The Rudolf Steiner Archive

As you can see from the announcement, we will have a weekly meeting every Monday. This is to be considered a meeting of the Besant branch. The notes on the invitation are to be taken into account. Last year's work has made the venue too small. It is not at all our intention to be exclusive and to hold these Mondays for the branch alone. We would like to expand the matter, but on the other hand it seems a bit harsh to the members if non-members without excuse have access throughout the year, especially this year, when perhaps even more intimate things could be discussed in these Monday meetings than last year. We are getting deeper and deeper into it. The other meetings are then in the architect's house. This year, particular attention will be paid to demonstrating the significance of Theosophy and its importance for the present. I will speak about important questions in their relation to current affairs. Next Thursday, I will speak about Haeckel's world riddle, then about our world situation, and then about the question of inner development. The cycle will then conclude with a reflection on Christmas.

I have just completed a major lecture tour. A tour such as this is not only educational for the one undertaking it, but it can also be educational for the widest circles of those who are interested in Theosophy. I was in St. Gallen, Freiburg, Stuttgart, Heidelberg, Frankfurt am Main, Kassel, Weimar. In most places I was able to give a public lecture, and then in the following days I had a discussion with those listeners who were more interested. We do not yet have branches in all these places. But that is not to say that we will not. We do not want to proceed in a stormy, agitating way. Those who come to the Theosophical Society should come because they have an inner urge to do so. Therefore, it will be good to cultivate Theosophy as much as possible and to tell the audience what it is all about. I am convinced that those who are predestined to participate will come. I was able to perceive that there is a great longing for what the Theosophical Society has to offer humanity. The Theosophists within it are deeply responsive to what people need and desire today. On the other hand, there is a certain despondency, a certain sum of prejudices with which people are afflicted, and which prevent them from immediately dealing with Theosophy. There is much to be overcome. This is shown by such a journey, on which one gets to know the most diverse moods. Despite all discouragement, such a journey has a certain satisfying impression. One sees in the hearts of men that which must live if we want to move towards the future, which the theosophical movement wants to strive for.

So let us touch on a few questions that may be of particular interest to us, without making any judgments. You only need to take a look at the current world situation to be able to recall at any moment how necessary Theosophy and Theosophical striving are today. You can look at all parts of the world, everywhere you see peoples and classes in a hard struggle for existence. Races are fighting each other, nations are at war with each other, individual classes in individual countries are sharply opposed to each other. Against this, we have nothing much other than our first principle: to establish the core of a universal brotherhood, without distinction of race, sex, class or creed. That is a powerful principle, people say. But many appeal to what Schopenhauer has already said: preaching morality is easy, but establishing morality is difficult. The theosophical movement is not a doctrine, not a foundation. It differs from the other movements of the new time in that it is real life. And the teachings we spread are not the main thing. It is not the teachings that matter to us. They are all only the means to life. And no matter what teachings are proclaimed in the various branches of the movement or at its public events, whether we believe these teachings or do not believe them, whether we can repeat them or cannot repeat them, that is not the point. The point is that the teachings are something quite different from other teachings of present-day science or from the teachings of even the traditional concepts of the Logos. As long as the theosophical teachings are not what they should be, as long as they are the same as other dogmas, as other doctrines and sciences. Only when they are great, when they live into the soul like a magnetic force and work in the soul, will they become what they should be. This is not a lodge where reincarnation and karma, the world view, the origin and purpose of man are merely taught and beautiful sentences are coined, but this is a lodge where these thoughts buzz through the room and touch the deepest part of the heart, so that man feels these teachings as intimately related to him, so that it is as if these teachings come from within him. When these things become so powerful that he not only becomes wiser but also better, then it is the right thing.

This difference will not be immediately understood by many. Many today present themselves as teachers of ethics, of morals, or as teachers of a creed or as educators. We hear people talking about monistic teachings, about a renewal of this or that teaching – all these teachings come across as being deeply different from what the theosophical teacher wants, what we want in general within the theosophical movement. All the others preach or proclaim their supposed truths, they stand there and say, this is our confession, this is our opinion, this is the truth, in my opinion. No Theosophical lecturer could approach an audience in this way. It is not about an opinion. We carry within us the awareness that truth is within ourselves, that it lives in every human breast, that we do not have to bring it in, but at most have to bring it out – that we stimulate our fellow human beings. Thus, what is necessary lies in what has been said, in the bond that unites the Theosophical members. What is discussed in the branches should be a kindling of the inner life in the souls. We bring thoughts from the spiritual world, the great laws from the supersensible existence, which have formed the world, brought forth man, the great laws according to which the wise teachers and masters taught our ancestors millennia ago and still teach us today. We draw on these great laws, and they are at the same time that which carries us forward, which gives us security, courage and hope for life. These laws should permeate the spaces in which we live. And by feeling them, these laws, we recognize the world and ourselves. Then we should let these laws influence our daily activities in the most mundane things we do. Then the members of the Theosophical Society will be like leaven; they will be everywhere on the outside like a new spirit - if that is the case, we will know that the spirit is something true and real.

Anyone who comes here just to hear teachings comes here in vain, because they don't have the right attitude. And this is what matters when faced with the spirit. It is important that the person who comes here knows that the spirit is a reality, a truth, that I do not just get well and ill from [a] medicine, not just from wind and weather, but that what our body and our reality actually is also emanates from what I think, feel and will, that health can only come from a spirit that works healthily. It is even more important that our thoughts are healthy than that our thoughts are true. You will not be able to notice tomorrow or the day after that a source of health emanates from what is done in the theosophical lodge. Think wrongly in the world and you will bring illness into the world, not tomorrow or the day after, but one day for sure. All evil stems from untruth, from an incorrect inner life. This connection will become clear to you in the next Monday lecture. To give humanity a new health, a new harmonious life, that is our main goal. Therefore, our thoughts are not just teachings, but forces. They do not just enlighten, but heal and harmonize, healing the body and healing the legal and social aspects of human coexistence. Those who grasp this so deeply have the core of the theosophical movement. Those who merely ask how this or that relates do not know about theosophy. But the theosophist knows that when he sits together with the others in the branch and the great thoughts of the world order pass through his soul for an hour, he makes himself the sounding board of a new, healthy and harmonious life. Well, ladies and gentlemen, the fact that such a life springs up and exists in the theosophical movement is evident in some phenomena. We started from the premise that we said: you cannot preach morality, you have to establish it. But it seems as if the Theosophical Society has already achieved something that corresponds to and serves the principle of the brotherhood of peoples. There was a beautiful moment at the opening of this year's congress. It was decided that each delegate would give a short speech in his or her mother tongue. There they were, people who, in the external political situation, are in a fierce struggle against each other. A prelude to what can become reality when the spiritual life takes hold of souls was played out at the opening of the London Congress. The following languages could be heard, as a symbol of our principle: Dutch, English, Swedish, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Hungarian, Finnish, Russian. There you have a symbol of the same will and the same feeling flowing in the different languages. This is the life that the Theosophical movement has achieved in the thirty years since its inception. There was one of the most beautiful and wonderful moments at this conference – not during the conference itself, but on one of the evenings before – for some members who gathered here during the summer. They were invited to attend a meeting of the Blavatsky Lodge. At that meeting, Annie Besant gave a lecture on the requirements of discipleship. As you know, discipleship is something very high. That evening, it was not so much a matter of discussing the requirements of discipleship in general, but rather of the greatest of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky's disciples speaking out about critical minds. Allow me to say a few words about the actual subject. I need only mention here that everything that is the Theosophical Society is owed to the fundamental work of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. None of the disciples can claim to have fully grasped what lived in Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. Those who delve into the works of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky see more and more that they are entering unfathomable depths, and that in her time the truth flowed through this unique personality as it has only flowed through the greatest religious founders and leaders of humanity. I can understand that in the beginning, when one approaches Helena Petrovna Blavatsky's achievements, one believes that one has understood many things. This can happen to anyone. But then there comes a time when one realizes that the content of the 'Secret Doctrine' contains writings of such spiritual depth that no one, without exception, has ever fully grasped it since Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. You could hear these words from Mrs. Annie Besant at any time.

There is the possibility, even for the greatest leading minds of humanity, to never stop. At least no one has yet found the end point. Deeper and deeper foundations of truth are found when you go deeper. That is what ultimately brings those who have the will to penetrate into a spiritual connection with Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. Helena Petrovna Blavatsky is still in contact with the Theosophical movement today. She is still one of the aids for the Theosophical Society today. If we have the right to turn to her, then she will help. One only has to look at what she has done historically. Take a look at her writings. You will find things in them that some scholars say: “This could be cobbled together from all the books in the world.” Yes, but no one has ever found what was available in different places around the world. Some things are in the most hidden places, in places that no other soul has had access to before; you will find exact quotes from writings that no human eye has rested on for centuries in Blavatsky's writings. She wrote so many of them in [Würzburg], while the books [in truth] were in the Vatican.

Of course she also made mistakes. But if you look into them, you will find that the mistakes are based on something specific, namely on a certain uncertainty of reading that always occurs when one has to grope in the astral light. We do not only live in the physical world, we also live in the higher worlds. We see not only the physical, but also the spiritual. We see not only physically, but also spiritually, and there you can also read books that are in the Vatican in Rome, but you can easily read wrong, you can easily read 136 instead of 631. Where mistakes have been made, it turns out that they have always been made in this way. Every objection that is raised against the truly valuable, the great and significant aspects of this personality can be easily refuted by anyone who really engages with it. But it seems that not many people are willing to get to the bottom of the matter, despite everything. Otherwise it would not have been possible for small mistakes by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky to have been ridiculed here and there in recent times – even in the English “Vâhan” – that Helena Petrovna Blavatsky was sometimes passionately agitated, used a harsh, passionate word, smoked cigarettes. The question was raised as to whether someone who smokes cigarettes can really be a great person, can sometimes be agitated. This was the reason for Mrs. Besant's lecture on Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. Now this greatest disciple of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky spoke from her innermost being. Everyone who was there will have found that something tremendous emerged from within, everyone had to feel that something deep was alive there. She discussed the fact that there may be people who have not gone astray – but [she also] asked whether they also have the great qualities of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. Of course, there are also many who do not smoke cigarettes, but do they have the great qualities of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky? The sun also has sunspots, but these do not illuminate the earth. It is light that has a warming and fertilizing effect. Those who want to have it, who want to achieve what Helena Petrovna Blavatsky was able to give to humanity, must also be able to see it - and be satisfied with what is great and powerful about it. Then they will come closer and closer to the impersonal source of wisdom, truth and life.

The fact that this was spoken out of a deeply serious experience was what mattered, and it was spoken by a personality who herself admitted that evening that [Helena Petrovna Blavatsky] was the Bringer of Light for her. Then came the beautiful, profound words in which Annie Besant, as everyone could feel, was in complete harmony with all the students of the great teacher Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, at the head of whom she placed those who said that that one should bear in mind that the disciple, the beginner above all, before he can grasp the greatness of the great, harms himself if he blocks his path to these great ones by hasty, unintelligent criticism. To have such an attitude, to get into such a mood, to really feel what is right in the face of greatness, that is the gain of life, that is the beginning of the highest spiritual knowledge. No one needs to venerate anyone else, everyone may criticize as much as they want in the world, but by doing so, they harm themselves most of all when they want to gain knowledge. Then they put the greatest obstacles in their own way.

There is one thing that must not be misunderstood. It is often said in theosophical writings: Don't criticize, seek to understand first, before you judge. And this is taken as if it were a prescription for everyone. The Theosophical Society does not oblige anyone to follow such a prescription. But there is something else we need to know, and that is that we must be in this mood of unbiased acceptance if these truths are to flow into us. You can't have one without the other, and anyone who wants one without the other is like someone who has a glass rod and wants it to be electric. If he wants it to be electric, he has to rub it. If he does not want to rub it, it will not become electric. He who wants knowledge must have this mood. You cannot achieve one without the other. It is a contradiction in terms to want to achieve one without the other.

You just have to understand the theosophical view correctly. It is nothing more than a narrative. It never demands anything of any of its members. That is something we are very far from, especially those who know what is important in the theosophical movement. We are not asked to believe in any authority, to engage in any personality cult. The less the cult of personality is demanded, the higher the status of those to whom it is applied. All speaking against personality cult is speaking against things that are not there. The great moment I wanted to characterize was to see a personality looking up. And the whole lecture was looking up. That was the significant thing about it.

I wanted to emphasize these two moments for you because they symbolically show something of the gain in life that one can have today within the Theosophical Society. There are two things that will become more and more important: One is the realization of our first principle: to establish the core of a human brotherhood, to present the great core of humanity, and the second is to learn to worship without belief in authority, without worship of persons, to worship out of freedom, out of knowledge. To offer worship as a gift that is free, without compulsion. This can be achieved. This is what we have achieved in thirty years. When we do that, it is as if a different kind of spirit were to pass through the room and fill everyone. Little by little, the theosophist comes to realize that this is something much more real than what can be grasped with hands. The thought should occur to every member at the entrance gate to the Theosophical Society: Here you enter a society in which people believe in the truths and realities of the spirit, in which they believe that spirit lives in you. This is connected with the central phenomenon of our society.

We recognize the great progress of the outer life, we are not reactionaries, we know what it means to have achieved outer science, that in the eighteenth century in one of the big cities 77 out of 1000 people died, while now only 22 out of 1000 die. We know what it means that our industry has conquered the world. In the face of all these achievements, there is one thing within this modern science that claims authority, one thing that you will encounter again and again, and that is an uncertainty regarding the great questions of the divine, regarding the great questions of the immortal powers in man. And there you hear from those who are most learned, most scientific: We know nothing, we can know nothing. And that is only natural, for it lies in the present development. But what knowledge have we acquired? To understand this properly, we have to look back a little in history.

Anyone who studies culture from a historical perspective from the point of view of the school of thought will be told that there were originally primitive, uneducated, uncultivated peoples. They still live in some parts of the world. We are descended from them. We will not examine whether this is the case. But when we examine religious beliefs, legends and myths, these world scriptures, we are amazed when we look into the deep wisdoms for which these myths and legends are the expression. We can glimpse the deepest wisdom in the mythical images of the seemingly most primitive peoples. We do not import it. Those who study them will find that it takes much more skill to import it than to extract it. These peoples did not have our means of understanding and our instruments. It is a miracle that the secret of the material is presented in a similar way to that given to us by science today. But now read a lecture given at the naturalists' meeting on the brain conditions. Everything appears chaotic to you compared to the old wisdom. There is a difference in how our people think and how our ancestors thought. What does today's man say? I have invented the truth. - Your ancestors would have referred you to their teachers, to higher and higher teachers. A sense of profound humility permeated the whole thing, a humility that can listen, that says to itself, the human being is in a state of development, knowledge and wisdom are also in a state of development, and if I want to know that which I cannot know myself, I must look up to other teachers. We should not accept knowledge on authority, no, when we have heard the truth, the knowledge, we can also find it ourselves.

