguish perception, understanding, and sufficient assimilation for the memory to retain it. And this third element is connected with the metabolic system. Those very delicate inner processes of metabolism going on in the organism are connected with memory, and we should pay attention to these, for as teachers we have particular reason to know about them. Notice what a different kind of memory pale children have compared with children who have nice rosy cheeks, or how different with regard to memory the various human races are. Everything of this kind is dependent on the delicate organisation and processes of the metabolism. And we can, for example, strengthen the memory of a pale child if, as teachers, we are in the position to see that he gets some sound sleep, so that the delicate processes in his metabolism receive more stimulation. And another way of helping his memory would be to bring about a rhythm for him, in our teaching, between just listening and working on his own. Now supposing you let the child listen too much. He will manage to perceive, and he will also understand at a pinch, because he is breathing all the time and therefore keeping his brain fluid moving; but the will of the child will not be sufficiently exerted. The will, as you know, is connected with the metabolism. So if you let the child get too much into the habit of watching and listening do not let him do enough work by himself, you will not be able to educate and teach him well—because inner assimilation is connected with the metabolism and the will, and the will is not being active enough. Therefore you have to find the right rhythm between listening and watching and working individually. For retention will not be good unless the will works into the metabolism and stimulates the memory to assimilate. These are delicate physiological matters that spiritual science will gradually have to understand in great detail.

Whilst all this refers to experiencing the pictorial element conveyed by means of sight, it is different in the case of everything relating to the element of sound, to the more or less musical element; and I do not only mean the musical element that lives in music, which only serves as the clearest example, and applies par excellence, but I mean everything to do with what we hear, living more in language and so on. I am referring to all that, when 1 speak of the sounding element. And here—however paradoxical it may sound—it is exactly the opposite process of the one I have just described. The sense organisation in the ear is inwardly connected in a very delicate way with all the nerves that present-day physiology calls motor nerves, but which are in fact the same thing as sensory nerves; so that all we experience as audible is perceived by the nerve strands embedded in our limb organisation. Everything musical has to penetrate deep inside our organism first of all—and our ear nerves are organised for this—and in order to be perceived properly it has to seize hold of the nerves deep within our organism those nerves in which otherwise only the will is active. For those areas in the human organism that convey memory of pictorial expedience—convey the actual perception of musical experiences. So if you look for the area in the organism where the memory of visual perceptions is developed you will also find the nerves that convey the actual perception of sound. Here we see the reason why, for instance, Schopenhauer and others brought music into such intimate connection with the will. Musical perceptions are perceived in the same place as visual perceptions are remembered, namely in the realms of the will. The place where musical perceptions are understood is again the rhythmic system. That is what is so impressive about the human organism, that these things intertwine in such a remarkable way. Our perceptions of visual things meet with our perceptions of audible things and are interwoven in a common inner soul experience because they are both understood in the rhythmic system. Everything we perceive is understood in the rhythmic system. Visual perceptions are perceived by the separate head organism and audible perceptions by the whole limb organism. Visual perceptions stream into the organism; audible perceptions stream from the organism upwards. And you must now combine this with what I said in the first talk. You can do this very well if you feel it. Through the fact that both worlds meet in the rhythmic system something arises in our soul experience that is a combination of audible experiences and visual experiences. And the musical element, that is, everything we hear, is remembered in the same realm where visual things have their sense-nerve organs. These are at one and the same time the kind of organs that appear to be sense-nerve organs, and external physiology calls them that, yet in reality they are connected with the metabolism, and convey the delicate metabolism of the head realm and bring about musical memories. In the same realms in which perception of visual things take place musical memory, the remembering of everything audible, takes place. We remember what we hear in the same realm as we perceive what we see. We perceive what we hear in the same realm as we remember what we see. And both cross over like a lemniscate in the rhythmic system where they intermesh.

Anyone who has ever studied musical memory—and despite the fact that we all take it for granted, it is a wonderful and mysterious thing—will find how entirely different it is from the memory of visual perceptions. It is based on a particularly delicate organisation of the head metabolism, and although in its general character it is also related to the will, and therefore to the metabolism, it is situated in an entirely different realm of the body from the memory of visual perceptions, which is likewise connected with the will.

You see, if you reflect on these things, you will be impressed by how complicated the speech process is. Due to the rhythmic system being so intimately connected with the organs of speech, understanding only comes about when the speech process unfolds from within. But it comes about in a remarkable way, and to help you understand it fully perhaps I may remind you of Goethe's theory of colour. Quite apart from the fact that Goethe calls the red-yellow side of the spectrum warm and the blue-violet side cold, let us recall how he brings the perception of colour and the perception of sound closer together. According to him the red-yellow side of the spectrum 'sounds' different from the blue-violet side, as it were, and he connects it with major and minor, which is certainly a more inward aspect of tone experience. You can find this in those parts of his scientific works that were published in the Weimar edition, from his unprinted material, and which I included in the last volume of my Kuerschner edition. And we can certainly say that if we look into the inner man more in the style in which Goethe describes the theory of colour, we arrive at something remarkable. When we speak it is, as it were, the sound of speech that comes to life first within man. Indeed, the element of sound lives in speech, yet this sound is altered in a certain way. I would like to describe it by saying that the sound is mixed with something that 'dulls it down' when we speak. This is really not just a metaphor but something that has to do with real processes when we say that the actual tone is 'coloured' when we speak. The same thing happens within us as it does in the case ol external colour when we perceive it as having a 'tone'. We do not perceive the tone in the external colour either, but we hear something sounding forth from every colour, as it were. We do not see a colour when we say E or U any more than we hear the tones when we see yellow or blue. But we experience the same thing when we become aware of the sound of speech as we do when we experience the sound of colour. The world of sight and the world of sound overlap here. The colours we see in the world outside us have a pronounced visual nature and a subtle sound nature that enters into us in the way I described in a previous talk. Speech, coming from within us towards the surface, has a pronounced sound nature and a subtle colour nature in its various sounds, that comes to expression more in the child before the seventh year, as I told you previously. From this you see that colour is more pronounced in the outer world and sound more pronounced in man's inner world, and that cosmic music moves beneath the surface in the outer world, whereas beneath the surface of sound in man there hovers an astral element of hidden colour.

And if you properly understand the marvellous organism that comes forth from man as actual speech, you will feel, when you hear it, all the vibrations of the astral body within the colourful movements that pass directly into speech. They work in man in other ways, too, of course. But they get unusually excited, gather up in the area of the larynx where they receive impacts from the sun and the moon, and this brings about something like a play of forces in the astral body that come to external expression in the movements of the larynx. And now you have the possibility of having a picture of this at least: when you listen to any kind of language you are looking at the astral body which straight away passes its vibrations onto the etheric body, thus making the two bodies work more closely as one. Now if you draw this, you will get pure movement coming from the human organism, and you will obtain the kind of eurythmy that is always being carried out by the astral body and etheric body together, when a person speaks. Nothing is arbitrary, for you would solely be making visible what is continually happening invisibly.

Why do we do this nowadays? We do it because it lies within us that nowadays we have to do consciously what we used to do unconsciously; for man's whole evolution consists in gradually bringing down into the sense world what originally only existed spiritually in the supersensible. The Greeks, for instance, actually still thought with their souls; their thinking was still entirely of a soul nature, Modern man, especially since the middle of the fifteenth century, thinks with his brain. Materialism is actually a perfectly correct theory for modern man. For what was still soul experience for the Greeks has gradually imprinted itself into the brain. This is inherited in the brain from generation to generation, and modern man now thinks with imprints in the brain; he now thinks by means of material processes. This had to come. Only now we have to go up again; what has to be added to these processes is that man raises himself up to what comes from the supersensible world. Therefore we now have to do the opposite of the former imprinting of soul in the body, that is, we have to take hold, in freedom, of the spiritual supersensible element, through spiritual science. But this has to be consciously taken in hand, if human evolution is to continue. We have consciously to bring man's visible body into movement, just as it has been done for us up till now in the invisible realm, without our being conscious of it. Then we shall be consciously carrying on in the direction in which the gods worked when they imprinted thinking into the brain, if we make invisible eurythmy visible. If we did not do this, mankind would fall asleep. Although all kinds of things would flood into the human ego and astral body from the spiritual worlds, this would only happen during sleep, and on awakening these things would never get passed on to the physical body.

When people do eurythmy it does a service to both the audience and the eurythmists, for they all get something of importance from it. In the case of eurythmists, the eurythmic movements make their physical organisms receptive to the spiritual world, for the movements want to come down from there. By preparing themselves for this the eurythmists are, as it were, making themselves into organs for receiving processes from the spiritual world. In the case of the audience, the movements living in their astral body and ego are intensified, as it were. If after seeing a eurythmy performance you could wake up suddenly in the night you would see that you had got much more from it than if you had been to a concert and heard a sonata; eurythmy has an even stronger effect than that. It strengthens the soul by bringing it into living contact with the supersensible. But a certain healthy balance must be maintained. If you have too much of it, the soul has a restless night in the spiritual world when the person should be asleep, and this restlessness in the soul would be the counterpart of physical nervousness.