It is true that the personal cannot know anything about things that go beyond the tangible. If we want to know something about this, we have to turn to such teachers who have kindled the light within themselves, in order to be able to show us what it looks like in the worlds that extend beyond the physical world. They will bring the teacher principle home to us.

What has the man of today achieved with all his science? He has been able to build the outer house and to bring about the greatest conceivable progress in the outer world of the senses. But one thing must be borne in mind. Think of it: all of science and culture has made our Earth a veritable palace for the people living on it. But it also teaches us something else: namely, that this physical Earth will no longer be here, because all the greatness and infinity that material culture has achieved will disappear, will disperse into its atoms. What does this physical science teach us? What will happen to all that man has been here and has achieved? A “I don't know,” this science must say, which is limited only to this earth. Only those who have experienced more than what is connected with the earth can know something about this question – and they do not speak about it that way. We must turn to the great teachers. Therefore, theosophical teaching ultimately leads to the great masters and teachers of the human race. Then one comes to the point of saying that a certain human knowledge is vain. But there are human beings who are beyond this point of view and have achieved something that will still be there when the earth has long since been scattered. We must find the way to the higher individualities who speak to the people who want to hear them. The Master does not speak to those who are arrogant, only to those who are truly humble in the highest sense, who make themselves a vessel and tool of the Master.

The Master speaks to them in the highest sense. Did the founder of the Theosophical Society, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, also have this humility? How easily she could have said: What is in my books comes from my knowledge. But she always referred to those who stood behind her, to the enlightened guides and masters of wisdom. So Helena Petrovna Blavatsky had that great modesty.

There are many who do not want to hear about the so-called higher worlds, who want to avoid the Theosophical Society precisely because it talks about a devachan plan and an astral plan. But whether we are afraid and afraid of these things is not the point, but whether they are true. The masters have told us more about these things because we need them in life. Certainly, you can learn a lot by observing life, the mind can tell us a lot. Even the moral teachings can be grasped by the intellect. From the ordinary point of view, many a person can be moralized about envy, cowardice, lies and so on. But envy, cowardice and lies are things that are observed in truth in the higher world. In the physical world, lying is a relatively light offense. But it is nothing compared to what it is on the astral plane. The moment you tell a lie, you cause something that is like the destruction of a living being. You then carry this killing with you. It mixes with your own astral body. What we otherwise only know from the lie as an external world, we then get to know in its liveliness. What is sensual here becomes spiritual. Today we need to be reintroduced to the spirit, to sense it first and then be led to certain knowledge. This is the life that must pulsate through the theosophical movement. If this life does not pass through the theosophical movement, then it will not achieve what it is meant for. These guiding masters, all our beautiful teachings and theories are in vain if there are not a number of people in the world who come together in the mood we have described, in the mood that they already say to themselves at the entrance: Here we only live in the awareness that the spirit is a reality. - When every listener is filled with this mood, then our branch has meaning, then you yourself are the source of something living. When we are together in the consciousness of the truth of the spirit, then this consciousness is a force, and the people who are there and have this consciousness form an electrical receiver. And when thoughts are expressed, whether by anyone in particular, that are in harmony with the laws of the universe, and are grasped by all the souls in us and a center is formed, then they go out from there through the whole city and influence the whole city, when we have the consciousness of the spirit. My words have no meaning if there are no people who take them up and carry them out into the world. That is why we come together in the Society. When we have this consciousness, only then are we truly a Theosophical Society. That this consciousness becomes more and more intense, stronger and stronger with us, that we really show a power through faith and through the knowledge of the spirit and of the spirit, that is what our meetings should achieve. What really matters is not that we read books or listen to teachings, but that we accept and appropriate this consciousness of the spirit. And then, when there are as many branches as there are people who have this consciousness of the spirit, only then will there be a Theosophical Society. But not before. It is not the doctrine, not the dogma, but the consciousness of the spirit that is important.

The Chair was taken by Miss Margaret McMillan, who gave a stirring address, and Dr. Steiner followed on.

My first words must be a reply to the kind greeting given by Miss Beverley to Frau Doctor Steiner and myself, and I can assure you that we deeply appreciate the invitation to give this course of lectures. I shall try to show what Anthroposophy has to say on the subject of education and to describe the attempt already made in the Waldorf School at Stuttgart to apply the educational principles arising out of Anthroposophy. It is a pleasure to come to the North of England to speak on a subject which I consider so important, and it gives me all the greater joy to think that I am speaking not only to those who have actually arranged this course but to many who are listening for the first time to lectures on education in the light of Anthroposophy. I hope, therefore, that more lies behind this Conference than the resolve of those who organized it, for I think it may be taken as evidence that our previous activities are bearing fruit in current world-strivings.

English friends of Anthroposophy were with us at a Conference held at Christmas, last year, when the Goetheanum (at Dornach, Switzerland)—since taken from us by fire—was still standing. The Conference was brought about by Mrs. Mackenzie, the author of a fine book on the educational principles laid down by Hegel, and the sympathetic appreciation expressed there justifies the hope that it is not, after all, so very difficult to find understanding that transcends the limits of nationality. What I myself said about education at the Conference did not, of course, emanate from the more intellectualistic philosophy of Hegel, but from Anthroposophy, the nature of which is wholly spiritual. And indeed Mrs. Mackenzie, too, has seen how, while fully reckoning with Hegel, something yet more fruitful for education can be drawn where intellectuality is led over into the spiritual forces of Anthroposophy.

Then I was able to speak of our educational principles and their practical application a second time last year, in the ancient university of Oxford. And perhaps I am justified in thinking that those lectures, which dealt with the relation of education to social life, may have induced a number of English educationists to visit our Waldorf School at Stuttgart. It was a great joy to welcome them there, and we were delighted to hear that they were impressed with our work and were following it with interest. During the visit the idea of holding this Summer Course on education seems to have arisen. Its roots, therefore, may be said to lie in previous activities and this very fact gives one the right confidence and courage as we embark on the lectures. Courage and confidence are necessary when one has to speak of matters so unfamiliar to the spiritual life of to-day and in face of such strong opposition. More especially are they necessary when one attempts to explain principles that seek to approach, in a creative sense, the greatest artistic achievement of the Cosmos—man himself.

Those who visited us this year at Stuttgart will have realized how essentially Waldorf School education gets to grips with the deepest fibres of modern life. The educational methods applied there can really no longer be described by the word ‘Pedagogy’ a treasured word which the Greeks learnt from Plato and the Platonists who had devoted themselves so sincerely to all educational questions. Pedagogy is, indeed, no longer an apt term to-day, for it is an a priori expression of the one-sidedness of its ideals, and those who visited the Waldorf School will have realized this from the first. It is not, of course, unusual to-day to find boys and girls educated together, in the same classes and taught in the same way, and I merely mention this to show you that in this respect, too, the methods of the Waldorf School are in line with recent developments.

What does the word ‘Pedagogy’ suggest? The ‘Pedagogue’ is a teacher of boys. This shows us at once that in ancient Greece education was very one-sided. One half of humanity was excluded from serious education. To the Greek, the boy alone was man and the girl must stay in the background when it was a question of serious education. The pedagogue was a teacher of boys, concerned only with that sex.

In our time, the presence of girl-pupils in the schools is no longer unusual, although indeed it involved a radical change from customs by no means very ancient. Another feature at the Waldorf School is that in the teaching staff no distinction of sex is made—none, at least, until we come to the very highest classes. Having as our aim a system of education in accord with the needs of the present day, we had first of all to modify much that was included in the old term ‘Pedagogy.’ So far I have only mentioned one of its limitations, but speaking in the broadest sense it must be admitted that for some time now there has been no real knowledge of man in regard to education and teaching. Indeed, many one-sided views have been held in the educational world, not only that of the separation of the sexes.

Can it truly be said that a man could develop in the fullest sense of the term when educated according to the old principles? Certainly not! To-day we must first seek understanding of the human being in his pure, undifferentiated essence. The Waldorf School was founded with this aim in view. The first idea was the education of children whose parents were working in the Waldorf-Astoria Factory, and as the Director was a member of the Anthroposophical Society, he asked me to supervise the undertaking. I myself could only give the principles of education on the basis of Anthroposophy. And so, in the first place, the Waldorf School arose as a general school for the workers' children. It was only ‘anthroposophical’ in the sense that the man who started it happened to be an Anthroposophist. Here then, we have an educational institution arising on a social basis, seeking to found the whole spirit and method of its teaching upon Anthroposophy. It was not a question of founding an ‘anthroposophical’ school. On the contrary, we hold that because Anthroposophy can at all times efface itself, it is able to institute a school on universal-human principles instead of upon the basis of social rank, philosophical conceptions of any other specialised line of thought.

This may well have occurred to those who visited the Waldorf School and it may also have led to the invitation to give these present lectures. And in this introductory lecture, when I am not yet speaking of education, let me cordially thank all those who have arranged this Summer Course. I would also thank them for having arranged performances of Eurhythmy which has already become an integral part of Anthroposophy. At the very beginning let me express this hope: A Summer Course has brought us together. We have assembled in a beautiful spot in the North of England, far away from the busy life of the winter months. You have given up your time of summer recreation to listen to subjects that will play an important part in the life of the future and the time must come when the spirit uniting us now for a fortnight during the summer holidays will inspire all our winter work. I cannot adequately express my gratitude for the fact that you have dedicated your holidays to the study of ideas for the good of the future. Just as sincerely as I thank you for this now, so do I trust that the spirit of our Summer Course may be carried on into the winter months—for only so can this Course bear real fruit.

I should like to proceed from what Miss McMillan said so impressively yesterday in words that bore witness to the great need of our time for moral impulses to be sought after if the progress of civilization is to be advanced through Education.

When we admit the great need that exists to-day for moral and spiritual impulses in educational methods and allow the significance of such impulses to work deeply in our hearts, we are led to the most fundamental problems in modern spiritual life—problems connected with the forms assumed by our culture and civilization in the course of human history. We are living in an age when certain spheres of culture, though standing in a measure side by side, are yet separated from one another. In the first place we have all that man can learn of the world through knowledge—communicated, for the most part, by the intellect alone. Then there is the sphere of art, where man tries to give expression to profound inner experiences, imitating with his human powers, a divine creative activity. Again we have the religious strivings of man, wherein he seeks to unite his own existence with the life of the universe. Lastly, we try to bring forth from our inner being impulses which place us as moral beings in the civilized life of the world. In effect we confront these four branches of culture: knowledge, art, religion, morality. But the course of human evolution has brought it about that these four branches are developing separately and we no longer realize their common origin. It is of no value to criticize these conditions; rather should we learn to understand the necessities of human progress.

To-day, therefore, we will remind ourselves of the beginnings of civilization. There was an ancient period in human evolution when science, art, religion and the moral life were one. It was an age when the intellect had not yet developed its present abstract nature and when man could solve the riddles of existence by a kind of picture-consciousness. Mighty pictures stood there before his soul—pictures which in the traditional forms of myth and saga have since come down to us. Originally they proceeded from actual experience and a knowledge of the spiritual content of the universe. There was indeed an age when in this direct, inner life of imaginative vision man could perceive the spiritual foundations of the world of sense. And what his instinctive imagination thus gleaned from the universe, he made substantial, using earthly matter and evolving architecture, sculpture, painting, music and other arts. He embodied with rapture the fruits of his knowledge in outer material forms. With his human faculties man copied divine creation, giving visible form to all that had first flowed into him as science and knowledge. In short, his art mirrored before the senses all that his forces of knowledge had first assimilated. In weakened form we find this faculty once again in Goethe, when out of inner conviction he spoke these significant words: “Beauty is a manifestation of the secret laws of Nature, without which they would remain for ever hidden.” And again: “He before whom Nature begins to unveil her mysteries is conscious of an irresistible yearning for art—Nature's worthiest expression.”

Such a conception shows that man is fundamentally predisposed to view both science and art as two aspects of one and the same truth. This he could do in primeval ages, when knowledge brought him inner satisfaction as it arose in the forms of ideas before his soul and when the beauty that enchanted him could be made visible to his senses in the arts—for experiences such as these were the essence of earlier civilizations.

What is our position to-day? As a result of all that intellectual abstractions have brought in their train we build up scientific systems of knowledge from which, as far as possible, art is eliminated. It is really almost a crime to introduce the faintest suggestion of art into science, and anyone who is found guilty of this in a scientific book is at once condemned as a dilettante. Our knowledge claims to be strictly dispassionate and objective; art is said to have nothing in common with objectivity and is purely arbitrary. A deep abyss thus opens between knowledge and art, and man no longer finds any means of crossing it. When he applies the science that is valued because of its freedom from art, he is led indeed to a marvellous knowledge of Nature—but of Nature devoid of life. The wonderful achievements of science are fully acknowledged by us, yet science is dumb before the mystery of man. Look where you will in science to-day, you will find wonderful answers to the problems of outer Nature, but no answers to the riddle of man. The laws of science cannot grasp him. Why is this? Heretical as it sounds to modern ears, this is the reason. The moment we draw near to the human being with the laws of Nature, we must pass over into the realm of art. A heresy indeed, for people will certainly say: “That is no longer science. If you try to understand the human being by the artistic sense, you are not following the laws of observation and strict logic to which you must always adhere.” However emphatically it may be held that this approach to man is unscientific because it makes use of the artistic sense—man is none the less an artistic creation of Nature. All kinds of arguments may be advanced to the effect that this way of artistic understanding is thoroughly unscientific, but the fact remains that man cannot be grasped by purely scientific modes of cognition. And so—in spite of all our science—we come to a halt before the human being. Only if we are sufficiently unbiased can we realize that scientific intellectuality must here be allowed to pass over into the domain of art. Science itself must become art if we would approach the secrets of man's being.