You can see these things as an indication that we should look at the marvellous construction of our human organisation and perceive more and more what it is really like. On the one hand our attention is drawn to the physical, where everything points to the fact that there is no part of our body without spirit in it, and on the other hand we see that the spiritual soul part has the urge not to remain separated from physical experience. And it is of special interest to let these things that I have spoken to you about again today work on you, and look to their educational value. Say for example you do a lively meditation on the whole life of the musical element in man in the will realm of things we see, and another one on the life of musical memories in the realm where we have perceptions of what we see—and vice versa, if you connect what is in the realm where we have perceptions of what we hear with what is in the realm where we remember what we see,—if you bring all these things together and meditate on them, you can be sure of one thing, and that is that the power of inventiveness you will need for teaching children will be sparked off in you.

Ideas like these on spiritual scientific education are all aimed at a better understanding of man. And if you meditate on them these things are bound to have an effect on you. You see, if for instance you eat a piece of bread and butter, it is in the first place a conscious process; but what happens after that, when the piece of bread and butter goes through the complicated process of digestion, you cannot have much influence on. The process takes place nevertheless, and is of great importance to your general well-being. Now if you work at the study of man like we have been doing, you experience it consciously to start with; yet if you subsequently meditate on it, an inner process of digestion goes on in your soul and spirit making a teacher and educator of you. Just as the metabolism makes you a living person, this meditative digesting of a true study of man makes you an educator. You simply encounter the child in an entirely different way when you experience the results of a real, anthroposophical study of man. What we become, what works in us and makes us teachers, comes into being through our working meditatively at this kind of study of man. And if we keep on returning to ideas like these, if only for five minutes a day, our whole inner life of soul will be brought into movement. We shall produce so many thoughts and feelings they will just pour out of us. If you meditate on the study of man in the evening, then next morning you will know in a flash 'Of course, you must now do this or that with Johnnie Smith'—or 'This girl lacks such and such,' and so on. That is, you will know what to do in any situation.

In our lives as human beings the important thing is to let inner and outer things work together in this way. You do not even need a lot of time for this. Once you have got the knack, in three seconds you can get an inner grasp of things that will often keep you going for a whole day's teaching. Time ceases to have any significance when it is a matter of bringing supersensible things to life. The spirit has different laws. Just as you can be thinking about something when you wake up that could have taken weeks to happen, yet it shot through your head in no time at all—what comes to you out of the spirit can stretch out in time. Just as everything contracts in a dream, things we receive from the spirit expand in time. So by doing a meditation like this, you can, if you are 40 or 45 years of age, carry out the whole inner transformation you need for your teaching, in five minutes, and you will be quite different in ordinary life than you were before.

Documents have been written about things of this kind of people who have experienced them. You have to understand these things. But you must also understand that the kind of thing experienced by a few individuals to a high degree, in a way that can throw light on the whole of life, must take place in miniature in the case of the teacher.

He must take in the study of man, understand the study of man through meditation, then remember the study of man, and the remembering will become vigorous life. It is not the usual kind of remembering, but a remembering that gives forth new, inner impulses. In this instance memory springs forth from the life of spirit, and what we call the third stage appears in our work; namely, following in the wake of meditative understanding comes a creative remembering which is at one and the same time a receiving from the spiritual world. Thus we start with a receiving or perceiving of the study of man, then comes an understanding, a meditative understanding of the study of man, that goes into its inner aspect where the study of man is received by the whole of our rhythmic system; and then comes a remembering of it out of the spirit. This means teaching creatively from out of the spirit; the art of education comes about. It must, be a conviction, a frame of mind.

You must see the human being in such a way that you constantly feel these three stages within you. And the more you come to the point of saying to yourself 'There is my external body, my skin, and that contains the power to receive the study of man, the power to understand the study of man in meditation, the power to be fructified by God in the remembering of the study of man'—the more you have this feeling within you, the more you will be a real teacher.

If we look at man's constitution and then apply the knowledge thus gained to the growing human being, to the child, the following (picture) emerges: out of the spiritual worlds comes into this one, I should like to say on wings of astrality, the ego being of man; and turning our attention to the first years of a child's life, observing how the child develops, how by degrees he brings his physiognomy from the depth of his inner being to the surface of his body, how he gains greater and greater mastery over his organism, then that which we see is essentially the incorporation of the ego. Considering this incorporation of the ego we can characterise what is happening in different ways, and you have so far met mainly two ways in which this can be done.

Latterly more stress has been laid on the fact that that which has hitherto worked in the body, organised the body, emancipates itself from the body with the change of teeth, frees itself from the body to work on as intelligence. Thus we can describe this process from one aspect. However, one can also do it the way it was done in earlier days when the whole subject was brought to man's understanding from a different point of view and it was said: with the change of teeth man's etheric body is being born; the physical body is born at birth, the etheric body round about the seventh year. So what seen from one side we can call the birth of the etheric body, seen from another side is the emancipation of intelligence from the physical body. It is only a two-sided description of one and the same fact. Indeed, we gain a true understanding only if we bring two such aspects to a synthesis. In spiritual science nothing can be characterised without approaching a fact from different sides and then combining the different aspects to one comprehensive view. To have any spiritual content fully contained in one single characterisation is just as impossible as it is to give a whole melody in a single tone. You must characterise it from different sides. This is what people who understood something of these matters in bygone times called harmonious listening (zusammenhoren), that is to hear the various explanations in harmony with one another.

Well , what happens further., In that which is set free—whether we call it the ether body or intelligence does not matter—the ego, which in a way descended at birth, streams, gradually organising it through and through; which means that there takes place a mutual permeation of the eternal I and that which is being formed: the slowly liberating intelligence, or the ether body which is in the process of being born.

And then, looking at the ensuing age, the time from the seventh to the fourteenth year, that is up to the time of puberty, we can say from a certain point of view that an element of will, a musical element is being absorbed; yes, this process is from one of its aspects indeed best described when we say: is being absorbed: for what lies in the outer world is really the musical element and all that which is being absorbed as music, as sound is vibrating through the astral body. Through this activity the astral body is emancipated from the connection which it had up to this time with the whole organism. From another point of view we can therefore say with regard to the child: in puberty the birth of the astral body takes place. But once again it is the ego which then as an eternal being unites itself with that which is being liberated, so that from birth to puberty, that is up to the age of about fourteen or more, we are concerned with a progressive anchoring of the ego in the entire human organism. From the seventh year on the ego fastens itself only to the etheric body, while before then, when the human being is still an imitator, the ego anchors itself precisely through this imitative activity in the physical body, and then later, even after puberty, the ego penetrates the astral body. So what takes place is a continuous penetration of the human organism by the ego, which can be seen really and concretely as I have described it.

This sphere has an immense significance for the educator. For—as I have indicated in my article on the artistic element in education in the last copy of Social Future—all education and teaching should always be carried out in the light of this gradual incorporation of the ego into the human organism as I have just described it; this process of the ego's incorporation in the human organism should be guided through an artistic education. What does this mean?

It means, for example, that the ego must not enter the physical body, etheric body and astral body too deeply, but that on the other hand it must neither be kept too much outside. If it settles down too firmly in the human organism, if the ego unites with them too intensively, man becomes too much an exclusively corporeal being; he will then think only with his brain, will be entirely dependent on his organism, in short he will become too earthly, the ego will have been too strongly absorbed by the bodily organisation. That we must avoid. Through our education we must try to avoid everything that would lead to the ego becoming too strongly absorbed by the bodily organisation, becoming too dependent on it. You will understand the utter seriousness of this matter when I tell you that the cause of the criminality and brutality of some men lies in the fact that their ego was allowed to be absorbed too strongly during their years of growing up. The characteristics of degeneracy, found by anthropologists and known to you, which manifest fully only in later years, reveal themselves often as an ego which has been too strongly absorbed by the rest of the bodily organisation. And if there is such a man born with the earlobe of a criminal, it is all the more important that we see to it, that his ego will not sink too deeply into the rest of his organisation. Because through a true artistic treatment in education we can avoid that even in a man with degenerate physical characteristics the ego sinks too deeply into his organism, we can thus save him from becoming a criminal.

We can, on the other hand, fall a prey to making the opposite mistake. There is a difficulty here. As we may place too small or too large a weight on one side of the scales—if the weight is too small, the other side will not rise; if it is too large, it will rise too high and we have to set the balance right—so, we have to face a similar fact in the realities of life. Living reality cannot be contained in rigid concepts; and in trying to rectify one error we may always fall into the opposite. With regard to a child it is therefore the intimate factors of life which are all important so that we never bring out one side or another too strongly but rather develop a feeling for the fact that in education one has to create an artistic balance. Because if one does not see to it that the ego unites with the organism in a right way, then it can happen that it remains too much outside, and the consequence will be that the person becomes a dreamer or follows fancies, or becomes altogether useless in life because he only lives in fantasies. This would be the other mistake, that one does not let the ego sink deeply enough into the organism. Even those, who in their childhood showed a tendency to fancifulness, to false romanticism, to theosophy in the wrong way, can be protected from this by their teacher when he or she sees to it that the ego does not stay outside the rest of the organism, but penetrates it in the right way. When one notices the well- known Theosophists mark, which all children who are inclined to theosophy bring with them at birth—a small bump rising a little way behind the forehead—then one must strive to prevent this tendency to fancifulness and false romanticism through pressing the ego more strongly into the organism. But how do we bring about the one thing and how the other?