Now if we follow this path with all our inner forces of soul, not only observing in an outwardly artistic sense, but taking the true path, we can allow scientific intellectuality to flow over into what I have described as ‘Imaginative Knowledge’ in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment. This ‘Imaginative Knowledge’—to-day an object of such suspicion and opposition—is indeed possible when the kind of thinking that otherwise gives itself up passively, and increasingly so, to the outer world is roused to a living and positive activity. The difficulty of speaking of these things to-day is not that one is either criticizing or upholding scientific habits of thought which are peculiar to our age; rather does the difficulty consist in the fact that fundamentally one must touch upon matters which concern the very roots of our present civilization. There is an increasing tendency to-day to give oneself up to the mere, observation of outer events, to allow thoughts passively to follow their succession, avoiding all conscious inner activity.

This state of things began with the demand for material proofs of spiritual matters. Take the case of a lecture on spiritual subjects. Visible evidence is out of the question, because words are the only available media—one cannot summon the invisible by some magical process. All that can be done is to stimulate and assume that the audience will inwardly energize their thinking into following the indications given by the words. Yet nowadays it will frequently happen that many of the listeners—I do not, of course, refer to those who are sitting in this hall—begin to yawn, because they imagine that thinking ought to be passive, and then they fall asleep because they are not following the subject actively. People like everything to be demonstrated to the eye, illustrated by means of lantern-slides or the like, for then it is not necessary to think at all. Indeed, they cannot think. That was the beginning, and it has gone still further. In a performance of “Hamlet,” for instance, one must follow the plot, and also the spoken word, in order to understand it. But to-day the drama is deserted for the cinema, where one need not exert oneself in any way; the pictures roll off the machine and can be watched quite inertly. And so man's inner activity of thought has gradually waned. But it is precisely this which must be retained. Yet when once the nature of this inner activity is understood, it will be realized that thinking is not merely a matter of stimulus from outside, but a force living in the very being of man.

The kind of thinking current in our modern civilization is only one aspect of this force of thought. If we inwardly observe it, from the outer side as it were, it is revealed as the force that builds up the human being from childhood. Before this can be understood, an inner, plastic force that transforms abstract thought into pictures must come into play. Then, after the necessary efforts have been made, we reach the stage I have Called in my book, the beginning of meditation. At this point we not only begin to lead mere cleverness over into art, but thought is raised into Imagination. We stand in a world of Imagination, knowing that it is not a creation of our own fancy, but an actual, objective world. We are fully conscious that although we do not as yet possess this objective world itself in Imagination, we have indeed a true picture of it. And now the point is to realize that we must get beyond the picture.

Strenuous efforts are necessary if we would master this inner creative thinking that does not merely contain pictures of fantasy, but pictures bearing their own reality within them. Then, however, we must next be able to eliminate the whole of this creative activity and thus accomplish an inwardly moral act. For this indeed constitutes an act of inner morality: when all the efforts described in my book to reach this active thinking in pictures have been made, when all the forces of soul have been applied and the powers of Self strained to their very utmost, we then must be able to eliminate all we have thus attained. In his own being man must have developed the highest fruits of this thinking that has been raised to the level of meditation and then be capable of selflessness. He must be able to eliminate all that has been thus acquired. For to have nothing is not the same as to have gained nothing. If he has made every effort to strengthen the Self by his own will so that finally his consciousness can be emptied-a spiritual world surges into his consciousness and being and he realizes that spiritual forces of cognition are needed for knowledge of the spiritual world. Active picture-thinking may be called Imagination. When the spiritual world pours into the consciousness that has in turn been emptied by dint of tremendous effort, man is approaching the mode of mode of knowledge known as true Inspiration. Having experienced Imagination, we may through an inner denial of self come to comprehend the spiritual world lying behind the two veils of outer Nature and of man.

I will now endeavour to show you how from this point we are led over to the spiritual life of religion.

Let me draw your attention to the following.—Inasmuch as Anthroposophy strives for true Imagination, it leads not only to knowledge or to art that in itself is of the nature of a picture, but to the spiritual reality contained in the picture. Anthroposophy bridges the gulf between knowledge and art in such a way that at a higher level, suited to modern life and the present age, the unity of science and art which humanity has abandoned can enter civilization once again. This unity must be re-attained, for the schism between science and art has disrupted the very being of man. To pass from the state of disruption to unity and inner harmony—it is for this above all that modern man must strive.

Thus far I have spoken of the harmony between science and art. I will now develop the subject further, in connection with religion and morality.

Knowledge that thus draws the creative activity of the universe into itself can flow directly into art, and this same path from knowledge to art can be extended and continued. It was so continued through the powers of the old imaginative knowledge of which I have spoken, which also found the way, without any intervening cleft, into the life of religion. He who applied himself to this kind of knowledge—primitive and instinctive though it was in early humanity—was aware that he acquired it by no external perceptions, for in his thinking and knowing he sensed divine life within him, he felt that spiritual powers were at work in his own creative activity enabling him to raise to greater holiness all that had been impressed into the particular medium of his art. The power born in his soul as he embodied the Divine-Spiritual in outer material substance could then extend into acts wherein he was fully conscious that he, as man, was expressing the will of divine ordnance. He felt himself pervaded by divine creative power, and as the path was found through the fashioning of material substance, art became—by way of ritual—a form of divine worship. Artistic creation was sanctified in the divine office. Art became ritual—the glorification of the Divine—and through the medium of material substance offered sacrifice to the Divine Being in ceremonial and ritual. And as man thus bridged the gulf between Art and Religion there arose a religion in full harmony with knowledge and with art. Albeit primitive and instinctive, this knowledge was none the less a true picture, and as such it could lead human deeds to become, in the acts of ritual, a direct portrayal of the Divine.

In this way the transition from art to religion was made possible. Is it still possible with our present-day mode of knowledge? The ancient clairvoyant perception had revealed to man the spiritual in every creature and process of Nature, and by surrender and devotion to the spirit within the nature-processes, the spiritual laws of the Cosmos passed over and were embodied in ritual and cult.

How do we “know” the world to-day? Once more, to describe is better than criticism, for as the following lectures will show, the development of our present mode of knowledge was a necessity in the history of mankind. To-day I am merely placing certain suggestive thoughts before you. We have gradually lost our spiritual insight into the being and processes of Nature. We take pride in eliminating the spirit in our observation of Nature and finally reach such hypothetical conceptions as attribute the origin of our planet to the movements of a primeval nebula. Mechanical stirrings in this nebula are said to be the origin of all the kingdoms of Nature, even so far as man. And according to these same laws—which govern our whole “objective” mode of thinking, this earth must finally end through a so-called extinction of warmth. All ideas achieved by man, having proceeded from a kind of Fata Morgana, will disappear, until at the end there will remain only the tomb of earthly existence.

If the truth of this line of thought be recognized by science and men are honest and brave enough to face its inevitable consequences, they cannot but admit that all religious and moral life is also a Fata Morgana and must so remain! Yet the human being cannot endure this thought, and so must hold fast to the remnants of olden times, when religion and morality still lived in harmony with knowledge and with art. Religion and morality to-day are not direct creations of man's innermost being. They rest on tradition, and are a heritage from ages when the instinctive life of man was filled with revelation, when God—and the moral world in Him—were alike manifest. Our strivings for knowledge to-day can reveal neither God nor a moral world. Science comes to the end of the animal species and man is cast out. Honest inner thinking can find no bridge over the gulf fixed between knowledge and the religious life.

All true religions have sprung from Inspiration. True, the early form of Inspiration was not so conscious as that to which we must now attain, yet it was there instinctively, and rightly do the religions trace their origin back to it. Such faiths as will no longer recognize living inspiration and revelation from the spirit in the immediate present have to be content with tradition. But such faiths lack all inner vitality, all direct motive-power of religious life. This motive-power and vitality must be re-won, for only so can our social organism be healed.

I have shown how man must regain a knowledge that passes by way of art to Imagination, and thence to Inspiration. If he re-acquires all that flows down from the inspirations of a spiritual world into human consciousness, true religion will once again appear. And then intellectual discussion about the nature of Christ will cease, for through Inspiration it will be known in truth that the Christ was the human bearer of a Divine Being Who had descended from spiritual worlds into earthly existence. Without super-sensible knowledge there can be no understanding of the Christ. If Christianity is again to be deeply rooted in humanity, the path to super-sensible knowledge must be rediscovered. Inspiration must again impart a truly religious life to mankind in order that knowledge—derived no longer merely from the observation of natural laws—may find no abyss dividing it alike from art and religion. Knowledge, art, religion—these three will be in harmony.

Primeval man was convinced of the presence of God in human deeds when he made his˃ art a divine office and when a consciousness of the fire glowing in his heart as Divine Will pervaded the acts of ritual. And when the path from outer objective knowledge to Inspiration is found once again, true religion will flow from Inspiration and modern man will be permeated—as was primeval man—with a God-given morality. In those ancient days man felt: “If I have my divine office, if I share in divine worship, my whole inner being is enriched; God lives not only in the temple but in the whole of my life.”

To make the presence of God imminent in the world—this is true morality. Nature cannot lead man to morality. Only that which lifts him above Nature, filling him with the Divine-Spiritual—this alone can lead man to morality. Through the Intuition which comes to him when he finds his way to the spirit, he can fill his innermost being with a morality that is at once human and divine. The attainment of Inspiration thus rebuilds the bridge once existing instinctively in human civilization between religion and morality. As knowledge leads upwards through art to the heights of super-sensible life, so, through religious worship, spiritual heights are brought down to earthly existence, and we can permeate it with pure, deep-rooted morality—a morality that is an act of conscious experience. Thus will man himself become the individual expression of a moral activity that is an inner motive power. Morality will be a creation of the individual himself, and the last abyss between religion and morality will be bridged. The intuition pervading primitive man as he enacted his ritual will be re-created in a new form, and a morality truly corresponding with modern conditions will arise from the religious life of our day. We need this for the renewal of our civilization. We need it in order that what to-day is mere heritage, mere tradition may spring again into life. This pure, primordial impulse is necessary for our complicated social life that is threatening to spread chaos through the world. We need a harmony between knowledge, art, religion, and morality. The earth-born knowledge which has given us our science of to-day must take on a new form and lead us through Inspiration and the arts to a realization of the super-sensible in the life of religion. Then we shall indeed be able to bring down the super-sensible to the earth again, to experience it in religious life and to transform it into will in social existence. Only when we see the social question as one of morality and religion can we really grapple with it, and this we cannot do until the moral and religious life arises from spiritual knowledge. The revival of spiritual knowledge will enable man to accomplish what he needs—a link between later phases of evolution and its pure, instinctive origin. Then he will know what is needed for the healing of humanity—harmony between science, art, religion, and morality.

Dr. Steiner: I am sorry I have not been here for so long. Let us take a look at what we need to do today.

A teacher asks if they should turn some of the more difficult children away or if a trial period should be implemented.

Dr. Steiner: That is a question we can decide only when we have analyzed each case.

A teacher: One of the children, B.O., stole something.

Dr. Steiner: Is he just spoiled or is this habitual?

A teacher: The child is really quite spoiled. Our question is whether it would be responsible of us to have that child with the other children.

Dr. Steiner: You would have to see whether the boy is disturbed. I hope I can come by again for a while tomorrow. We have already had some children who had stolen something, and we still have them.

A teacher speaks about H.M.A. and asks if she can be excused from foreign languages.

Dr. Steiner: There is no reason to not have her in the school. It is for just such children that we need a remedial class.

That is something we need to do. Even though they may be disturbed, the children need to learn, and we do not want to turn them away. The situation is somewhat different in B.’s case. We have to admit it is difficult to come to grips with him. If he is disturbed, he would also have to go into the remedial class. The question is not easy to decide. With such children, it is not so easy to turn them away after a time. Accepting them and then rejecting them would lead to a bourgeois tendency in the school. We would all become bourgeois, just like everyone else. We certainly cannot accept children and then turn them away. There are not many children like B. and were we to observe him more closely, the various tricks he plays, we would probably see the meaning of it. For instance, in the case where he said he was someone else, there is certainly some other circumstance that would explain that.

A teacher: He has a bad influence on the others. When he is around, they act differently.

Dr. Steiner: That is true, the danger of infection is high. It will not be easy to find a way to work with him. In any event, before I consider the question, I would first like to meet him.

We have already had some thefts, but we never really considered whether we should keep the children or not. What kind of criteria could we make?

The difficulty is in determining some criteria and then sticking to it. Surely, there must be some way of doing that. How can we set the boundary between those who are servile enough for the Waldorf School and those who do not deserve it? How would you want to determine a tendency for theft? We can take note of the question, but such questions are more easily asked than answered. We are not done with the question yet, and I do not tend to give general answers to such questions. We must answer them case by case.

A teacher: The Independent Anthroposophical Youth has asked the teachers to give a course.

Dr. Steiner: They are mostly those who were down there in the Society branch building. They already had a few small meetings. Why shouldn’t you do that?

A teacher requests some guidelines.

Dr. Steiner: It would be quite a service if you were to do it. But stay more in the area of pedagogy. They are certainly thinking of pedagogy in general and not specific pedagogical methods. They are thinking more of cultural pedagogy. There is certainly a lot more going on in young people since the beginning of the century, or perhaps a few years earlier. There is a great deal going on in their unconscious. That is why the youth movement has a supersensible foundation. We should take this up seriously. I was in Aarau last Friday. It was not really a discussion, but a few people spoke up. One of them was a very curious person. During the first university course, I was put in a difficult position. I had received an unexpected telegram stating that two students had cut class and gone to the course. That is quite dangerous in Switzerland. Dr. Boos lay in wait for them and caught the two rascals. We gave the money back. It was one of those boys who spoke last Friday.

In reality, what happened was that a minister spoke first, a middle- aged man who really had nothing to say other than that we shouldn’t talk only about death; then, a teacher; and then that boy. The boy actually spoke best. He said something that was really quite correct. The whole conversation ended in the minister saying that modern youth does not recognize authority. Then the young man said, “Who should have authority? You should not complain if I state things radically, but if you want authority, then you have to be able to justify it. Don’t older people make compromises? If we see that, how can we look upon them with a feeling of authority?” He spoke very insightfully, and it made a good impression upon me.

We should pay attention to the youth movement. It is a cultural movement of great significance. Nevertheless, we need to avoid narrow-mindedness and pedantry in connection with the youth movement.

The teachers could give lectures on three days around Christmas and New Year’s.

A teacher asks about the behavior of some of the older students toward the girls and about smoking.

Dr. Steiner: Have they been making some advances? Let’s leave the question of smoking to the side, we can discuss that later. These other things we can do now. Has anything occurred that goes beyond reason? Of course, when a number of children get together, certain things happen, at least to an extent. Has anything happened that goes beyond reasonable limits?

A number of teachers speak about the behavior toward the girls.