We can work in one direction or another, when we acquaint ourselves with the means which can achieve this. They are the following: everything in teaching and education which is geometry and. arithmetic, everything which necessitates the forming of mental images of number and space helps the ego to settle itself well into the organism, provided the child takes it in and works it through. Equally, everything in language which is of a musical nature, for example rhythm in recitation, etc, helps the ego to settle properly into the organism. Music will be specially beneficial for a somewhat fanciful child when we use it in such a way that we develop the child's ability to recollect music, his musical, memory. These are the means we must use when we notice that the ego of a child does not want to enter into the organism properly, when the child might easily remain fanciful. In the moment, however, when we notice that a child is becoming too earthly, that the ego is too strongly dependent on the body, we let the child draw the forms which are otherwise grasped more through thought. The moment we let the child draw geometrical forms we create a force which works counter to the situation which draws the ego into the organism. You will see from this that we can indeed educate rightly, when we use the various subjects in the right way.

When in a child, who by virtue of his gift or through other circumstances may be receiving a special musical training, we notice that he becomes too dependent on his organism, that a certain heaviness becomes apparent in his singing, then we must try to guide him to practise more spontaneous listening and less his musical memory. We can always work for a balance: either help the child to suck in his ego more deeply through the measures I have characterized, or protect the ego from remaining outside too much if we haven't brought about the right balance. It is specially good when we try to regulate things through the way we teach a language. All the musical elements in a language contribute to the ego being sucked in. When I notice that this happens too strongly in a child, I will try to involve him in something which is more concerned with the meaning and the content of what is said. I will work with the child in such a way that I call upon him for the meaning of things. On the other hand, should I notice that the child is becoming fanciful, then I will rather make him take up recitation, rhythm and metre in the language. As a teacher one must acquire this as an art and develop a certain force in it.

There are whole subjects which help us when we want to protect the ego from being sucked into the organism too strongly. These are above all geography, history and all those where the emphasis is on the picture element and on drawing. In history, for example, it can be done excellently when you develop your story in such a way—this is of importance—that the child's inner life, his feeling participates in it deeply, so that you call up in him reverence, or if you like hatred, for a character if the personality you describe is deserving hatred. Such a treatment of history makes a special contribution towards the child's not becoming too earthly. But if through insight into the child's development, which we must acquire, we have gained the impression that through an overdose of this kind of history lesson we have made the child a little inclined towards fanciful dreaminess, if we notice that the child begins to bubble over a little in this way, then we must try something different. And all this must be integrated within the curriculum. One must start at the right age and for that reason it is good to keep our eye on such a child over years. If one sees that a child becomes too fanciful, gets a bit out of himself through the stories of history, then, if the time is right, one must permeate history with ideas, must show the great connections. Thus, the individual treatment of events or personalities of history protects the child from his ego being sucked into the body too strongly; the permeation of history with ideas which pervade periods of time further the ego's union with the body.

Too much drawing and too many images can also easily lift the ego out of the body and thus make it fanciful , but the antidote is at once at hand: one makes such a child that has become fanciful through too much drawing or painting understand the meaning of what he draws: when I let the child draw a Rosetta I make him think about it, or when he writes I lead him to admire the letters, the forms of the letters, to which I have drawn his attention. So while the child goes out of himself through the mere activity of writing and drawing, by observing what he has drawn or written he comes into himself.

Such examples show us how in teaching and education we can use every detail rightly when we develop it truly out of art. It is essential that we really take such things seriously into consideration. Take for instance the teaching of Geography. On the whole it protects the ego from being drawn too deeply into the organism, which means that we can make good use of it with a child who is in danger of becoming too earthbound; we will lead such a child to an active interest in Geography. On the other hand, however, should a child be in danger of becoming fanciful through lessons in Geography, then, by making him for instance grasp the differences of altitudes on earth, or by introducing anything into our teaching of Geography which requires a more geometrical kind of thinking, we will be able to bring the child's ego back into his organism.

The value of these things will only be fully appreciated when one can perceive the wonderful structure of the human organism and its harmony with the universe, the cosmos. It is wonderful to think that what we have observed in a child's development between birth and puberty is an interplay between cosmic-formative (plastiche>) and cosmic-musical forces. This interplay unfolds of course in the most diverse variations. And—I think, I have pointed to this important fact in various connections before, but I should like to mention it once more, because it can be very helpful here—if you look at the human constitution you will find on the one hand the physical body and the etheric body: these two never separate from each other between birth and death: in a certain way they are constantly united between birth and death. On the other hand, the physical body and the ether body separate from the astral body—first of all the ether body from the astral body—when one falls asleep and they join again when one wakes up. Thus we can see that the ether body and the astral body are less firmly bound to each other than, for instance, the physical body and the etheric body are; equally strongly connected, on the other hand, are the ego and the astral body which do not separate from each other while one is asleep. Well, what is man through his physical body here on earth? He is a being who lives in intimate interaction with the surrounding air. A certain quantity of air is at one moment in our body, at another outside it; we breathe in, we breathe out. This in and out breathing reveals in a delicate way the difference between man'1, waking and his sleeping condition. There is a subtle difference and in matters of great importance the subtle differences are often more significant than others. What happens here takes place through interaction between the astral body and the etheric body. It takes place in waking man, and also when man is asleep. This interplay between the musical element and the formative element during man's formative years (Entwicklungszeit) is the continual and mutual permeation of the vibrations of the astral body in which the ego participates and the vibrations of the ether body which are shared by the physical body. Fundamentally, in the morning man breathes in his ego and his astral body and on falling asleep he breathes them out again.

This is in a way a large breathing process which we can compare with the small breathing process. In truth, with every falling asleep we leave our physical body and our etheric body and enter then into a more intimate connection with the surrounding air, because our ego and our astral body are then directly in the air. When we are awake we direct our breathing from inside, when we are asleep we do it from outside, we direct it from out of our soul. From the fact that on the one hand the air, a certain amount of it, is now out of and then again in the human organism, and on the other hand that the entire human constitution from the physical body to the ego is involved in this breathing process, you can see that we shall have to investigate closely the significance of this interaction between the human constitution and the air.

Well, you have all learnt some physics and you will remember how hard teachers usually tried, tried as conscientious teachers will , to explain to the children or the young people that air, which consists of oxygen and nitrogen, is not a chemical compound but a kind of mixture. Looking at air in this way, we accept that the connection between oxygen and nitrogen does not develop into a chemical compound but remains a looser one than it would be in a chemical compound. What has this fact to do with man? This, that it is a cosmic picture of the other fact, namely that in man the astral body and the etheric body are but loosely connected with each other. If oxygen and nitrogen formed a chemical compound in the air, if they were chemically united, then man's etheric body and his astral body would also be so tightly linked that they could not be separated and we would never be able to go to sleep. The connection which exists in us between etheric body and astral body is mirrored in the external constituency of the air; and, vice versa, the constitution of the air outside as a mixture of oxygen and nitrogen mirrors the inner relationship between etheric body and astral body in the human organism. Thus is man organised in accordance with the cosmos. Thus he is inwardly a microcosm, with the only difference that in the outer world certain things are ordered in a physical way while in man they are of the order of the soul. Outside, in nature, we have to deal with the physical laws prevailing between oxygen and nitrogen; inside, in man, we have the laws of soul active in the relationship of etheric body and astral body. And, when, on the one hand, we look at man and what happens in the human organism—a scientist of the spirit can observe this—we realise that when he breathes we have in the wonderful vibrations, which we describe as vibrations of light, a swift intermingling of astral and etheric vibrations. Then, on the other hand, we see how the same thing one step lower down happens in the physical process of out and in breathing. Looking at this we can positively see how man as a spirit and soul being frees himself constantly from his physical environment just as when in a mixture the heavier parts fall to the bottom, separating themselves out from the mixture, while the lighter parts remain above. Such processes take place in infinitely manifold ways in man himself. And they must be part of all that we relate to by becoming aware of it, taking it in, perceiving it, and so understand it and, as I described yesterday, can transform it in meditative recollection into artistic, creative pedagogy.

Then there is yet something else which we shall have to consider. What is it that carries our ego on its descent from spirit worlds through birth into this physical world? It is the head which carries it. The head is, so to say, the carriage in which the ego journeys into the physical world. And when it has arrived (hereingefahren ist) at this transition from the spiritual to the physical world, it completely changes its whole state of life. No matter how paradoxical this may appear to someone who looks at things only from outside, before we get ready to be born here on earth we are in constant movement in the spirit world: yes, there movement is our native element. Should we want to continue this movement we would never be able to enter into the physical world. We are safeguarded from continuing this movement through the head organisation which adjusts itself to the rest of the organism so that, in a manner of speaking, our head organisation becomes a carriage in which we ride into the physical world, but which comes to a halt when it has arrived and remains comfortably supported on the rest of the organism. And though the rest of the body walks, the head does not participate in this movement. Just as a man who travels in a carriage or a train is himself at rest, so the ego which was prenatally in constant movement, has come to rest once it has arrived in the physical world; it has ceased making the movements which it previously made. This points to something of extraordinary significance.

The present day embryologist, studying the evolution of the human fÅ“tus (Keim) notices that to begin with the head is much larger and more configurated compared with the rest of the angular and unconfigurated members of the human being, which develop properly only later. But he looks at this process as if every part of it were of the same nature. It must be admitted that embryological science is rather meaningless, so meaningless that it is difficult to find common ground with a modern physiologist because his thinking works on a different plane altogether. What matters is that fertilization affects essentially only the limb nature of man, only that which is not of 'head nature'; because the head of the human being receives its configuration basically not from the male parent but from the entire cosmos. In fact the human head is conceived not from the seed of the male but from the whole cosmos. The germ (Aulagezum) of the human head is present already in the unfertilized human cell and the head, which in the unfertilized human cell is still under a cosmic influence, is affected by this fertilization in the following manner. First of all this fertilization works on the rest of the organism and only as this organism develops do the effects of the embryonic development work back on the head. So that—even by studying the embryonic development of the human embryo from quite an external point of view, but by really studying it—we can observe how the head forms itself out of the mother's womb, not yet under the direct but only the indirect influence of the forces of fertilization; it is just like building a carriage in a workshop, a carriage which is then to carry a passenger: they come towards each other—in the same way the head is being prepared so that it can receive the descending human being in accordance with his ego. And for a long time after birth, actually through all his formative years, man bears the traces of the growing union between his human and his cosmic organisation.

When the spirit of the pedagogy which we want to nurture here has entered the teacher, I should like to say as a real soul habit, then the following will happen. Those who are standing in front of a class will be enormously fascinated by that which takes place in individual children, because even between their seventh and their fourteenth year a distinct differentiation can be made—certainly only by intimate observation—between a separating, a receding of a superhuman organisation from the head and a penetration of the head with forces that stream up and pour in from the rest of the organism. In your thinking you will have to set this side by side with what was said in the first and the second lesson, because in a certain way the one has to be balanced by the other. But it must always be interesting to us to study in a child the difference between the sculptural form of the head and the formation of the rest of the organism. For this it is necessary, however, to look at both of them in a different way. If you want to consider the changes which take place within the head, you must approach them with the feelings of a sculptor; if, on the other hand, you wish to consider those changes which the rest of the organism undergoes, you must feel yourself a musician doing Eurythmy. For as far as the rest of the organism is concerned it is of little use to observe how, for example, the fingers grow, etc; instead you must take note of the change in the child's manner of moving. These movements work back on the formation of the organism, not, however, through their form content (die FormgebiIde), but through their dynamics. If someone has got enormously long legs and arms, then they will be heavier than under normal circumstances. It is not their form which has a distinct effect but the force of weight with which they work; and it is this weight which influences the musical forming of the movements. And if one wants to assess rightly a human being whose arms and legs have grown so long that he does not know what to do with them, then one will have to approach life with a sense of music (lebens musikalische Beurteilung) and one must feel that the child's legs, because they are too long, have the tendency of being in each other's way and that therefore the movements become abnormal, or that the arms never know what they are meant to do because their weight has too great an effect. It is wonderful to think that through spiritual science one can get to know the human being so intimately, if one proceeds in such a way! One may then cease to judge matters emotionally, as one might have been prone to do. If someone has small hands and small arms one will say to oneself: they will be far less inclined to box somebody's ear than if someone's arms and hands are too long, too heavy. In the latter case, instead of seeing it from an emotional point of view we will have to charge it to his Karma that he feels a ready urge to box people's ears.

Such considerations bring the human being, especially the growing one, much nearer to us. For there is a secret which is truly remarkable. You can, if you consider the form of the human body in this way, say to yourself; I am unravelling a human being's development, his soul make-up, from his bodily organisation; I am discovering the significance of a certain shape of head, of a certain weight of arms and legs, etc, of a certain way of setting your foot on the ground, for example if someone is more inclined to step with his toes or if he—like Fichte, whose whole figure bore witness to the fact—strides with his heels. All these things tell us an immense amount and can give us the feeling: this way you get to know man better. Of course these are not specially personal things, they are the way in which we express ourselves in our human-social encounters—encounters which are, however, more intimate between teacher and pupil when we educate. When we meet a man the feeling can arise in us: there is one thing you learn about him when you face him, in this way you can see what expresses itself musically; you learn another thing when you see him clearly from behind. One should derive one's rules for life out of the nature of life. For example, if a student with the right rules of life had sat in Fichte's lectures he would have listened to his lecture facing him, in order to take in what he said. However, in order to get to know Fichte's character, his whole manner of presenting himself (seines Auftretens), he would have had to look at him from behind. The form of the back of the head, the structure of his back, his hunched shoulders, the way in which he moved his hands, the manner of holding his head, were the features that called on us to see Fichte as the personality which he was in the world.

We can learn remarkable things, if we get to know children in this manner, if we are teachers who are inclined towards an understanding of Karma and less in the direction of a teacher who has taught in such a way that, being terribly annoyed about an emotional child, he admonished him again and again to sit still, to be quiet; told him: calm, calm, calm, please, and eventually, because he was driven to distraction, reached out for the inkpot and threw it at the child's head, saying: I'll teach you how to be quiet!—I am characterizing this in a somewhat radical fashion, but even in a less radical form we as teachers and educators must recognise such a thing as wrong.

If we are able to free ourselves from such behaviour and to direct our anthroposophical study of man more, as I have indicated, to the bodily form of the child, so that his organism can tell us something of the character of his soul, then we are occupying ourselves with a child in a different way from the usual one. And, strangely enough, through such an attitude towards the child we shall develop love towards him, we shall gradually understand him with greater and greater love. And precisely through that we shall gain a powerful feeling of support for teaching and educating the child lovingly. These ways, which I have tried here to describe to you, are the ways in which we as teachers and educators shall acquire the right attitudes and feelings. For it would be quite the wrong method if, for instance, someone wanting to become a composer thought he could learn to compose by merely using a book on music theory, or if someone else took a book on aesthetics, read everything that was said there about painting and hoped thereby to become a painter. He will not turn into a painter, he will only become a painter if he learns to use colours, the actual handling of colour right into every movement of his hand, and so on. And you will become a sculptor only through grasping the forms of an organism. It is immensely interesting to grasp the forms of an organism, also as it is done for example in the art of sculpture. You will have quite a different feeling as a sculptor when you form a head or when you form the rest of the organism. In forming the head you will feel the head is working on you from within itself, you would have to retreat and make room for the head formation; a pressure issues from within it. When, on the other hand, you sculpture the rest of the organism you will feel: you are exerting pressure and at the same time this section of the organism is withdrawing from you. So your feelings are just the opposite when sculpturing the head or all the rest of the organism. This shows us that in every case we have to learn the appropriate treatment. In education it is the same. If you wished to teach in a school by following a manual on pedagogy it would be just like wanting to become a painter through using a manual on aesthetics. Nothing will come of this. If, on the other hand, you will practise anthroposophical study of man as outlined, as we are doing here, then the pedagogical talent will spring up in you, because many more people have the right disposition for it than you would think. And then you will develop certain faculties which a teacher needs quite specially if he wants to be a good teacher.

There is no field where talk is more devoid of content than in the field of pedagogy, and this despite the great interest taken by many people. The reason why one feels so badly about the current ways of discussing educational matters is that they are affecting the next generation. But, as in so many other fields, and especially in this one, one can overcome the dilettante tirades through a deeper understanding of the human being. Even teachers have accepted the slogan: learning must be pleasure for the children. We do not take it amiss when such a thing is said by laymen; they mean well; but it is to be strictly rejected when passed on by professionals! For it is well to remember pedagogical reality and then consider certain things which are difficult for the children to overcome and ask yourself what you as a teacher can possibly do to make everything pure joy for the children. Or think of certain tendencies in children and put it to yourself, if one has such a child in school from morning till night what possibility is there for him to experience nothing but joy, joy, joy? It cannot be done: it is one of those slogans produced by people who stand outside the reality of things. The fact is that certain things will not be pleasurable for children but that they will have to experience them nevertheless. Were, for instance, the teacher to give to the child nothing but pleasure, the child would be unable to develop a feeling for duty, which can be acquired only if we learn to overcome ourselves. There would be no advantage in this. So, this is not the point; the point is quite a different one, namely: to gain through our pedagogical art the children's love so strongly that, under our guidance, they will do things that do not necessarily give pleasure, things which may even be unpleasant and even cause pain to a slight degree. We must say therefore: if the right kind of love is carried into teaching, if we succeed in awakening the right kind of love in children, then more than joy and pleasure will be developed in them—they will develop devotion (Anhanglichkeit) towards the teacher and then they will feel quite differently. They will feel then: there are many difficult things, but, for this or that teacher I will do even the difficult things.

These are matters which show us how we can overcome some difficulties in teaching when we are able to create the right relationship between teacher and pupil. Such a way of looking at matters differs from the views on teaching and educating as they are generally held by the laity.

My dear friends, on this occasion another meeting for further considerations will not be possible. There are endless other meetings to be gone through. We will only be able to gather once more for a teachers' meeting.

... In order to describe the super-sensible events which are of special importance for the time in which we are living, we must remind ourselves that all life in the universe rests upon an ascending evolution. If we follow the path of man's evolution we find him first as he was endowed in the beginning, in the old Saturn period; then we find him penetrated by a new element in the old Sun period, still further developed in the old Moon period, and in the Earth period endowed with the fourth element, the Ego. And we know moreover that in the Jupiter period his soul forces will take on such a form as will make him comparable with the Beings of the Hierarchy of the Angels.

Now just as man advances and ascends in his evolution, so do the other Beings of the different Hierarchies proceed from lower to higher stages. It is not only the human Hierarchy which is subject to this ascending evolution, but also the Hierarchies who are above mankind.