Dr. Steiner: Well, it could simply be naïveté.

A teacher: It was sharper, more than naïve.

Dr. Steiner: It depends upon their character. If someone is rather coarse, he could still be naïve. It is important since we have looked at this point, that when nothing else can be done, we should somehow step in. On the other hand, we should not go into the situation with the children themselves. That would certainly make them difficult to handle. Take one such instance that occurred. A girl sits upon an older boys’ lap. You can be certain that you should ignore it as long as possible. You need to try to inhibit such actions, but don’t go so far as to put the children off. If you do, you will certainly draw their attention to it. You should handle such things with extreme care. You cannot teach boys and girls together if you do not avoid taking direct action.

Our materialistic age has created horrible prejudices in this regard. It often happens that a mother and father come to me and ask for advice because their children are developing a perverse sexuality. But when I see the child, he is only five years old and supposedly perverse! He doesn’t have any sexuality at all. This is pure stupidity. At the end, they bring out the Freudian theory that says a baby’s sucking on a pacifier is a sexual act.

What is important here is your tact. It can happen on occasion that you must act upon something sharply. However, in this question, you should do things more indirectly, otherwise you will draw the children’s attention to them.

It would be a good idea to report these cases psychologically, at least where a discussion of them is justified. Have you told me of all the instances? That doesn’t seem to be the case?

A teacher: Z.S. has a little circle of admirers around her.

Dr. Steiner: Such things have been cause for great tragedies. We need to handle them indirectly. Suppose a tragedy is playing out there. Because of that tragedy, one of the older girls says something to a teacher, then the girl sees that as a terrible breach of trust, and then the other girl finds out that you have told it further. You told something to another teacher that was told you in confidence, and the girl finds that out. The girl has cried a great deal over that. We really need to take these things in a way so that we can see they are actually an enrichment of life. These are things we cannot handle in a pedantic way. Every person is a different human being, even as a child.

A teacher: In my discussions about The Song of the Niebelungs in the tenth grade, I have come across a number of risqué passages. How should I behave in this regard?

Dr. Steiner: Either you have to pass over them tactfully or handle them seriously. You could try to handle such things in a simple and natural way, without any hint of frivolousness. That would be better than hiding them.

Concerning a restriction on smoking and similar things, it is quite possible that the children feel they are above that.

A teacher: One boy smoked a whole pack. We also find the name “Cigarette School.” It is not good for the school when the students smoke.

Dr. Steiner: In Dornach, the eurythmy ladies smoke much more than the men. The best thing would be to teach them to exercise some reason in regard to smoking.

A teacher: The result was, as they noticed, that they only hurt themselves.

Dr. Steiner: I think you could say what the effect is upon the organism. You could describe the effects of nicotine. That would be best. You may be tempted to do one and not another. This question in particular is a textbook example of when it is better to do one thing, namely, when the children who have such bad habits learn to stop them. In that case, pedagogically you have done fifteen times more than if you only prohibit smoking. A restriction on smoking is easier, but to teach the children so that they understand the problem affects the entirety of their lives. It is very important not to forbid and punish. We should not forbid nor punish, but do something else.

A teacher: Some of the teachers have started a discussion period for the students. We have discussed questions of worldview.

Dr. Steiner: It does not appear that children from the specific religions stay away. In any event, such a discussion period is good. It would be impossible to avoid having the discussion of worldview take on an anthroposophical character. You can barely avoid that in the religion classes, but in such a discussion group it is unavoidable. It is also not necessary to avoid it.

A question is asked about tutoring for foreign languages.

Dr. Steiner: That is a question about the extent to which we can make the foreign language classes independent of the grades, so that a child in one of the lower grades could be in a higher foreign language class.

A teacher: That would be difficult.

Dr. Steiner: It is still a question whether we can solve it or not.

A teacher: It will hardly be possible to teach foreign language in all the classes at the same time. That is why we thought of tutoring as a temporary measure.

Dr. Steiner: We can certainly do what we can in that direction. In the continuation school in Dornach, all the children from eight until eighteen sit together in the various subjects. There is also a forty-five-year-old woman with them. I cannot say that is such a terrible thing since it really isn’t so bad. Yesterday, an “officer of the law” came who wanted to take the children away from us.

We cannot make many classes, but we could do something. However, the teachers would have more work than if we simply tried to get past some of these small problems.

A teacher: Then, it would be good to leave the children there?

Dr. Steiner: That is the ideal. We could give them some extra instruction, but not take them out of the class. That would actually be too strenuous for the children. Otherwise, we would have to form the language classes differently from the other subjects.

A teacher: That is enormously difficult.

Dr. Steiner: We cannot easily increase the number of teachers. There is a discussion about art class in the upper grades and about some drafts for crafts.

Dr. Steiner: In art, you can do different things in many different ways. It is not possible to say that one thing is definitely good and the other is definitely bad. In Dornach, Miss van Blommestein has begun to teach through colors, and they are making good progress. I have seen that it is having a very good influence. We allow the children to work only with the primary colors. We say, for instance, “In the middle of your picture you have a yellow spot. Make it blue. Change the picture so that all of the other colors are changed accordingly.” When the children have to change one color, and then change everything else in accordance with that, the result is a basic insight into color. This can be seen, for instance, when they sew something onto a purse or something else and then do crossstitch on it so that it sits at just the right spot. The things you have told us about all result in essentially the same thing, and that is very good. The only question is when to begin this. You will have the greatest success if you begin in the very low grades, and then develop handwriting from that.

A teacher: Wouldn’t the class teacher contradict the shop teacher then?

Dr. Steiner: The person giving the art class needs to be aware that these children have all done this as small children. Now we could do it like you said; however, later you will need to be aware that the children have already done all that. Today, you first have to get rid of all bad taste. In this connection, people have not had much opportunity to learn very much. When people today do some crossstitch upon something, they could just as easily have done it on something else.

A teacher: I did not agree that the children in my third-grade class should paint in handwork class.

Dr. Steiner: If the children paint in your third grade, they will begin painting in handwork only in the eighth grade.

A teacher: What I meant is, I think the children are too young to do anything artistic.

Dr. Steiner: In your class, there is still not any artistic handwork. There is some discussion about this conflict.

Dr. Steiner: The individual teachers need to communicate with one another. The fact that there is no communication can at best be a question of lack of time, but, in principle, you always need to discuss things with one another.

The shop teacher: I think the children in the ninth and tenth grades should have more opportunity to work in the shop. I have them only every other week.

Dr. Steiner: Only every other week? How did that happen? The shop teacher: I can have only twenty-five at a time.

Dr. Steiner: It is impossible to have more time for that. Rather than dividing the classes, which is pedagogical nonsense, it would be better if you compressed everything into one week, namely, that you had the children every day for a week. That is something really important for life, and the children suffer from having to do without their work for a longer period. This tearing apart is significant. Perhaps we should consider this more according to our principle of concentration of work.

Why do we have to have this class in the afternoons? Is it a question of the class schedule? There must surely be some solution.

A teacher: We only need to know what would have to be dropped.

Dr. Steiner: Well, we certainly cannot affect the main lesson.

A teacher: Then, that would mean that for a week we would have only shop.

Dr. Steiner: We could do it so that only one-third has shop class.

The only class that is suffering less from a lack of concentrated instruction is foreign language. It suffers the least. The main lesson and art class suffer not only from a psychological perspective, there is something in human nature that is actually destroyed by piecemeal teaching.

The children do not need to do handwork, knitting or crochet, for a week at a time. That is something they can do later. We don’t need to be pedantic. I could imagine finding it very intriguing to knit on a sock every Wednesday at noon for a quarter of an hour, so that it would be done in a half year. To work every Wednesday on a sculpture is something else again. But, you can learn to knit socks in that way.

You need to simply find a solution for these things. A handwork teacher: I find it very pleasant to have the children once a week.

Dr. Steiner: If it does not involve crafts, then the pauses are unimportant. However, when it does involve crafts, then we should try to maintain a certain level of concentration. When we have the children learn bookbinding, that certainly requires a concentrated level of work. This is something that is coming. In the tenth grade we already have practical instruction. In such a class, we wouldn’t do any other crafts.

A teacher: …

Dr. Steiner: You should learn stenography in your sleep, that is without any particular concentration. Teaching stenography at all is basically barbaric. It is the epitome of Ahrimanism, and for that reason, the ideal would be to learn stenography as though in sleep. The fact that is not possible makes it significant when it is being done so poorly, as though there was no concentration given to it while learning it. It is simply all nonsense. It is cultural nonsense that people do stenography.

A teacher: Shop was connected with gardening class. Now Miss Michels is here, so how should we divide that?

Dr. Steiner: Miss Michels will take over from Mr. Wolffhügel. The best would be for them to discuss how to work together. They can discuss it.

A teacher reports that the faculty began an extra period for tone eurythmy.

Dr. Steiner: That is possible with tone eurythmy. It is not something that burdens the children. It could, however, open the door to other things. If we have a tutoring period for every regular period, that will be too much. We would have to teach all night long.

A teacher asks about eurythmy for the children in the remedial class.

Dr. Steiner: I hope I will have time to have a look at them. For the children in the remedial class, it would be best to do eurythmy during that period.

A teacher asks about the development of the curriculum.

Dr. Steiner: In the pedagogical lectures, there was a large amount of theoretical material. Now we also have some practical experience.

A teacher: Attempts have been made to create a boarding school.

Dr. Steiner: Under certain circumstances, boarding schools are good, but that is seldom the case these days. They are not a purpose of our Waldorf School. It is not the purpose of our Waldorf School to create special situations. We are not here to create a special social class, but, rather, to bring out the best we can from the existing social classes through our teaching.

If the home is good, we can recommend it for the children.

A teacher: Mrs. Y. had asked if other parents want to participate.

Dr. Steiner: That is possible only if the parents ask the school, and if the school determines that Mrs. Y.’s home is adequate. Then the faculty would recommend it. Right now, we do not know. What we should really work for is the founding of as many Waldorf Schools as possible, so that parents would not have to board the children for them to go to a Waldorf school. Right now, there is only the one Waldorf school, and that is why we could support a boarding home. Actually, it must become possible for children everywhere to go to a Waldorf School, otherwise Stuttgart will remain only as model.

There is a tremendous amount of hubbub. If I look at the letters I have received in just the last three days, people want to create boarding homes everywhere. This sort of thing happens all the time. People want something, but we really need to look at it critically. People are always poking their nose into things as soon as something like the Waldorf School is created. All kinds of uncalled for people appear.

A comment is made about a continuation course that has started.

Dr. Steiner: In principle, there is nothing to say against it. You only need to be careful that some guys don’t come into it who would ruin the whole class.

A question is asked about the biennial report and whether Dr. Steiner would write something for it.

Dr. Steiner: I will write something; now there are a number of things to say.

A question is asked about the reading primer.

Dr. Steiner: I don’t have the primer. I haven’t had it for a long time. I have nothing against it if it is done tastefully. If I am to do the lettering, then I will have to have it again.

One of the subject teachers complains about the disturbances caused by the confirmation class.

Dr. Steiner: Are there really so many? That is an invasion into healthy teaching.

A teacher: The faculty would like a special Sunday Service for teachers only.

Dr. Steiner: We already discussed something like that. I would have to know if there is an extensive need for it.

A teacher: The desire was stated.

Dr. Steiner: Of course, something quite beautiful could come from that. I could easily imagine a unified striving coming from it. It will not be so easy to find the form. Who should do it? Suppose you choose by voting and then rotate. Those are very difficult things. You must have a deeply unified will. Who would do it?

A teacher: It never occurred to me that this could cause an argument. We certainly may not have any ambitions.

Dr. Steiner: If everyone had a different opinion about who could do it well, then it would be difficult. You would all need to be united in your opinion about who could do it. But then, problems arise. That is like the story about Stockerau: Someone asks a man in Vienna if it is far to America, to which he replies, “You’ll soon be in Stockerau and afterward, you’ll find the way.”

A teacher: Should only one person do it?

Dr. Steiner: Then every week you’ll wonder who could do it well.

A teacher proposes Mr. N.

Dr. Steiner: Now we will have to hold a secret ballot.

A teacher: What seems important to me is that we have it.

Dr. Steiner: Of course. This is a difficult thing, like choosing the Pope.

A teacher: Everyone would be fine with me.

Dr. Steiner: Now we would have to think about the form. I would never dare say who should do it.

A teacher: Perhaps one of the three men now doing the children’s service.

Dr. Steiner: Only if it were perfectly clear that that is acceptable. A service is either simply a question of form, in which case you could do it together, or it is a ritual act, and you have to look more seriously at it. In that case, you can have no secret enemies. Another teacher speaks about the question.

Dr. Steiner: Now I am lost. I don’t understand anything anymore. A sacrament is esoteric. It is one of the most esoteric things you can imagine. What you said is connected with the fact that you cannot decide upon a ritual democratically. Of course, once a ritual exists, it can be taken care of by a group. But, the group would have to be united.

A teacher: I thought we shouldn’t demand things of individuals.

Dr. Steiner: That is what I mean. It should be like the ritual we provided for the children. That was not at all the task of the Waldorf School.

The question is whether something that, in a certain sense, requires such careful creation might be too difficult to create out of the faculty and too difficult to care for within the faculty as a whole. Let us assume you all are in agreement. Then, we could only accept new colleagues into the faculty who also agree. We could esoterically unite with only those people who are united in a specific esoteric form. A service is possible in esoteric circles only when it is to be something. Otherwise, we would need to have just a sacrificial mass. You would need that for those who want something non-esoteric, and it would exist in contrast to the esoteric. You cannot have a mass without a priest. In esoteric things, people should be united in the content.

A question is asked about esoteric studies.

Dr. Steiner: That is very difficult to do. Until now, I have always had to avoid them. As you know, I gave a number of such studies years ago, but I had to stop because people misused them. Esotericism was simply taken out into the world and distorted. In that regard, nothing in our esoteric movement has ever been as damaging as that. All other esoteric study, even in less than honorable situations, was held intimately. That was the practice over a long period of time. Cliques have become part of the Anthroposophical Society and they have set themselves above everything else, unfortunately, also above what is esoteric. Members do not put the anthroposophical movement as such to the fore, but, instead, continually subject it to the interests of cliques. The anthroposophical movement is dividing into a number of factions. To that extent, it is worse than much that exists in the exoteric world. I say that without in any way wanting to express a lack of understanding for the history of it. Think about what you have experienced in the external bourgeois world led by functionaries. When some important government official moves from one city to another, he must, with great equanimity, introduce himself to all the various people with their differing opinions. However, in the Anthroposophical Society, if someone comes to a city that has a number of branches, it might occur to him that, since there are many branches, that is good, and he can go to all of them. But after visiting one, the others turn him away. A naïve person would think he could go to all of them. There are cities in which numerous anthroposophical branches exist, and that is how they treat one another.