From among these Hierarchies let us take the one which stands two stages higher than man, the Hierarchy of the Archangels. As I said yesterday many intellectual people are prepared to accept it if one speaks of ‘spirit’ in general; but if one proceeds to classes, orders, individuals, as one does in speaking of plants, animals and other spheres in natural science, then the educated man of to-day feels hostile. But we must do so, if we wish to deal with the spiritual world in a real and concrete way.

If you will look at the lecture cycle I held in Christiania on the evolution of the races of mankind, you will see that the evolution of the races is connected with the Hierarchy of the Archangels. The successive epochs of mankind are subject to the Archai, the Spirits of Personality.

Now if we take the most important Beings in the ranks of the Archangels, we have names which we have met with in other connections and which we can use like other names,—Raphael, Gabriel, Michael and so on.

We can call these Beings by such names, for the name is in no way the essential thing. We give them names in the same way as we give other things names; that plays a certain role in what we find as facts of super-sensible evolution. Our physical evolution is however dependent upon this super-sensible evolution.

As a matter of fact we can distinguish scientifically between the separate Beings of the Hierarchy of the Archangels; not abstractly by mere name-labels, but in such a way that we can see how the principal impulses in civilisation which appear, for instance, in the sense world in a particular part of the earth in the first Christian centuries are governed by a different Being from the one who directed the principal impulse of civilisation,—say in the 12th and 13th centuries, or from the one who directs the cultural evolution of our own day.

Let us for the moment confine ourselves to what relates to our own epoch of civilisation. We have to distinguish quite sharply from other epochs the period which began about the 15th'16th century and which received its character from the rise of the new natural science. This epoch brought natural science to the height it attained in the 19th century, a greatness which cannot be sufficiently admired. When one surveys the work done by humanity as a whole in natural science in these centuries, one sees that it has been accomplished by certain peoples who were guided from the super-sensible world by a Being appointed from among the Hierarchy of the Archangels, and that this Being is quite distinct from the one who is directing from the super-sensible world the spiritual culture of the epoch which is just beginning. If one gives the names which in the West have become customary for these leaders amongst the Hierarchy of the Archangels, then from the Christian era onwards one can point to different Beings who have guided the progress of civilisation. Without wishing to lay stress on the names as such, I will enumerate the names of Beings in the Hierarchy of the Archangels, just as one mentions the names of men who have taken part in something on the physical plane. The order of Beings of the Hierarchy of the Archangels who have in turn controlled the progress of civilisation are Oriphiel, Anael, Zachariel, Raphael, Samael, Gabriel, and Michael.

Gabriel was the guiding Spirit in the cultural epoch which came to an end for the spiritual world with the last third of the 19th century. For with the last third of the 19th century—and this is a fact that will become more and more evident—an epoch begins into which quite different influences and impulses flow from the super-sensible into the sense world. Whereas during the previous period men's souls were bound to what the senses observe and what the mind can grasp, in the coming period the man who is not going to sleep through the march of evolution will above all have to observe how super-sensible wisdom and knowledge will flow increasingly from the super-sensible world into earthly sense-evolution.

Speaking in an external way one might describe it as follows. In the period of evolution that is now passed, the super-sensible Beings were engaged in guiding the forces from the super-sensible worlds, so that as far as possible they should flow into man's earthly physical body; the Hierarchies had to prevent these forces from flowing into man's soul. From now on, however, the super-sensible forces will be so directed and guided from the super-sensible world that as much as possible may be able to flow into the human soul, so that a knowledge of Imagination, Inspiration, Intuition, may lay hold of the human soul. The truly living impulses in the civilisation of the coming epoch will be as charged with Inspiration and Intuition as the preceding epoch has been lacking in all Inspiration and in all knowledge of the spiritual.

Fifty years ago it would have been impossible to speak to men of what through the necessary course of world evolution can be said to them to-day; because at that time it would have been impossible for them to receive these things directly out of the spiritual world. The door has only now been opened, and as the times that are past were the most favourable for the development of the intellect, so will the immediate future be the most favourable for the development of Inspiration and Intuition.

Two epochs of time meet sharply at this point; one to which all Inspiration was denied, and one in which, although mighty forces will undoubtedly use every available means to fight against it, it will yet be possible to receive Inspiration, to make it the determining element in the mood and character of the soul.

And if we look further into the question, we discover that the super-sensible forces which did not flow directly into the soul in the past epoch were by no means inactive. What an external physiology cannot prove is nevertheless true; in the Gabriel period the super-sensible world was at work in the world of the senses, influencing man's physical body. During that period delicate structures arose within the front part of the brain, and were gradually implanted into the reproductive system. Thus it came about that the majority of human beings were born with a brain possessing other and more delicate structures than was the case, for example, in the 12th and 13th centuries. That was the special task of the age in which man turned his mind to the physical plane of the senses and was shut off from Inspiration; the impulses of the super-sensible world poured themselves into the body and developed this fine structure in the brain.

And this structure will more and more be present in those who now feel themselves capable of progressing to active thinking and to an understanding of spiritual science. And then in our epoch, in the epoch at the beginning of which we stand, super-sensible forces will not be used to form structures in the brain but to work in the soul through Imagination and Inspiration, to flow directly into the human soul.

This is what the Michael Rulership means.

Two Beings of the Archangels are to be distinguished in this way: One who guided man immediately before our time and worked upon the structure of the brain, and one who now works upon man and has to let stream into the human soul receptiveness for spiritual wisdom. Thus we can divide from one another the Beings who belong to the Hierarchy of the Archangels.

In these two examples I have tried to present to you concrete attributes and characteristics of these Beings. We shall not content ourselves with names; for even as we know nothing of a man when we merely know he is called Miller, so we know very little about Gabriel if we only know his name. But we do know something of a man when we can say of him that he is a man of compassion, or that he has done this or that. And it is the same when we can say of a super-sensible Being that he causes forces to flow into man's physical body, forces which can instil certain structures into the power of propagation, and when we can say of another Being that he helps to stimulate the perception for intuitive truth. Michael does not work so much for the spiritual investigator, the initiate himself, but for those who wish to understand spiritual investigation, for those who are endeavouring to pass on to active thinking; it is for these that Michael will work, as these forces accumulate in mankind in the coming centuries.

This transition is an important one in another respect. Through what happened at that time, a race of men is being formed who, owing to the whole way in which they are organised will in future incarnations be in a position to look back on their earlier earthly lives.

The human race must however first give itself this possibility. One cannot remember something one has not thought about. If at night you take off your cuffs without thinking, and without thinking put away the links, then you cannot find them next morning, because you had not thought about them. If you had taken care to impress upon yourself a picture of the whole surroundings where you put your cuff links down, then next morning you would go straight to the place.

If this is true as regards memory in ordinary life, we must look at the matter in the same way on the wider horizon of different earth-lives. It is the innermost nature of the soul that we must remember, that which really passes over into the being of the soul; but to do so, we must first have comprehended the life of the soul. And that can only be done through occult training. If one has not troubled in the earlier incarnation to have thoughts about the nature of the soul one cannot of course recollect it. Men will be constituted to remember, but they will experience this constitution at first as illness, as a dreadful nervous condition. For they will be constituted to remember the past, and yet they will have nothing which they can remember. When a man has impressions which he cannot turn to account, organs in him which he cannot use, then he falls ill.

This is the state of things we are approaching, Mankind will be organised to remember, but only those who have something to remember will be able to remember,—that is, those who by means of occult training have recognised the human soul in its special character as a member of the spiritual world. In every life that follows after one in which a man has recognised the soul as a spirit-being there will be remembrance of former earth-lives.

We are standing at an important turning-point. To understand Spiritual Science means fundamentally nothing else than to have a true feeling for the turning-point to which we have come in our age.

Now all the Beings who belong to the Hierarchy of the Archangels are not of the same nature nor of the same rank. When we speak of the Hierarchy of the Archangels we can say that they ‘relieve’ one another in the way I have described to you, but the highest in rank, as it were the chief, is the one who takes over the leadership in our age—Michael. Michael is one of the order of Archangels, but he is from a certain aspect the most advanced. Now there is, as you know, evolution; and evolution embraces all Beings. Beings are in an ascending evolution, and we live in the era when Michael, the chief of those of the nature of the Archangels, passes over into the nature of the Archai. He will gradually pass over into a Guiding Being, he will become the Spirit of the Time, the Being who leads and guides the whole of humanity. It is of the utmost importance that we should understand this. It means that something which in all previous epochs has not been there for the whole of mankind, now can and must become a possession of all mankind. What formerly appeared among certain peoples here and there—spiritual deepening—can now be something for the whole of humanity.

And when in this way we point to what happens behind the world of the senses, we can also point to what takes place here in the sense-world as an imprint or copy of the event that has just been described,—that a promotion, so to say, of this Archangel, takes place behind the world of the senses. Hitherto man has been able to possess personality. In the future he will also possess personality, but in a different way. Man has always participated to some extent in the super-sensible worlds—at any rate he always could do so with his life of soul; but the personal note, the personal colouring which he then showed in his life in the sense world did not come down from above, it came up from below, it came from Lucifer. It was Lucifer who gave man personality. One could therefore say: Man cannot enter the super-sensible world with his personality, he cannot bring it into the spiritual world, he must blot out his personality—otherwise he will pollute the spiritual world.