Esotericism is a painful chapter in the book of the anthroposophical movement. It isn’t just that people always refer to what has occurred in the past. It is, in fact, the case that when Kully writes his articles in the local newspaper, you can clearly see that he is well informed about the most recent events within the Society, right down to the most unimportant details.

We would first need to find some form.

A teacher: Is it possible to find that form?

Dr. Steiner: We must truly find the form first. You can see that since now there is this wonderful movement that has led to the theological course. It was held very esoterically and contained within it the foundation of the sacraments in the highest sense of the word. There you can see that people were united.

In any event, I would like to think about this, and what can be understood about your needs.

The children’s Sunday service, isn’t it an esoteric activity for the individual human beings who attend it, regardless of whether they are children or not?

Finally, you need to remember that lay people have a priest—Protestantism has no esotericism within it any more—the priest has a deacon, he has a bishop and that goes right on up to the Pope. But even the Pope has a confessor. You can see there how human relationships change. That ironclad recognition of the principle is what is necessary. The confessor is not higher than the Pope, but nevertheless he can, under certain circumstances, give the Pope penance. Of course, the Roman Catholic church also comes into the most terrible situations.

I want to think about this some more.

The subject about which I shall have to speak today, tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, and which was already referred to some time ago,¹ is the special way in which, in the first half of the twentieth century, a kind of renewed manifestation of the Christ-Event is to take place. This will need a certain amount of preparation, and today, to begin with, I shall try to characterize again from a certain point of view the spiritual complexion of the civilized world and, from this point of view, draw attention to the challenges that are placed before us with regard to the evolution of humanity—the education of humanity as a whole in the near future-by the facts of this human evolution itself.

We know that a new age in the development of civilized humanity began around the beginning of the fifteenth century. People today no longer form an exact idea of what the constitution of soul was like in the people who lived before this great turning-point of modern history. People do not consider this. But one could easily imagine how different the soul-constitution in Europe must have been which, over large areas, inclined people to undertake the Crusades to Asia, to the Orient; especially when one bears in mind how impossible an event like this, resting as it did on an idealistic spiritual background, has become since the beginning of the fifteenth century. People do not consider the completely different nature of humanity's interests before this historical turning-point, nor the interests which, since that time, have become particularly important. But if, from the many characteristics which can be attributed to this more recent time, one wishes to single out the most significant one, then this must be the increasing ascendancy, the increasing intensity of the human power of intellect.

But in the depths of the human soul there is always another force, whether as a sense of longing or as a more or less clear facet of consciousness. It is the longing for knowledge. Now, when one looks back into former times, even into the eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries of European development, it is possible to speak of a definite longing for knowledge in as much as the human being at that time had faculties in his soul which enabled him to achieve a relationship to nature—a relationship to what was revealed in nature as spirit—and thereby also to achieve a relationship to the spirit world itself. Certainly, longing for knowledge has been spoken about a good deal since then; but it is impossible, when one looks completely without prejudice at the development of humanity, to compare the longing for knowledge which holds sway today with the intensity of the longing for knowledge that held sway before the middle of the fifteenth century. Striving for knowledge was an intense affair of the human soul; for knowledge that had an inner glow, an inner warmth, for the human being, and which was also significant for the human being when it came to what moved him to perform his work in the world, and so on. Everything that lived there as a longing for knowledge has become less and less comparable with what has been emerging since the middle of the fifteenth century. And even when we consider the great philosophers of the first half of the nineteenth century, we are presented with ingenious elaborations of the human system of ideas; but only, if I can put it so, artistic elaborations of it. In neither Fichte, nor Schelling, nor Hegel—particularly not in Hegel—do we find a proper idea of what had previously existed as a longing for knowledge.

Then, in the second half of the nineteenth century, the striving for knowledge, even though pursued in isolation as was still the custom, enters more and more into the service of outer life. It enters into the service of technological science and thus also takes on the configuration of this technology. What then is the cause of this? It comes from the fact that it is just in this time that we find the particular development and elaboration of the intellect. This, of course, did not happen all at once. The intellect was gradually prepared for. The last traces of the old clairvoyance had long since become extremely dim. But one can nevertheless say that, to a certain degree, the last effects of the old clairvoyance—though not the old clairvoyance itself—were still present even in the fifteenth century. All human beings, or at least those who strove for knowledge, had some idea of the faculties rising up out of the human soul that are higher than the faculties concerned with daily life. Although in olden times these faculties arose from the soul in a dreamlike way, they were nevertheless faculties different from those of everyday life and it was by means of these other [higher] faculties that people tried to probe to the depths of the world-being—and did, in fact, penetrate to its spirituality. Thus was knowledge attained. People experienced it as knowing when, from the phenomena of nature, from the being of nature, they sensed, they perceived, how spiritual elemental beings worked in the individual phenomena of nature; how the divine spiritual being as a whole worked through the totality of nature. People felt themselves to be in the realm of knowledge when gods spoke through the phenomena of nature; when gods spoke through the appearance and movements of the stars. This is what people understood as knowledge.

The moment humanity renounced perception of the spiritual in the manifestations of nature, the concept of knowledge itself also fell more or less into a deterioration. And it is this decline of real intensity in the pursuit of knowledge that marks the latest period of human evolution.

What then is needed here? It is that which exists at present only in the small circle of anthroposophically-striving human beings but which must become more and more general. Nature's manifestations spoke to ancient human beings in such a way that they revealed the spirit to them. The spiritual spoke out of every spring, every cloud, every plant. In the way people came to know the manifestations and beings of nature they also came to know the spiritual. This is no longer the case. But the condition of intellectualism is only a transitional condition. For what is the deepest characteristic of this intellect? It is that it is impossible to grasp and know anything at all with the pure intellect. The intellect is not just there for knowing. This is the greatest error to which the human being can give himself: the belief that the intellect is there for gaining knowledge. People will attain to true knowledge again only when they concern themselves with what lies at the basis of spiritual-scientific research; which, at the least, can be given by Imagination. People will only know truly again when they say: In ancient times divine-spiritual beings spoke from the manifestations of nature. For the intellect they are silent. For higher, super-sensible knowledge it will not be the phenomena of nature that will speak directly—for nature, as such, works silently. But beings will speak to the human being—beings who will appeal, to him in Imaginations, will inspire him, with whom he will become united intuitively and whom he will then be able to relate again to the phenomena of nature. Thus one can say: In ancient times the spiritual appeared to the human being through nature. In our transitional condition we have the intellect. Nature remains spiritless. The human being will lift himself up to a condition where he can again truly know; where, indeed, nature will no longer speak to him of divine-spiritual beings but where he will o take hold of the divine-spiritual in supersensible knowledge and will, in turn, be able to relate this to nature.

It was a particular characteristic of oriental spiritual life, of oriental knowledge—which, as we know, lived on as a heritage in occidental civilization—that the orientals, at the time of the blossoming of the knowledge of their culture, perceived a spiritual element in all the manifestations of nature; that the divine-spiritual spoke through nature, whether through the lower elemental beings in individual things and phenomena or in the whole of nature, as the all-encompassing divine-spiritual. Later on there developed in the central regions of the earth that which came under the dialectical-legal spirit. It is out of this that intellectuality was born. Spiritual culture was retained as a heritage from the ancient Orient. And when people still had this last longing to experience something from the Orient—people did experience something of this in the Crusades and brought it back to Europe—and after they had stilled this longing through the Crusades, the Orient became effectively closed off. On the one hand, by what was established by Peter the Great who destroyed the remains of the oriental constitution of soul on the European side and, on the other hand, by the blockade set up by the Turks who, just at the beginning of this age which we call the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, established their rule in Europe. European thought and culture was, as it were, closed off from access to the Orient. But it had to develop further and could only do so under the influence of the dialectical-legal life, under the influence of the economic life arising from the West, and in the decadent continuation of the spiritual life which had been received from the Orient, to which the doors were now closed as I described. The condition was thereby prepared in which we are now living, where it is up to us, out of ourselves, to open the doors again to the spiritual world; to come to a perception of it through Imagination, Inspiration, Intuition.

This is all connected with the fact that, in those ancient times in which the oriental rose to the attainment of wisdom, what was of particular importance were the abilities, the forces, brought by the human being into physical existence through birth. In the time of oriental wisdom, everything—despite the civilization which took its course there and was shone through with wisdom—everything, fundamentally, depended on the blood. But, at the same time, what was in the blood was also spiritually recognized. It was determined by the Mysteries as to who, through his line of blood, was called by destiny to the leadership of the people. There could be no questioning this: whoever was called to the leadership of the people by the Mysteries was brought to this position because his bloodline, his descent, was. the outer sign that this was how it should be. There could be no question of any kind of legal proof as to whether anyone was rightly in this position or not because, against the verdict of the gods, according to which people were allotted their place, there could be no contradiction. Jurisprudence was unknown in the mission here in the world of the senses was given by Orient. One knew theocracy, the 'rule of cosmic order', One's mission here in the world of the senses was given by the spiritual world above. The feeling that said that someone was in the in the right place because the gods had directed his bloodline in such a way that he could be brought to this place was replaced with another in a dialectical-legal dress, on the basis of which one that he could dispute on legal grounds whether someone was entitled to his position, or to do this or that, and so on.

The nature of the soul-constitution, prepared already in Greece but then particularly also in Rome, by which Central Europeans were beginning to use concepts, dialectics, to decide what justice was, was quite unknown and alien to the Orient. I have described this from different aspects. In the Orient it was a matter of fathoming the will of the gods. And there were no dialectics for deciding what the gods willed.

But we are again at a turning-point. It is becoming necessary now for humanity to also take a closer look at this dialectical-legal element. For the economic element, which from the West has conquered the world with the aid of technology, is already completely entangled in the state of affairs that has arisen through the dialectical-legal aspect. The economy was a minor element in the ancient theocratic cultures which were permeated by the divine-spiritual. People did there in the economic life what arose as a matter of course according to the place and rank into which the gods had placed them through the proclamations of the Mysteries. And then the economic life, which began again only primitively, became caught up, as it were, in the threads of the dialectical-legal life. For, at the beginning of the so-called Middle Ages, the Romans above all had no money. Economics based on money was gradually lost and the dialectical-legal culture spread in Europe as a kind of economy based on nature-produce. The early part of the Middle Ages was, basically, short of money; and this brought about all those forms of military service which were necessary because there was no money to pay the troops. The Romans paid their troops with money. In the Middle Ages feudalism developed, and with it a particular type of professional soldiery. All this came about because, tied to the soil under the influence of an economy based on the exchange of nature-produce, a man could no longer take part himself in distant campaigns of war. Thus this dialectical-legal element grew up in a kind of agricultural economy based on barter, and it was only when technology from the West permeated this economic life that the new age arose. The life of this new civilization, which has become so fragile, has arisen in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch entirely as a result of technology. I have already described this in different ways. I have described how, according to the official census, world population at the end of the nineteenth century was 1,400 million but that as much work was being accomplished as though there were 2,000 million. This is because such a phenomenally large amount of work is done by machines. The machine technology with its stupendous transformation of the economic life and the social life has arrived.

What has not yet arrived—because everything is still engulfed in the intellectual life—is precisely what must now carry this machine-technological economy into modern civilization. One experiences the strangest things today with regard to the prospects facing humanity. There are already many people today, particularly among those who pride themselves on being practical, who, for example, go into governmental positions with their practical experience where it then usually evaporates. The little practical experience people have usually evaporates as soon as they take it into a government department. Such `governing practicians', such 'practical men in government'—one has to put it in inverted commas—get the strangest ideas these days. Someone said to me recently: 'yes, the new age has brought us machines, and with them urban life; we must take life back to the land.' As though one could just remove the machine-age from the world! The machine would simply follow us into the country, I said to him. Everything, I said, could be forgotten; spiritual culture could be forgotten, but machines would remain. They would simply be taken out to the land. What has arisen in the cities will transplant itself into the country.

In fact, people become reactionaries in a grand style—when they no longer feel inclined—and this is the characteristic of people generally today: that they have no will—to form ideas concerning true progress. They would prefer to bring back the old conditions of the countryside. They imagine that this can be done. They believe that one can shut out what the centuries have brought. That is nonsense! But people today love this nonsense so tremendously because they are too complacent to grasp the new and prefer to get along with the old. The machine age has arrived. Machines themselves show how much human labour they save. It is simply that 500 million people would have to do the work machines do if their work on the earth were to be done by people.

And all this work by machines began, primarily, in Western civilization. It arose in the West and spread to the Orient very late where it did not establish itself at all in the same way as it did in occidental civilization. But that is a time of transition. And now try and grasp a thought which, however strange it may seem to you, must be taken seriously.

Let us suppose the human being in ancient times had before him a cloud, or perhaps a river, or all kinds of vegetation and so on. He did not see in these the dead nature seen by the human being of today—he saw spiritual elemental beings, up to the divine-spiritual beings of the higher Hierarchies. He saw all this, as it were, through nature. But nature no longer speaks of these divine-spiritual beings. We have to grasp them as spiritual reality beyond nature and then relate them again back to nature. The period of transition came. Man created machines as an addition to nature. These he regards for the time being quite abstractly. He works with them in an entirely abstract way. He has his mathematics, geometry, mechanics. With these he constructs his machines and regards them altogether in the abstract. But he will very soon make a certain discovery. Strange though it may still seem to the human being of the present that such a discovery will be made, people will nevertheless discover that (in this mechanistic element which they have incorporated into the economic life) those spirits are again working which in earlier times were perceived by the human being in nature. In his technical machines of the economic sphere the human being will perceive that, although he constructed and made them, they nevertheless gradually take on a life of their own—a life certainly which he can still deny because they manifest themselves to begin with only in the economic sphere. But he will notice more and more in what he himself creates that it gains a life of its own and that, despite the fact that he brought it forth from the intellect, the intellect itself can no longer comprehend it. Perhaps people today can barely form a clear idea of this, but it will be so nevertheless. People will discover, in fact, how the objects of their industry (Wirtschaft) become the bearers of demons.

Let us look at it from another side. Out of the naked intellect, out of the most desolate intellect, there has arisen the Lenin-Trotsky system that is trying to build an economic life in Russia. Despite Lunacharsky,² these people are not interested in the spiritual life. For them the spiritual life must be an ideology arising from the economic life. It can hardly be said that there is a very strong dialectical-legal element in the Trotsky-Leninist system—everything is to be geared towards the economic. The desire is, in a certain sense, to embody the intellect in the economic life. If one could do this for a time—this initial experiment will not work, but let us suppose that it were possible—the economic life would grow over peoples' heads. It would bring forth everywhere destructive, demonic forces out of itself. It would not work because the intellect would not be able to cope with all the economic demands that would surge up! Just as the human being in ancient times beheld nature and the manifestations of nature and saw in them demonic beings; so, too, must the human being of present times learn to see demonic beings in what he himself produces in the economic life. For the time being these demons, which human beings have not diverted into machines, are still in human beings themselves and manifest as the destructive beings (die zerstarenden) in social revolutions. These destructive social revolutions are nothing other than the result of not recognizing the demonic element in our economic life. Elemental spirits (elementarische Geistigkeit) must be looked for in the economic life just as in ancient times elemental beings (elementarische Geistigkeit) were sought in nature. And the purely intellectual life is only an intermediary stage which has no significance at all for nature or for what man produces, but only for human beings themselves.

Human beings have developed the intellect so that they can become free. They have to develop a faculty that has absolutely nothing to do with nature or with machines but only with the human being himself. When the human being develops faculties that stand in a relationship to nature, he is not free. If he tries to flee into the economic life he is also not free because the machines only overwhelm him. But when he develops faculties that have nothing to do with either knowledge or practical life, like pure intelligence, he can appropriate freedom to himself in the course of cultural development. It is precisely through a faculty like the intellect, which does not stand in a relationship to the world, that freedom can arise. But in order that the human being does not tear away from nature, in order that he can again work into nature, Imagination must be added to this intellect; everything must be added to it which supersensible research is seeking to find.

There is something else involved here. I related how, for the ancient oriental, the relationships of the blood line were of very particular importance, for the wise men of the Mysteries were guided by these as though by signs from the gods when they placed the human being into his appropriate [social] position. And all these things reach over then like after-effects, like ghosts, into later times. Then came the dialectical-legal element. The official stamp became the most important thing. The diploma, examination results or, rather, what was on the piece of paper that was the examination certificate—this became the important thing. Whereas in ancient theocratic times blood was the decisive factor, it was now the piece of paper. Those times drew near for which many things are characteristic. A lawyer once said to me during a discussion I had with him: The fact that you were born, that you exist, is not what matters!' This did not interest him. It was the birth certificate or the christening certificate that had to exist; that was the important thing. The paper substitute! So the dialectical-legal arose. This, at the same time, is also the expression for the unreal (das Scheinhafte) in relation to the world, for the unreal element of the intellect. But precisely in the human being himself there could develop, as the counterpart of this maya element (Scheinhafte) in the world, what gave the human being freedom.

But now there develops, out of what is signified in paper—which in earlier times was signified in the blood—out of what is signified in the letter-patent of nobility or similar documents, something that is already showing itself today and which will—continue if things go on as now. And they will continue! Descent by blood will no longer be of importance. The letter-patent of nobility and similar papers will have no more importance. At most, only what a man manages to salvage of what he possesses from the past will count. To ask 'why' was not possible when the gods still determined an individual's place in the world. In the dialectical-legal age it was possible to dispute this 'why'. Now all discussion ceases, for only the factual is left, the actuality of what an individual has salvaged. The moment people lose faith in the paper-regime there will be no more discussions. The things an individual has saved for himself will simply be taken away. There is no other way to bring humanity forward, now that nature no longer reveals the spiritual, than to turn to the spiritual itself and, on the other hand, to find in the economic element what people in earlier times found in nature.

This, however, can only be found through association. What a human being alone can no longer find can be found by an association which will again develop a kind of group-soul, taking in hand what the individual at present cannot decide alone. In the Middle Ages, in the age of the intellect, it was the individual that ruled in economics. In the future it will be the association. And people must stand together in an association. And then, when it is recognized that a spiritual element has to be kept in check in the economic life, something will be able to arise which can replace the blood-line and the patent. For, the economic life would grow above the human being's head if he did not show himself equal to it, if he did not bring a spiritual insight with him to guide it. No one would associate with someone who did not bring qualities that made him effective in the economic life and which qualified him really to control the spirits which assert themselves in the economic life. An entirely new spirit will arise. And why will this be so?

In the ancient times, in which people judged according to the blood, what had taken place before birth or before conception was of importance for human beings, for this is what they brought into the physical world through the blood. And when existence before birth had been forgotten a recognition of the life before birth still lived on in the recognition of the blood-line. And then came the dialectical-legal element. The human being was only recognized in relation to what he was as a physical being. Now the other element comes in—an economic life that is growing demonic. And the human being must also now be recognized again in his inmost soul-and-spirit being. And just as one will see the demonic element in economic life, so one will also have to begin to see that which the human being bears through repeated lives on earth. One will have to be aware of what a human being brings when he enters this life. This will have to be taken care of in the spiritual limb of the social organism.

When one judges according to the blood, one really does not need a pedagogy; one only needs a knowledge of the symbols through which the gods express where it is a human being is to be placed. As long as one judges in a purely dialectical-legal way one only needs an abstract pedagogy which speaks of the human child in a generalized way. But when a human being is to be placed in an associative life in such a way that he is fit and capable one has to take account of the following. One must realize that the first seven years in which the human being develops the physical body, are not significant for what he will be able to do later in the social life -—he must only be made fit and capable in a general way valid for all human beings. In the years between seven and fourteen, in which the etheric body is developed, the human being must first of all be recognized. What has to be recognized is what then emerges as the astral body at the age of fourteen or fifteen and which comes into consideration when the real soul-and-spiritual core of the human being is to bring him to the place he is meant to be. Here the educational factor becomes a specifically social one. It is a matter here of gaining a true understanding of the child one is educating so that one can see that a certain quality in the child is good for this, and another quality is good for that. But this does not show itself clearly until after the child leaves primary school and it will belong to an artistic pedagogy and didactics to be able to discern that one child is suited for this and another is suited for that. It is according to this that those decisions will be made that are the challenge in Towards Social Renewal for the circulation of capital; that is to say the means of production. A completely new spiritual concept must arise which, on the one hand, is capable of perceiving the economic life in its inner spiritual vitality and, on the other, can perceive what role must be played by cultural life; how cultural life must give economic life its configuration. This can only happen if the cultural life is independent, when nothing is forced upon it by the economic life. It is when one inwardly grasps the whole course of humanity's evolution that one recognizes how this evolution requires the threefolding of the social organism.

Thus, because we have been closed off from the Orient in more recent times by the Petrinism of Peter the Great on the one hand and Turkey on the other, we therefore need an independent spiritual life; a spiritual life that really recognizes the spiritual world in a new form and not in the way in which, in ancient times, nature spoke to man. One will then be able to relate this spiritual life back to nature. But once one has found it, one will also be able to develop this spiritual life in such a way in the human being that it becomes the content of his skills; that he will be able through this spiritual life to satisfy, in associative cooperation, an economic life that becomes more and more dynamic. Such thoughts as these really must exist in an anthroposophically-oriented spiritual science. For this reason such a spiritual science can only be born from a knowledge of the course of human evolution.

The first thing is to steer towards a real knowledge of the spirit. Talk of the spirit in general terms—in empty, abstract words in the way that is accepted practice today among official philosophers and in other circles and which has become generally popular—is of no use for the future. The spiritual world is not the same as the physical world. Thus it is not possible to gain a perception of the spiritual world by abstracting from the physical but only by direct spiritual investigation. These perceptions naturally then appear as something completely different from what the human being can know when he knows only the physical world. People who, out of complacency, wish only to know of the physical world call it fantastic to talk about Old Moon, Old Sun and Old Saturn. They find that, when one speaks about these former embodiments of the earth, it strikes no chord in them. Things are described there of which they do not have the foggiest notion. The fact is of course that they have no notion of them because they do not want to know about the spiritual world. Things are related to them about the spiritual world and they say: But it doesn't concur with anything we already know. But that is the whole point: worlds are found that do not concur with what one knows already. This is the way, is it not, that, for example, Arthur Drews, the philosophy professor, judges spiritual science. It does not concur with what he has already imagined. Indeed, when the railway from Berlin to Potsdam was to be built, the post master of Berlin³ said: And now I'm supposed to send trains to Potsdam! I already send four post coaches a week and no one travels in them. If people really want to throw their money out of the window why don't they do it directly! Of course, the railways looked different from the post-coaches of the 1830s of the honest post-master of Berlin. But, of course, the descriptions of the spiritual world also look different from what nests in heads like Arthur Drews'. He, however, is only characteristic of many others. He is even one of the better ones, strange as it may seem. Not because he is good, but because the others are worse.

It was first of all necessary to show how, on a strict scientific basis, one can truly penetrate into the spiritual worlds. This is what, in the first place, our lecture course this autumn has been striving towards. And even if this is only at its beginnings, it has at least been shown how, in certain areas of the sciences, knowledge can be raised to a knowledge of the spiritual as such and how this spiritual element can in turn permeate what is gained by sense-knowledge.

But what can thus be gained in the field of knowledge and what will be achieved in contrast to the accepted knowledge in the schools—for it is in this area that fine beginnings are apparent—would remain incomplete. One could in fact already show how psychology, and, indeed, even mathematics, point towards spiritual realms. But it would only be something incomplete and therefore unable to aid our declining civilization if a truly elemental and intensive will does not arise from the area of practical economic life. It is necessary that old usages, old habits, be truly dropped and that everyday life be permeated with spirituality. It must come about as a flower of the Anthroposophical Movement that, with the help of the mood of soul that can arise out of spiritual science, a perceptive understanding of practical life is brought to bear—especially of the practical economic life—and that it may be shown how the downfall can be averted if a consciousness of creating something alive is carried into this economic life.

Every day one should keep an ever-watchful eye on the so blatantly visible signs of our declining economic life. This old economic life cannot be galvanized. For just as today no one should be proud of what he gains from ordinary science—for that would definitely lead humanity into the future prophesied by Oswald Spengler—so, too, no one should be proud of what he can gain from the old economic life by way of abilities that correspond to this old form. Today no one can be proud of being a physicist, a mathematician, a biologist in the usual sense. But also no one can be proud of being a merchant, an industrialist in the old sense. But this 'old sense' is the only thing we have today. Nowhere today do we see anything arising like a true association. What is really needed, as a kind of second event of this Goetheanum, is to have something on the lines of this lecture-course, which could provide something tangible out of the realm of practical life itself, and which could stand side by side with the sciences. We will not get any further with what is contained in just one stream but only when this other side of human striving also has its place.

This today is still the characteristic feature of our present human evolution: on the one side the traditional bearers of the old spiritual life who calumniate and slander one when, working out of the modern scientific approach, one tries to achieve a spiritualization. They already do this today quite consciously because they have no interest in the progress of human development and because, for the time being, they only think to hold back this evolution of humanity. Sometimes they do so in a truly grotesque manner, like that strange academic⁴ who recently spoke in Zurich about Anthroposophy and went to such extremes that even his colleagues were shocked; so that, as it seems, this attack against Anthroposophy has actually acted as mild propaganda for it. These representatives of a redundant spiritual life persist, however, and will do so far more, for they will dose ranks with formidable slanders. Here one sees what one is up against, arising in the form of slanders and so on, in regard to untruth.

On the other side one can notice another strong resistance; which, however, occurs in the unconscious. And this is a painful experience. In this area one can definitely speak of an inner opposition, sometimes quite unintentional, against what must lie in the direction of spiritual-scientific endeavour. It will be a matter of having to learn, particularly in this area, to identify with the aims that spiritual science can set here. For to judge, in the subjective way that has been usual up to now, what must be willed from spiritual science, would be to do the same as the priests and others in other areas do when they declare spiritual science a heresy. This is what makes difficulties for our Anthroposophical Movement—the fact that precisely in this area a kind of inner opposition is clearly noticeable. One can say that it is particularly in this area that what sheds light in such a strange way on certain accusations which come from many sides, shows itself most clearly. They say: 'In this Anthroposophical Society everyone only repeats what one man has said. But in reality they do not repeat at all; everyone just says what he thinks so that the one man can approve it.' We have experienced this many times, have we not? A person talks frequently about what he may want, saying that I said so, even though from me he actually heard the exact opposite. Now this is the real rule of blind faith in authority. A strange faith in authority! This has been evident in many cases. But it would be particularly damaging if this strange kind of opposition—there has actually always been more opposition than faith in authority and, therefore, an indictment of faith in authority is really unjust—it would be far more fatal if what I refer to here as inner opposition were, particularly in the sphere of practical life, to take on wider dimensions. For then the opponents of anthroposophical striving would, as long as they could, of course say: `Aha, a sectarian, fantastic movement which cannot be practical.' Of course it cannot be practical if people do not engage themselves in it; just as, after all, no matter how good one is at sewing, one cannot sew without a needle.

With this I only wished to draw attention to something that needs watching. It is by no means intended as a criticism or as a reference to the past but is something necessary for the future. Nevertheless, I would of course not have referred to it if I did not see all sorts of smoke-clouds rising. But I am really only pointing out what has, as it were, to be a challenge to really cooperate on all sides and not to shelter behind reactionary practices and, behind the bulwark of these reactionary practices, destroy Anthroposophy even though one is perhaps trying to help it. So I am not referring to something that has already happened but to something that is necessary for the future. It is necessary to think about these things.

With these comments I shall have to let it rest for today. Tomorrow and the following day we shall have to link up this prelude which, as you will see, is in fact an introduction to a study of the Christ-experience in the twentieth century.

• 1 . See Das Ereignis der Christus-Erscheinung in der atherischen Welt (The Event of the Reappearance of Christ in the Etheric World), sixteen lectures given in different cities in 1910, (GA 118).
• 2 . Anatol Vasilevich Lunacharsky (1875–1933), Russian writer and politician. From 1917 he was the Commisar for the education of the masses.
• 3 . Karl Ferdinand Friedrich von Nagler (1770–1846).
• 4 . It has not been possible to establish who this was.

Yesterday I told you the story of Gerhard the Good—which most of you probably know—so that today we can illustrate various points in our endeavour to increase our understanding of the matters we are discussing. But before I interpret parts of this story for you, in so far as this is necessary, we must also recall a number of other things we have touched on at various times during these lectures. From what has been said over the past few weeks you will have seen that the painful events of today are connected with impulses living in the more recent karma of mankind, namely, the karma of the whole fifth post-Atlantean period. For those who want to go more deeply into these matters it is necessary to link external events with what is happening more inwardly, which can only be understood against the background of human evolution as seen by spiritual science.