In future it will be required of man to allow his personality to be inspired from above, so that it can receive what will then flow out of the spiritual world. A personality will receive its stamp from what it has been able to absorb of spiritual knowledge; personality will become something quite different. In a sense man was formerly a personality through what separated him from the spiritual, through what was impressed into him from the body. In future he must be a personality through what he is able to receive from the spiritual world and work upon in himself.

In the past, blood and temperament determined personalities, and into these personalities impersonal elements streamed from the super-sensible world. Less and less will man be a personality on account of his blood and temperament. In future he will be able to become a personality through the character that he acquires from his participation in the super-sensible world. The Michael impulse which brings into the human soul an understanding for the spiritual life, will achieve this. Men with a pronounced character and personality will in the future have this character and personality through what they bring to expression from their understanding of the super-sensible worlds. The Alexanders, the Caesars, the Napoleons belong to the past. Certainly the super-sensible element flowed into them too, but their highly personal colouring they received from what came to them from below. Men who are personalities from the way in which they carry the spiritual world into the sensible, men who carry personality into mankind from the soul, will take the place of the Alexanders, the Caesars, the Napoleons. The strength of human deeds will in future come from the strength of the spiritual influence working into these human deeds.

All this belongs to what is important in the transition from one epoch into another. The transition, however, from the Gabriel epoch into the Michael epoch in our time has all the characteristics of a transition of the utmost significance.

It is possible, even with ordinary sound human reason, to come to an understanding of what has been said to-day, if one is only unprejudiced enough to observe our times and see how two possibilities come right up against one another in the last third of the 19th century.

The first possibility is to form a world-conception based upon natural science. To-day that is out of date; it has become antiquated, it no longer lies in the character of the age. People still do so because they simply carry forward what comes from the past. It lies in the character of the age, however, to construct a world-conception from the inspirations coming from the spiritual world and an understanding of them. We must receive this into our souls as a feeling, as an experience; then we shall learn to know what the anthroposophical world-conception means for individual souls, we shall learn to perceive what evolution is for mankind. It is given to us to be partakers in things of great significance.

And now I will remind you of something that I mentioned in the lectures I held here last time, the lectures where I spoke of the change in the function of the Buddha.¹ And here too is the point where the next lecture will join on to to-day's.

To-day's lecture may close with a question—a question that can arise in every soul and that will lead us from the important considerations which have occupied us to-day to considerations of still greater importance. When a promotion of Michael has been accomplished, when he has become the guiding Spirit of Western civilisation, who will take his place? The place must be filled. Everyone must say to himself: “Then some Angel must also have been promoted, and must enter the ranks of the Archangels. Who is it?”

I will close with this question, a question, as I said, that leads to still more important considerations which must occupy us in the next lecture.

To-day I wished to place before your souls the important character of this transition: the fact, namely, that those souls who can rouse themselves to activity will now be able to find an understanding for inspired truth. For that is the will of those who stand behind mankind, the guiding World-Powers of man's evolution. And the expression of this in the sense world is, that whereas during past ages temperament and heredity gave personality its individual colouring, in the future spiritual understanding will be the determining element. Spiritual understanding will determine the tone and character of a man's personality.

It is important to understand this,—still more important to carry it out. From this point we will pass on in our next lecture to a consideration which will find a response in every one of our souls.

• 1. Occult Research into the Life between Death and Rebirth, 17th, 20th February, 1913.

We have tried to throw some light upon the character of our present age as it shows itself in relation to the working of cosmic law. This is a matter that should not be lightly passed over. For when we speak of the spiritual forces, the spiritual influences of a particular age, these are likewise the forces and impulses which are working in the soul of each one of us. We cannot understand our own souls, unless we are able to place ourselves in right relation to these forces and influences of our age which are at the same time the spiritual forces and impulses of our own souls. In whatever way individuals among you may account for your belief in something that is given in Spiritual Science, it is absolutely true that in the souls of all those who fairly and honestly come to Spiritual Science there lives, perhaps unconsciously, an urge that comes from the genuine spiritual impulses of our time.

In the last lecture I endeavoured to show you that at the present time we are living in what one may call the Michael Age. An understanding for spiritual things is now becoming possible for an increasing number of souls. Whereas during the course of previous centuries it was possible to acquire an understanding above all for the things of external natural science, for physical, chemical and physiological laws, for everything related to external space and time, whereas during the Gabriel Age understanding was awakened for all that went from triumph to triumph in the natural sciences, and inclined men to a scientific conception of the world, we are now entering upon an age in which it will be just as possible to understand the things of the spirit.

At no time in human evolution have two successive epochs been so radically different from one another as that which has just run its course and the epoch upon which we are now entering. And never before have souls been more alien to one another than will be the souls of those who incline to what is spiritual and the souls who still adhere to what past centuries have brought. Nor will it be long before those who believe they stand firmly in materialistic Monism will be quite out of date in comparison with those who are earnestly seeking an understanding of super-sensible worlds. For since the last third of the nineteenth century a spiritual ‘tidal wave’ from higher worlds has been flowing into our world, and making it possible for man to understand the way in which human and world evolution are spiritually guided.

My dear friends, nearly two thousand years ago the event took place which you all know under the name of the Mystery of Golgotha. Of this Mystery of Golgotha we have often spoken here. We have approached it from many different sides, and have seen it to be the great centre of gravity of all human evolution. It has been possible to show quite clearly that without reference to any religious views or creed, but purely out of spiritual science itself, an understanding of this Event is possible, and in such a way that one may expect understanding from every shade of current religious belief. We have also spoken at some length about the reasons why certain people are not prepared to accept the Christ Event as the great centre of gravity of human evolution. But now we must turn our minds to something else which was mentioned yesterday in the public lecture.¹

It might well be that out of prejudice a person wished to know nothing of what took place in a certain small country at the beginning of our era, did not want to trouble himself about what we call the Mystery of Golgotha. Very well, let us even assume that it would be natural for him to imagine the whole course of history in such a way that what happened on Golgotha could be struck out. Let us make that hypothesis. In the course of his study of the evolution of mankind, such a person will nevertheless discover a special characteristic of that age. We spoke of this yesterday. The epoch immediately preceding the Mystery of Golgotha was a time of transition in the attitude and direction of the human soul. From having been directed more to the surrounding world in an external way, man's soul began to be turned within to its own inner nature—and this, quite apart from the Mystery of Golgotha. At the time into which the Mystery of Golgotha was placed, the great transition was occurring from a life in outward surroundings to a more inward life. And anyone can feel this, even if he ignore the Mystery of Golgotha altogether. Mankind was in that time at a turning-point. It is not necessary even to speak of the Mystery of Golgotha, one can point to quite other events to show that formerly man's life had an outward direction, but that afterwards those who are animated by the impulse of the age, by the true genius of the age, begin to make their life more inward.

When anything of this kind happens, it does not happen without being prepared beforehand. I have no desire to quote the trite saying: Nature, or history, does not proceed by leaps. The expression holds good only within certain limits. Even the blossom is already prepared in the green leaves—although here we have, have we not, a clear case of a ‘leap’ in development? Similarly there was a preparation beforehand for what appears as a sudden incision in human history at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. When we go deeply into what we can find of the teaching and outlook of the last centuries of ancient Hebraism, we find a spirit—of a Hebrew kind, of course—a spirit of preparation for the Mystery of Golgotha; and not in Hebraism alone, for in other regions of the earth too we can find such a spirit of preparation.

In Hebraism new features began to show themselves of quite a different order from those that were there formerly. In the sixth century before the Mystery of Golgotha we find an altogether new mode of regarding the world, compared with what we find earlier in the spiritual life of the Hebrews; it marks a new epoch. This reveals itself clearly enough to the careful observer. And if it shows itself here in a different manner since the old Hebrew people were differently constituted, yet it is the same spirit, expressing itself differently, which prevails in Greek philosophy and even in the Greek art of poetry, in the last centuries before the Mystery of Golgotha. We find it everywhere. One has only to make a serious study of spirits like Plato and Aristotle,—yes, and even Socrates, to see that this turning point is everywhere being prepared.

Now events that happen here on earth are guided and controlled from the super-sensible world. Before the incision entered into the physical life of the earth which we call the Event of Golgotha, the earlier guidance of evolution sent out a Messenger—at that time still a Messenger of Jehovah—to guide this event. He was the Spirit who prepared the period of civilisation up to the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, the same Spirit who is the Leader of our own culture epoch just beginning, the Spirit we have called Michael. Just as Michael gives its character to our age, so did he give its character to the whole civilisation which prepared the way for the Mystery of Golgotha. The Power however who sent forth Michael from the higher worlds was at that time Jahve or Jehovah.

In those days it was not as it is in our time, when, as soon as one speaks of spiritual things, the objection is so easily raised: You often speak of the Folk Spirit or Time Spirit, and of other spiritual facts, but you rarely speak of God.—People do not notice why one does not speak of God,—for the reason, namely, that no human concept can embrace that in which we live and move and have our being. Here one also meets with points of view which are, from a certain aspect, very interesting. When I gave a public lecture recently in a certain town, and as the practice often is, questions were sent up to be answered, one man put a very clever question. He asked: “If logically one recognises an object through the fact that one looks at it as an object and can stand before it, if we cannot have an objective picture of an object which we have in ourselves—like the pupil of the eye, for example—because we cannot look at it, then how does this fit in with the opinion of many Mystics that one must remove oneself from God in order to be able to contemplate Him?”