To begin with, take at face value certain facts which I have pointed out a number of times. I have frequently said that, in the middle of the nineteenth century, an endeavour was made to draw the attention of modern mankind to the fact that there exist in the universe not only those forces and powers recognized by natural science but also others of a spiritual kind. The endeavour was to show that just as we take in with our eyes—or, indeed, with all our senses—what is visible around us, so are there also spiritual impulses around us, which people who know about such things can bring to bear on social life—impulses which cannot be seen with the eye but are known to a more spiritual science.

We know what path this more spiritual science took, so I need not go over it again. Around the middle of the nineteenth century, then, it was the concern of a certain centre to draw people's attention to the existence, as it were, of a spiritual environment. This had been forgotten during the age of materialism. You also know that such things have to be tackled with caution because a certain degree of maturity is necessary in people who take in such knowledge. Of course, not all those can be mature who come across, or are affected by, this knowledge in accordance with the laws of our time, which underlie public life. But part of what must be done at such a time can be the requirement to test whether the knowledge may yet be revealed publicly.

Now in the middle of the nineteenth century two paths were possible. One, even then, would have been what we could describe by mentioning our anthroposophical spiritual science, namely, to make comprehensible to human thinking what spiritual knowledge reveals about our spiritual environment. It is a fact that this could have been attempted at that time, in the middle of the nineteenth century, but this path was not chosen. The reason was, in part, that those who possessed this esoteric knowledge were prejudiced, because of traditions that have come down from ancient times, against making such things public. They felt that certain knowledge guarded by the secret brotherhoods—for it was still guarded at that time—should be kept within the circle of these brotherhoods. We have since seen that, so long as matters are conducted in the proper way, it is perfectly acceptable today to reveal certain things. Of course it is unavoidable that some malicious opponents should appear, and always will appear, in circles in which such knowledge is made known—people who are adherents for a time because it suits their passions and their egoism, but who then become opponents under all sorts of guises and make trouble. Also when spiritual knowledge is made known in a community, this can easily lead to arguments, quarrelling and disputes, of which, however, not too much notice can be taken, since otherwise no spiritual knowledge would ever be made known. But, apart from these things, no harm is done if the matter is handled in the right way.

But at that time this was not believed. So ancient prejudice won the day and it was agreed to take another path. But, as I have often said, this failed. It was decided to use the path of mediumistic revelation to make people recognize the spiritual world in the same way as they recognize the physical world. Suitable individuals were trained to be mediums. What they then revealed through their lowered consciousness was supposed to make people recognize the existence of certain spiritual impulses in their environment. This was a materialistic way of revealing the spiritual world to people. It corresponded to some extent to the conditions of the fifth post-Atlantean period, in so far as this is materialistic in character.

This way of handling things began, as you know, in America in the middle of the nineteenth century. But it soon became obvious that the whole thing was a mistake. It had been expected that the mediums would reveal the existence of certain elemental and nature spirits in the environment. Instead, they all started to refer to revelations from the kingdom of the dead. So the goal which had been set was not reached. I have often explained that the living can only reach the dead with an attitude which does not depend on lowering the consciousness. You all know these things. At that time this was also known and that is why, when the mediums began to speak of revelations of the dead, it was realized that the whole thing was a mistake. This had not been expected. It had been hoped that the mediums would reveal how the nature spirits work, how one human being affects another, what forces are at play in the social organism, and so on. It had been hoped that people would start to recognize what forces might be used by those who understand such things, so that people would no longer be dependent solely on one another in the way they are when only their sense perceptions come into play, but would be able to work through the total human personality. This was one thing that went wrong.

The other was that, in keeping with man's materialistic inclinations, it soon became obvious what would have begun to happen if the mediumistic movement had spread in the way it threatened to do. Use would have been made of the mediums to accomplish aims which ought only to be accomplished under the influence of natural, sense-bound reasoning. For some individuals it would have been highly desirable to employ a medium who could impart the means of discovering the knowledge which such people covet. I have told you how many letters I get from people who write: I have a lottery ticket; or, I want to buy a lottery ticket; I need the money for an entirely selfless purpose; could you not tell me which number will be drawn? Obviously, if mediums had been fully trained in the techniques of mediumship, the resulting mischief with this kind of thing would have been infinite, quite apart from everything else. People would have started to go to mediums to find a suitable bride or bridegroom, and so on.

Thus it came about that, in the very quarter that had launched the movement in order to test whether people were ready to take in spiritual knowledge, efforts were now made to suppress the whole affair. What had been feared in bygone times, when the abilities of the fourth post-Atlantean period still worked in people, had indeed now come to pass. In those days witches were burnt, simply because those people called witches were really no more than mediums, and because their connections with the spiritual world—though of a materialistic nature—might cause knowledge to be revealed which would have been very awkward for certain people. Thus, for instance it might have been very awkward for certain brotherhoods if, before being burnt at the stake, a witch had revealed what lay behind them. For it is true that when consciousness is lowered there can be a kind of telephone connection with the spiritual world, and that by this route all sorts of secrets can come out. Those who burnt the witches did so for a very good reason: It could have been very awkward for them if the witches had revealed anything to the world, whether in a good or a bad sense, but especially in a bad sense.

So the attempt to test the cultural maturity of mankind by means of mediums had gone awry. This was realized even by those who, led astray by the old rules of silence and by the materialistic tendencies of the nineteenth century, had set this attempt in train. You know, of course, that the activities of mediums have not been entirely curtailed, and that they still exist, even today. But the art of training mediums to a level at which their revelations could become significant has, so to speak, been withdrawn. By this withdrawal the capabilities of mediums have been made more or less harmless. In recent decades, as you know, the pronouncements of mediums have come to amount to not much more than sentimental twaddle. The only surprising thing is that people set so much store by them. But the door to the spiritual world had been opened to some degree and, moreover, this had been done in a manner which was untimely and a mistake.

In this period came the birth and work of Blavatsky. You might think that the birth of a person is insignificant, but this would be a judgement based on maya. Now the important thing is that this whole undertaking had to be discussed among the brotherhoods, so that much was said and brought into the open within the brotherhoods. But the nineteenth century was no longer like earlier centuries in which many methods had existed for keeping secret those things which had to be kept secret. Thus it happened that, at a certain moment, a member of one of the secret brotherhoods, who intended to make use in a one-sided way of what he learnt within these brotherhoods, approached Blavatsky. Apart from her other capacities Blavatsky was an extremely gifted medium, and this person induced her to act as a connecting link for machinations which were no longer as honest as the earlier ones. The first, as we have seen, were honest but mistaken. Up to this point the attempt to test people's receptivity had been perfectly honest, though mistaken. Now, however, came the treachery of a member of an American secret brotherhood. His purpose was to make one-sided use of what he knew, with the help of someone with psychic gifts, such as Blavatsky. Let us first look at what actually took place. When Blavatsky heard what the member of the brotherhood had to say, she, of course, reacted inwardly to his words because she was psychic. She understood a great deal more about the matter than the one who was giving her the information. The ancient knowledge formulated in the traditional way lit up in her soul a significant understanding which she could hardly have achieved solely with her own resources. Inner experiences were stimulated in her soul by the ancient formulations which stemmed from the days of atavistic clairvoyance and which were preserved in the secret brotherhoods, often without much understanding for their meaning on the part of the members. These inner experiences led in her to the birth of a large body of knowledge. She knew, of course, that this knowledge must be significant for the present evolution of mankind, and also that by taking the appropriate path this knowledge could be utilized in a particular way.

But Blavatsky, being the person she was, could not be expected to make use of such lofty spiritual knowledge solely for the good of mankind as a whole. She hit upon the idea of pursuing certain aims which were within her understanding, having come to this point in the manner I have described. So now she demanded to be admitted to a certain occult brotherhood in Paris. Through this brotherhood she would start to work. Ordinarily she would have been accepted in the normal way, apart from the fact that it was not normal to admit a woman; but this rule would have been waived in this case because it was known that she was an important individuality. However, it would not have served her purpose to be admitted merely as an ordinary member, and so she laid down certain conditions. If these conditions had been accepted, many subsequent events would have been very different but, at the same time, this secret brotherhood would have pronounced its own death sentence—that is, it would have condemned itself to total ineffectiveness. So it refused to admit Blavatsky. She then turned to America, where she was indeed admitted to a secret brotherhood. In consequence, she of course acquired extremely significant insights into the intentions of such secret brotherhoods; not those which strive for the good of mankind as a whole, disregarding any conflicting wishes, but those whose purposes are one-sided and serve certain groups only. But it was not in Blavatsky's nature to work in the way these brotherhoods wished. So it came about that, under the influence of what was termed an attack on the Constitution of North America, she was excluded from this brotherhood.

So now she was excluded. But of course she was not a person who would be likely to take this lying down. Instead, she began to threaten the American brotherhood with the consequences of excluding her in this way, now that she knew so much. The American brotherhood now found itself sitting under the sword of Damocles, for if, as a result of having been a member, Blavatsky had told the world what she knew, this would have spelt its death sentence. The consequence was that American and European occultists joined forces in order to inflict on Blavatsky a condition known as occult imprisonment. Through certain machinations a sphere of Imaginations is called forth in a soul which brings about a dimming of what that soul previously knew, thus making it virtually ineffective. It is a procedure which honest occultists never apply, and even dishonest ones only very rarely, but it was applied on that occasion in order to save the life—that is the effectiveness, of that secret brotherhood.

For years Blavatsky existed in this occult imprisonment, until certain Indian occultists started to take an interest in her because they wanted to work against that American brotherhood. As you see, we keep coming up against occult streams which want to work one-sidedly. Thus Blavatsky entered this Indian current, with which you are familiar. The Indian brotherhood was very interested indeed in proceeding against the American brotherhood, not because they saw that they were not serving mankind as a whole, but because they in turn had their own one-sided patriotically Indian viewpoint. By means of various machinations the Indian and the American occultists reached a kind of agreement. The Americans promised not to interfere in what the Indians wanted to do with Blavatsky, and the Indians engaged to remain silent on what had gone before.

You can see just how complicated these things really are when you add to all this the fact, which I have also told you about, that a hidden individual, a mahatma behind a mask, had been instituted in place of Blavatsky's original teacher and guide. This figure stood in the service of a European power and had the task of utilizing whatever Blavatsky could do in the service of this particular European power. One way of discovering what all this is really about might be to ask what would have happened if one or other of these projects had been realized.

Time is too short to tell you everything today, but let us pick out a few aspects. We can always come back to these things again soon.

Supposing Blavatsky had succeeded in gaining admission to the occult lodge in Paris. If this had happened, she would not have come under the influence of that individual who was honoured as a mahatma in the Theosophical Society—although he was no such thing—and the life of the occult lodge in Paris would have been extinguished. A great deal behind which this same Paris lodge may be seen to stand would not have happened, or perhaps it would have happened in the service of a different, one-sided influence. Many things would have taken a different course. For there was also the intention of exterminating this Paris lodge with the help of the psychic personality of Blavatsky. If it had been exterminated, there would have been nothing behind all those people who have contributed to history, more or less like marionettes. People like Silvagni, Durante, Sergi, Cecconi, Lombroso and all his relations, and many others would have had no occult backers behind them. Many a door, many a kind of sliding door, would have remained locked.

You will understand that this is meant symbolically. In certain countries editorial offices—I mean this as a picture!—have a respectable door and a sliding door. Through the respectable door you enter the office and through the sliding door you enter some secret brotherhood or other working, as I have variously indicated over the last few days, to achieve results of the kind about which we have spoken. So the intention was to abolish something from the world which would have done away with, at least, one stream which we have seen working in our present time. Signor d'Annunzio would not have given the speech we quoted.

Perhaps another would have been given instead, pushing things in a different direction. But you see that the moment things are not fully under control, the moment people are pushed about through a dimming of their consciousness, and when occultism is being used, not for the general good of mankind—and above all, in our time, not with true knowledge—but for the purpose of achieving one-sided aims, then matters can come to look very grave indeed.

Anyway, the members of this lodge were, from the standpoint of the lodge, astute enough not to enter into a discussion of these things. Later on, certain matters were hushed up, obscured, by the fact that Blavatsky was prevented by her occult imprisonment from publicizing the impulses of that American lodge and giving them her own slant, which she would doubtless otherwise have done. Once all these things had run their course, the only one to benefit from Blavatsky was the Indian brotherhood. There is considerable significance for the present time in the fact that a certain sum of occult knowledge has entered the world one-sidedly, with an Indian colouring. This knowledge has entered the world; it now exists. But the world has remained more or less unconscious of it because of the paralysis I have described.

Those who reckon with such things always count on long stretches of time. They prepare things and leave them to develop. These are not individuals, but brotherhoods in which the successor takes over from the predecessor and carries on in a similar direction with what has been started.

On the basis of the two examples I have given you, of occult lodges, you can see that much depended on the actual impulses not being made public. I do not wish to be misunderstood and I therefore stated expressly that the first attempt I described to you was founded on a certain degree of honesty. But it is extremely difficult for people to be entirely objective as regards mankind as a whole. There is little inclination for this nowadays. People are so easily led astray by the group instinct that they are not objective as regards mankind as a whole but pay homage to one group or another, enjoying the feeling of ‘belonging.’ But this is something that is no longer really relevant to the point we have reached in human evolution. The requirement of the present moment is that we should, at least to some degree, feel ourselves to be individuals and extricate ourselves, at least inwardly, from group things, so that we belong to mankind as human individuals. Even though, at present, we are shown so grotesquely how impossible this is for some people, it is nevertheless a requirement of our time.