Certainly many Mystics have maintained that one must withdraw from God in order to contemplate Him. It was a clever question, but the only answer that can be given is: “You may withdraw from God as much as you please, but you still remain in Him, you cannot get out of God.” Logic may often be very logical but fall short of reality.

In times when men stood nearer to the spiritual, they had a feeling of reverence for the Divinity in which we live and move and have our being, the Divinity which it was not even always right to call by name; and for that reason the ancient Hebrews, in order not to pronounce the name, used the expression the ‘Countenance of Jehovah.’ In man, the countenance is what he turns outwards, that by which he reveals himself. It is not the whole of man. One knows a man as he is in his inner being by the features of his countenance, but one does not on that account presume to speak of the whole man when one means his face or countenance.

At that time therefore, Michael was called the ‘Countenance of Jehovah’; men preferred to speak of the representative through whom Jahve revealed Himself to mankind as in an external countenance. Even in intimate circles they would rather name the representative than speak of Jahve Himself. Michael was in fact at that time looked upon as the spiritual Regent of the age, as the Messenger of Jahve, as the member of the Hierarchies from whom streamed forth the impulse that was to come for the understanding of he Event of Golgotha.

In the intervening centuries other Beings from the rank of the Archangels have had the guidance of mankind's spiritual evolution, but the Being who had the guidance when preparation had to be made for the Mystery of Golgotha is the same Being as is now again sending the floods of super-sensible life down into the world of the senses. There was a Michael Age then, and a Michael Age is the one that is now beginning. There is, however, a vast difference between that Michael Age and ours which has just begun.

It would take us too far to-day to describe what kind of understanding men have been able to bring to the Mystery of Golgotha during the period which has elapsed between that Michael Age and ours. There have been deeply fervent souls who out of a more or less intense need for belief have gained a relation to the Mystery of Golgotha and its Bearer; there have been deeply religious natures all through the centuries since the Mystery of Golgotha down to our own time. But the Mystery of Golgotha is a Mystery which, notwithstanding that it took place as a real fact, at the beginning of modern times, is yet of such a nature that human souls cannot presume to understand it fully without preparation. New epochs will continually arise which will bring a greater deepening to human souls, and which will have an increasing understanding for what happened in the Mystery of Golgotha. The Event itself stands there as the great turning-point in human evolution; the understanding of the Event will continuously grow and ripen in the spiritual evolution of the Earth. This fact cannot be engraved deeply enough into our minds and hearts.

Let us grasp in a certain metaphysical abstraction what actually took place at that time. We have described it from various points of view; let us now choose a more abstract point of view, but one which, if we allow it to work upon us, can call forth a deep feeling in our souls.

When with ordinary powers of observation and even with scientific observation we study the things around us, we learn to know by means of ordinary thinking and ordinary science the laws of existence in the mineral, plant, animal and human kingdoms. These laws all culminate in an ideal,—to understand life. But life is not to be understood here on earth. Occultism alone can give knowledge of life; external science can never fathom it. It would be the wildest fantasy to believe that one could ever penetrate the laws of life as one can physical or chemical laws. To do so remains an ideal; it can never be reached. On the physical plane there is never any possibility of giving a knowledge of life. This knowledge of life must remain the preserve of super-sensible knowledge.

But now, impossible as is a sense knowledge of life, equally impossible is a super-sensible knowledge of death. There are conditions of terrible isolation of consciousness in the spiritual worlds, there is such a thing as a temporary immersion as though into a condition of sleep, but there is no death in the higher worlds. Death is impossible in the higher worlds. All the Beings we have learned to know as Beings of the higher Hierarchies have this distinguishing characteristic; they do not know death, they never pass through death. Just as we are told in the Bible that the Angels covered their faces before the secret of birth, the secret of Man's becoming, so must they and all other Higher Beings cover their faces before death. For death is an event that is only possible in the sense world, not in the super-sensible.

Among all the Beings of the higher worlds there was One and One alone Who had to go through death,—we may also say, Who willed to go through death; that is, the Christ. To that end He had to come down to Earth. In order that a Being of the higher worlds might be able to accomplish what was necessary for Earth evolution, the Christ had to descend from a world in which there is no death to the world in which there is death.

If such ideas are at first abstract, it is for us to change them into feeling and experience. The full understanding of what I have now described in an abstract way will become a concern of the evolution of humanity. With a certain reverence, together with humility and delicacy let us approach to-day the secret of the Mystery of Golgotha.

For what was it that really happened then? It has often been described. The Christ descended from the super-sensible worlds into the world in which He has since lived as a hidden Force—a Force however which will make itself manifest from this century onwards. He descended out of a world in which there is no death, into the world of death, and He—this Force—has united Himself with the Earth; from being a cosmic Force He has become a Force of the Earth. He went through death, in order to come to life in Earth existence, in order to be within the Earth world. And all through the centuries there has come to expression in souls which were filled with this Impulse the striving of mankind to understand Him. But the nearer evolution approached the close of the Gabriel Age, the more this understanding receded, until to-day just where there should be understanding, it is sadly lacking, and materialism prevails not only in modern science but consequently in Theology too. The real understanding of the Christ Impulse has grown less and less. Materialism has seized upon men's souls and deeply ensconced itself in them. Materialism became in many respects the fundamental impulse of the epoch which has just elapsed. Countless souls died during that epoch who went through the gate of death with a materialistic outlook. For such numbers of souls to go through the gate of death with a materialistic outlook would have been impossible in earlier ages. These souls then lived in the spiritual world between death and a new birth without knowing anything of the world, in which they lived. A Being came towards them; they perceived Him in that world. They had to perceive Him because this Being had united Himself with the Earth, although for the present He rules invisibly in physical Earth existence. And the exertions of these souls who had gone through the gate of death succeeded—we cannot express it otherwise—in driving the Christ out of the spiritual world. The Christ has had to experience a renewal of the Mystery of Golgotha, although not in the same magnitude as before. At that time He went through death; now He had to undergo banishment from His existence in the spiritual world. And thus there was fulfilled in Him the eternal law of the spiritual world,—that what disappears for the higher spiritual world arises anew in the lower world.

If it is possible in the 20th century for souls to evolve to an understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha, then it is due to this Event,—that Christ, through a conspiracy of materialistic souls, has been driven out of the spiritual worlds, and transferred into the sense world, into the world of man, so that even in this world of the senses a new understanding for the Christ can begin. Hence, too, Christ is still more nearly and intimately united with the destiny of men on Earth. And while in the past man could look up to Jahve or Jehovah and know that He was the Being who sent out Michael to prepare the way for the transition from the Jahve Age to the Christ Age,—while in earlier ages it was Jehovah who sent Michael, it is now the Christ who sends us Michael.

This is the new and important fact which we must transform into a feeling. As formerly man could speak of Jahve-Michael, the Leader of the age, so now we can speak the Christ-Michael. Michael has been exalted to a higher stage—from Folk Spirit to Time Spirit, inasmuch as from being the Messenger of Jahve he has become the Messenger of Christ. And so when we speak of a right understanding of the Michael Impulse in our age, we are speaking of a right understanding of the Christ Impulse.

An abstract understanding always deals in names, simply in names, and thinks it will arrive somewhere if it asks: “What kind of Being is Michael?” and wants to be told that he comes from this or that Hierarchy, that he is an Archangel, that Archangels have such and such qualities. Then it is all defined and people think now they know what such a Being is. They do not know it by speaking of Michael in this way. If one wants to understand the evolution of mankind, one must understand that Michael too has evolved: one must understand that it is the same Being who paved the way for the preparation of the Mystery of Golgotha, and who now in our day paves the way for the understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. Then, however, he was a Folk Spirit, now he is a Time Spirit; then he was the Messenger of Jahve, now he is the Messenger of Christ. We speak of the Christ in the right way when we speak of Michael and his mission, knowing that Michael, who was formerly the bearer of the Jehovah-mission, is now the bearer of the Mission of the Christ.

My dear friends, we have been able to follow the path of Michael, a Spirit who has, so to say, ascended in order to communicate a new impulse to mankind; who has ascended, or rather is ascending, from the rank of the Archangels to the rank of the Archai. His place will be filled by another Being who succeeds him.

I have spoken here on different occasions of the evolution which Buddha passed through. The puerile objections which are now being made against us² are brought also against our understanding of the Christ Impulse in the world,—as though we had ever been one-sided in our representation of the Christ Impulse. We turn our gaze to evolution as a whole and describe what different impulses underlie it, giving to each its due value. Again and again we have spoken of the Bodhisattva who was born as Gautama Buddha and have shown that for us it is truth that he became ‘Buddha’. We have followed his evolution until the time when he received his mission on Mars. And of that mission we have also spoken here.

As long as man dwells on Earth, there is always for each human being, however high he may stand, an individuality who guides him from incarnation to incarnation. The individual guidance of human beings is made subject to the Angeloi, the Angel Beings. When a man from being a Bodhisattva becomes a Buddha, then his Angel is, as it were, set free. And it is such Angel Beings who, after the fulfilment of their mission, ascend into the realm of the Archangel Beings.

Thus if we really understand how to penetrate ever more deeply into the super-sensible evolution which lies behind our sense evolution, we are actually able to perceive at some point how an Archangel ascends to the nature of the Archai, and an Angel Being to an Archangel Being.

My dear friends, what I have said to you about the spiritual background of the world in which we live and in which we wish to take our stand as Anthroposophists—I have not said it in order that you may merely theorise over these things, but that you may transform into feeling and experience what has been expressed in words and ideas. Yes,—to be an Anthroposophist in our age means to know the nature of the super-sensible world which underlies the sense world of human evolution, to feel oneself in the spiritual world, as physical man feels himself physically in the atmosphere. But we do not feel ourselves in the spiritual world by merely repeating: Spirit, Spirit, Spirit is in us! Just as one has to gauge in a practical concrete way—from the formation of the clouds, from the humidity and other phenomena—the state of the atmosphere of the Earth, so we must ‘feel’ in quite a concrete way the spiritual world into which we are submerged every night when we fall asleep; we must feel and know how there lives in this spiritual world what is now happening as a result of the mission entrusted by Christ to Michael,—that is, to the same Spirit of the Hierarchy of Archangels who in earlier times had been used by the impulse of Jahve for the preparation of the Mystery of Golgotha. That is what is happening behind our physical sense evolution. And to feel ourselves within such happenings in the spiritual world, in the same way as we feel ourselves physically within the atmosphere which we breathe in and out, means to have the right consciousness to-day in relation to the spiritual world.

Try to receive into your whole heart and soul these results of occultism which I have now endeavoured to lay before you; try to have a sensitive understanding of them, and to consider what it means now in this age to live consciously in the spiritual events that are taking place around us, to live consciously in that world whither our soul goes every night when we fall asleep and whence we come every morning when we awake. Try to lead the soul into the direct and concrete experience of what is so often abstractly called Divine Providence. For it lies in the true character of our age to do this. Try now in this present time to know and experience as individual Beings what men in past ages could only feel in an undefined way as a Providence moving through the world.

Place as a picture before your souls that the task of the previous epoch was to find natural science. At that time the laws of nature were good if they were rightly used by man to build up external world conceptions. But there is nothing absolutely good or bad in this external world of Maya. In our time the laws of Nature would be bad and evil, were they still to be used to build up a world conception at a time when spiritual life is flowing into the sense world. These words are not to be taken as directed against what past ages have done; they are directed against what wants to remain as it was in earlier ages and will not put itself at the service of the new revelation.

Michael did not fight this Dragon in the ages that are past, for then the Dragon which is now meant was not yet a Dragon; it will become a Dragon if those concepts and ideas which belong only to natural science were to be used to construct the world conception of the coming age. For the monster that will then rear its head amongst mankind will be rightly seen in the picture of the Dragon that must be vanquished by Michael, whose Age begins in our own time.

That is an important Imagination,—Michael overcoming the Dragon. To receive the inflow of spiritual life into the sense world,—from now on, that is the service of Michael. We serve Michael by overcoming the Dragon that is trying to grow to his full height and strength in ideas which during the past epoch produced materialism and which now threaten to prolong their life on into the future. To defeat this means to stand in the service of Michael. That is the victory of Michael over the Dragon. It is the old picture over again, which for earlier times had another meaning and which must now acquire the right meaning for our age. When we are conscious of the part we have to play as men of a new age, then our task can stand before us in the picture of Michael conquering the Dragon.

Let us take this picture and make of it an Imagination. Let us try to understand our times through knowing ourselves to be in a spiritual guidance that is the true spiritual guidance of our age, and that can be the spiritual guidance of every human soul who is sincerely and honestly seeking evolution on the path of spiritual life.

• 1. Lecture on “Raphael and his Mission in the Light of Spiritual Science.” Stuttgart, 19th May, 1913.
• 2. A reference to the attempts made among some members of the Theosophical Society to put forward Krishnamurti as the new Bearer of the Christ for the West.

... I have frequently spoken to you here of that important event which came to pass in the last third of the nineteenth century, the event through which a special relationship was established between the Archangelic Power, that Being whom we call the Archangel Michael, and the destiny of mankind.

I have reminded you that since November, 1879, Michael is to be the Regent, as it were, for all those who seek to bring to humanity the right forces necessary to their healthy progress.

My dear friends, in our day we know that when such a matter is indicated, the indication refers to two different things:—first, to the objective fact, and second, to the way this objective fact is connected with what men are willing to receive into their consciousness, into their will. The objective fact is simply this, that in November, 1879, beyond the sphere of the sense world, in the super-sensible world, that event took place which may be described as follows:—Michael has gained for himself the power—when men come to meet him with all the living content of their souls—so to permeate them with his power, that they are able to transform their old materialistic intellectual power—which by that time had become strong in humanity—into spiritual intellectual power, into spiritual power of understanding. That is the objective fact; it has taken place. We may say concerning it that since November, 1879, Michael has entered into another relationship with man than that in which he formerly stood. But it is required of men that they shall become the servants of Michael.

What I mean by this will become quite clear to you through the following explanation.

You are aware that before the Mystery of Golgotha was accomplished upon earth, the Jews of the Old Testament looked up to their Jahve, or Jehovah. Those who, among the Jewish priests, looked up in full consciousness to Jahve, were well aware that they could not reach him directly with human perception. The very name, Jahve, was held to be unutterable, and if it had to be uttered, a sign only was made, a sign which resembles certain combinations of signs which we attempt in the art of Eurhythmy. The Jewish priesthood, however, was well aware that men could approach Jahve through Michael. They called Michael the countenance of Jahve. Just as we learn to know a man when we look into his face, just as we draw conclusions about the gentleness of his soul from the gentleness of his countenance, and about his character from the way he looks at us, so the priesthood of the Old Testament, through the atavistic clairvoyance which flowed into their souls in dreams, desired to gain from the countenance of Jahve, from Michael, a knowledge of Jahve, whom it was not yet possible for mankind to reach.

The position of this priesthood towards Michael and Jahve was the right one. Their position towards Michael was right because they knew that if a man of that time turned to Michael, he could find through Michael the Jahve-power, which it was proper for the humanity of that time to seek.

Other Soul-Regents of humanity have appeared since then in the place of Michael; but since November, 1879, Michael is present again and can become active in the soul-life of those who seek the paths to him. These paths to-day are the paths of spiritual scientific knowledge. We may speak of “the paths of Michael”, just as well as of the “paths of spiritual scientific knowledge”.

But just at the time when Michael entered in this way into relationship with the souls of men, in order again to become their inspirer for three centuries, at this very time the demonic opposing force, having previously prepared itself, set up the very strongest opposition to him, so that a cry went through the world during our so-called war-years, in reality years of terror, a cry which has become the great world-misunderstanding which now fills the hearts and souls of men.

Let us consider what would have become of the Jewish people of the Old Testament, if instead of approaching Jahve through Michael they had sought to approach him directly. They would have become an intolerant people, a national self-seeking people concerned with the aggrandizement of their own nation, a nation thinking only of itself. For Jahve is the God who is connected with all natural things, and in the external historical development of mankind, he manifests his Being through the connection of generations, as it expresses itself in the essential qualities of the people. It was only because the ancient Jewish people desired at that time to approach Jahve through Michael, that they saved themselves from becoming nationally so egoistic that Christ Jesus would not have been able to come forth from among them. Because they had permeated themselves with the Michael power, as this power was in their time, the Jewish people were not so strongly impregnated with forces given over to national egoism, as would have been the case had they turned directly to Jahve or Jehovah.

To-day Michael is again the Regent of the World, but it is in a new way that mankind must become related to him. For now Michael is not the countenance of Jahve, but the countenance of Christ Jesus. To-day we must approach the Christ-impulse through Michael. In many respects humanity has not yet struggled through to this. Humanity has retained atavistically the old qualities of perception by which Michael could be approached when he was still the intermediary to Jahve; and so to-day humanity has a false relationship to Michael. This false relationship to Michael is apparent in a very characteristic phenomenon.

During the years of the war we heard continually the universal lie: “Freedom for individual nations, even for the smallest nations.” This is an essentially false idea, because to-day, in the Michael period, the all-important matter is not groups of men, but human individuals, separate men. This lie is nothing else than the endeavour to permeate each individual nation not with the new force of Michael, but with the force of the old, the pre-Christian time, with the Michael-force of the Old Testament. However paradoxical it may sound, there is a tendency among so-called civilized nations at the present day to transform what was justifiable among the Jewish people of the Old Testament, into something Luciferic, and to make of this the most powerful impulse in every nation.

People wish to-day to build up the republics of Poland, of France, of America, etc., upon methods of thought suited to Old Testament times. They strive to follow Michael as it was right to follow him before the Mystery of Golgotha, when men found through him Jahve, a national God. To-day it is Christ Jesus whom we must strive to find through Michael, Christ Jesus the divine leader of the whole human race. This means that we must seek for feelings and ideas which have nothing to do with human distinctions of any kind on the Earth. Such feelings and ideas cannot be found on the surface. They must be sought where the spirit and soul-part of man pulsate—that is, along the path of Spiritual Science. The matter lies thus; that we must resolve to seek the real Christ upon the path of Spiritual Science:—that is, upon the Michael-path. Only through this striving after spiritual truth is the real Christ to be sought and found; otherwise it would be better to extinguish the lights of Christmas, to destroy all Christmas trees, and to acknowledge at least with truth, that we want nothing that will recall what Christ Jesus has brought into human evolution ...