For example, let me refer to what I said here a few days ago. A nation as a whole is an individuality of a kind which cannot be compared with human individualities, who live here on the physical plane and then go through their development between death and a new birth. Nations are individualities of quite a different kind. As you can see from everything we find in our anthroposophical spiritual science, a folk spirit, a folk soul, is something different from the soul of an individual human being. It is nonsense to speak in a materialistic sense, as is done today, of the soul of a nation while at the back of one's mind thinking of something resembling the soul of an individual—even though one, of course, does not admit this to oneself. Thus you hear people speak of ‘the French soul’; this has been repeatedly said in recent years. It is nonsense, plain nonsense, because it is an analogy taken from the individual human soul and applied to the folk soul. You can only speak of the folk soul if you take into account the complex totality described in the lecture cycle on the different folk spirits. But to speak in any other sense about the folk soul is utter nonsense, even though many, including journalists, do so—and they may be forgiven, for they do not know what they are talking about. It is mere verbosity to speak—as has been done—for instance of the ‘Celtic soul and the Latin spirit’. Maybe such a thing is just about acceptable as an analogy, but there is no reality in. We must be clear about the meaning of the Mystery of Golgotha. So often have we said that the Mystery of Golgotha was accomplished in such a way that what has been united with earth evolution ever since is there for all mankind, but that if an individual speaks of a mystical Christ within him, this is no more than idle talk. The Mystery of Golgotha is an objective reality, as you know from much that has been said here. It took place for mankind as a whole, which means for every individual human being. Christ died for all human beings, as a human being for human beings, not for any other kind of being. It is possible to speak about a Christian, about one whose attitude of mind is Christian, but it is complete nonsense to talk of a Christian nation. There is no reality in this. Christ did not die for nations, nations are not the individualities for whom He died. An individual who is close to the Being of the Mystery of Golgotha can be a Christian, but it is not possible to speak of a Christian nation. The true soul of a nation, its folk soul, belongs to planes on which the Mystery of Golgotha did not take place. So any dealings and actions between nations can never be interpreted or commented upon in a Christian sense.

I am pointing out these things simply because it is necessary that you in particular, my dear friends, should understand just how important it is today to arrive at clear-cut concepts. This can only be done by applying spiritual science, and yet mankind as a whole strives to fish in muddy waters with concepts that are utterly nonsensical and obscure. So the important thing is, above all, to arrive at clear-cut concepts, to see everything in relation to clear-cut concepts, and also to understand that in our time certain occult, spiritual impulses have been working, chiefly through human beings. This is fitting for the fifth post-Atlantean period.

Now if Blavatsky had been able to speak out at that time, certain secrets would have been revealed, secrets I have mentioned as belonging to certain secret brotherhoods and connected with the striving of a widespread network of groups. I said to you earlier that definite laws underlie the rise and evolution of peoples, of nations. These laws are usually unknown in the external, physical world. This is right and proper, for in the first place they ought to be recognized solely by those who desire to receive them with clean hands. What now underlies the terrible trials mankind is undergoing at present and will undergo in the future is the interference in a one-sided way, by certain modern brotherhoods, with the spiritual forces that pulse through human evolution in the region in which, for instance, nations, peoples, come into being. Evolution progresses in accordance with definite laws; it is regular and comes about through certain forces. But human beings interfere, in some part unconsciously, though if they are members of secret brotherhoods, then they do so consciously.

To be able to judge these things you need what yesterday I called a wider horizon; you need the acquisition of a wider horizon. I showed you the forces of which Blavatsky became the plaything, in order to point out how such a plaything can be tossed about, from West to East, from America to India. This is because forces are at work which are being managed by human beings for certain ends, by means of utilizing the passions and feelings of nationality, which have, however, in their turn first been manufactured. This is most important. It is important to develop an eye for the way in which a person who, because of the type of passions in her—in her blood—can be put in a certain position and be brought under the sway of certain influences. Equally, those who do this must know that certain things can be achieved, depending on the position in which the person is placed. Many attempts fail. But account is taken of long periods of time and of many possibilities. Above all, account is taken of how little inclination people have to pay attention to the wider—the widest, contexts.

Let us stop here and turn to yesterday's story. It tells us about the time around the tenth century, when the constitution of souls was still that of the fourth post-Atlantean period. We saw how the spiritual world intervened in the life of Emperor Otto of the Red Beard. His whole life is transformed because the spiritual world makes him aware of Gerhard the Good. From Gerhard the Good he is to learn the fear of God, true piety, and that one must not expect—for largely egoistic reasons—a blessing from heaven for one's earthly deeds. So he is told by the spiritual world to seek out Gerhard the Good. This is the one side: what plays in from the spiritual world.

Those who know that age—not as it is described by external history, but as it really was—are aware that the spiritual world did indeed play in through real visions such as that described in connection with Emperor Otto the Red, and that spiritual impulses definitely played a meaningful part. The one who wrote down this story says expressly that in his youth he had also written many other stories, as had other contemporaries of his. The man who wrote down the story of Gerhard the Good was Rudolf von Ems, an approximate contemporary of Wolfram von Eschenbach. He said he had written other stories as well but that he had destroyed them because they had been fairy tales. Yet he does not consider this story to be a fairy tale but strictly historical, even though externally it is not historical—that is it would not be included in today's history books which only take physical maya into account. In the way he tells it, it cannot be compared with external, purely physical history; and yet his telling is more true than purely physical history can be for, on the whole, that is only maya. He tells the story for the fourth post-Atlantean period.

You know, for I have repeatedly said this, that I am not taking sides in any way but simply reporting facts which are to provide a basis on which judgements may be formed. Only those who do not wish to be objective will maintain that what I shall attempt to say is not objective. Someone who does not wish to be objective cannot, of course, be expected to find objectivity in what is, in fact, objective. The fact that the spiritual world plays into human affairs is not the only important aspect of the story of Gerhard the Good. It is also significant that a leading personality receives from the spiritual world the impulse to turn to a member of the commercial world, the world of the merchant. It is indeed a historical fact that, in Central Europe, at that time the members of the ruling dynasty to which Otto the Red belonged did start to patronize the merchant classes in the towns. In Europe this was the time of the growth of commerce.

We should further take into account that at that time there were as yet no ocean routes between Orient and Occident. Trade routes were definitely still overland routes. Merchants such as Gerhard the Good who, as you know, lived in Cologne, carried their trade overland from Cologne to the Orient and back again. Any use of ships was quite insignificant. The trade routes were land routes. Shipping connections were not much more than attempts to achieve with the primitive ships of those days what was being done much more efficiently by land. So in the main the trade routes were overland, while shipping was only just beginning. That is what is characteristic of this time, for comprehensive shipping operations only came much later.

We have here a contrast arising out of the very nature of things. So long as Orient and Occident were connected by land routes, it was perfectly natural that the countries of Central Europe should take the lead. Life in these Central European countries was shaped accordingly. Much spiritual culture also travelled along these routes. It was quite different from what came later. As the centuries proceeded, the land routes were supplanted by ocean routes. As you know, England gradually took control of all the ocean connections which others had opened up. Spain, Holland and France were all conquered as far as their sea-faring capacities were concerned, so that in the end everything was held under the mighty dominance which encompassed a quarter of the earth's dry land, and gradually also all the earth's oceans.

You can see how systematic is this conquering, this almost exterminating, of other seafaring powers when you remember how I told you some time ago that in the secret brotherhoods, especially those which grew so powerful from the time of James I onwards, it was taught as an obvious truth that the Anglo-Saxon race—as they put it—will have to be given dominance over the world in the fifth post-Atlantean period. You will see how systematic the historical process has been when you consider what I have also mentioned and what was also taught: that this fifth post-Atlantean race of the English-speaking peoples will have to overcome the peoples of the Latin race.

To start with, the main thing is the interrelation between the English-speaking peoples and those whose languages are Latin in origin. Recent history cannot be understood without the realization that the important aim—which is also what is being striven for—is for world affairs to be arranged in such a way that the English-speaking peoples are favoured, while the influence of any peoples whose language is based on Latin fades out. Under certain circumstances something can be made to fade out by treating it favourably for a while, thus gaining power over it. This can then make it easy to engulf it.

In those secret brotherhoods, about which I have spoken so often, little significance is attached to Central Europe, for they are clever enough to realize that Germany, for instance, owns only one thirty-third of the earth's land surface. This is very little indeed, compared with a whole quarter of the land surface plus dominance over the high seas. So not much importance is attached to Central Europe. A great deal of importance was attached, however—especially during the period when present events were being prepared—to the overcoming of all those impulses connected with the Latin races.

It is remarkable how short-sighted the modern historical view is and how little inclination there is to go more deeply into matters which are quite characteristic of situations. I have already pointed out that what has so long been practised as a pragmatic view of history is not important, reporting as it does on one event, followed by another, and another, and yet another. What is important is to recognize the facts characterized by the many interrelationships in the events which follow one another. What matters is to point out what is characteristic about the facts, namely, what reveals the forces lying behind maya. Pragmatic history must today give way to a history of symptoms.

Those who see through things in this way will be in a position to form judgements about certain events which differ considerably from those of people who reel off the events of world history—this fable convenue—one after the other, as is done in historical science today. Consider some of the things you know well in connection with some others about which I shall tell you. First of all, a simple fact: In 1618 the Thirty Years War began because certain ideas of a reformative kind developed within the Czech Slav element. Then certain aristocrats belonging to these Slav circles took up the movement and rebelled against what might be called the Counter-Reformation, namely, the Catholicism from Spain which was favoured by the Habsburgs. The first thing usually told about the Thirty Years War is the story of the rebels going to the town hall in Prague and throwing the councillors Martinitz and Slavata and the secretary Fabrizius out of the window. Yet this is quite insignificant. The only interesting point is perhaps that the three gentlemen did not hurt themselves because they fell onto a dunghill. These are not things which can bring the Thirty Years' War to life for us or show us its real causes.

The reformative party elected Frederick, Elector Palatine of the Rhine, as counter-King of Bohemia in 1619. Then followed, as you know, the battle of the White Mountain. Up to the election of the Elector Palatine, all the events were caused by the passionate feelings of these people for a reform movement, by a rebellion against arbitrary acts of power such as the closure or destruction of Protestant churches at Braunau and Kloster Grab. There is not enough time for me to tell you the whole story. But now think: Frederick, Elector Palatine of the Rhine, is elected King. Up to this point the events are based on human passions, human enthusiasm, it is even justified to say human idealism—I am quite happy to concede this.

But why, of all people, was the Elector Palatine of the Rhine chosen as King of Bohemia? It was because he was the son-in-law of James I, who stands at the beginning of the renewal of the brotherhoods! Here, then, we may discern an important finger in the pie if we are trying to look at history symptomatically. Attempts were being made to steer events in a particular direction. They failed. But you see that there is a finger in the pie. The most significant sign of what kind of impulses were to be brought to bear in this situation is that the son-in-law of one of the most important occultists, James I, was thrown into this position.

You see, the fact is that the whole of recent history has to do with the contrast between the ancient Roman-Latin element and that element, not of the English people—for they would get on perfectly happily with the world—but that element which, as I have described sufficiently, is to be made out of the English people if they fail to put up any resistance. It is the conflict between these two elements that is at work.

Meanwhile something else is manipulated, for a great deal can be achieved in one place by bringing about events in another.

Let us look at a later date. You might pick up a history book and read the history of the Seven Years War. Of course the history of this war is read just as thoughtlessly as any other. For to understand what is really going on and investigate what forces of history are playing a part, you have to look properly at the various links between the different circumstances. You have to consider, for instance, that at that time the southern part of Central Europe, namely Austria, was linked with every aspect of the Latin element and even had a proper alliance with France, whereas the northern part of Middle Europe—not at first, but later on—was drawn to what was to be made, by certain quarters, into the English-speaking, fifth post-Atlantean race.

When you look closely at the alliances and everything else that went on at that time—those things which were not maya, of course—you discover a war that is in reality being waged about North America and India between England and France. What went on in Europe was really only a weak mirror image of this. For if you compare everything that took place on the larger scale—do extend your horizons!—then you will see that the conflict was between England and France and that North America and India were already starting to have their effect. It was a matter of which of these two powers was cleverer and more able to direct events in such a way that dominion over North America or India could be snatched away from the other. At work in this were long-term future plans and the control of important impulses. It is true: The influence snatched by England from France in North America was won on the battle fields of Silesia during the Seven Years' War!

Watch how the alliances shift when the situation becomes a little awkward and difficult; watch the alliances from this point of view!

Now, another story. It is necessary to look at these things, and once one is not misunderstood, once it is assumed that one's genuine purpose is to gain a clear picture of what is going on in the world, once one strives to be objective, it will not be taken amiss when such stories are told; instead it will be understood that our concern is for comprehension and not for taking sides. In fact, it is precisely those people who feel they are affected by a particular matter who ought to be particularly glad to learn more about it. For then they are lifted above their blindness and given sight, and nothing is better for a person than real insight into how things work in the world. So let us now take an example which can show you a different side of how things work.

Through circumstances which you can look up in a history book, the kingdoms of Hanover and England were once linked. The laws of succession in the two countries were different—we need not go into this in detail—and as a result of this, when Victoria came to the throne of England, Hanover had to become separate. Another member of the English royal house had to take the throne of Hanover. The person elected, or rather the person jostled onto the throne of Hanover was Ernst August, Duke of Cumberland, who had previously been connected with the throne of England. So this Ernst August came to the throne of Hanover at the age of sixty-six. His character was such that, after his departure to become the king of Hanover, the English newspapers said: Thank goodness he's gone; let's hope he doesn't come back! He was considered a dreadful person because of the whole way he behaved. When you look at the impression he made on his contemporaries and those who had dealings with him, a certain type of character emerges which is striking for one who understands characters of this kind. The Hanoverians could not understand him. They found him coarse. He was indeed coarse, so coarse that the poet Thomas Moore said: He surely belonged to the dynasty of Beelzebub. But you know the saying: The German lies if he is polite. So they had a certain understanding for coarseness, but they did presuppose that someone who is coarse is at least honest. Ernst August, however, was always a liar as well as being coarse, and this the Hanoverians could not understand. He had other similar traits as well.

First, Ernst August repealed the Hanoverian constitution. Then he dismissed the famous ‘seven professors’ of Göttingen University. He had them sent straight out of the country, so that it was not until they reached Witzenhausen, which lay beyond his majesty's borders, that their students were permitted to take leave of them. I need not tell you the whole story. But what is the explanation? Those who seek no further for an explanation of this extraordinary mask merely find Ernst August coarse and dishonest. He even cheated Metternich, which is saying much indeed, and so on. But there is something remarkably systematic in all this. And the systematic aspect is not changed by the fact that he lived most of his life up to the age of sixty-six in England, where he was an officer of the Dragoons.

An explanation may be found in the fact that in his whole manner he was manifesting the impulses one has when one is a member of the so-called ‘Orange Lodge’. His whole manner was an expression of the impulses of the Orange Lodge, of which he was a member.

What we must do is learn to understand history symptomatically and widen our horizons. We need to develop a sense for what is important and what really gives insight. So I told you the tale of Gerhard the Good in order to demonstrate how, through such phenomena as the Orange Lodge, and so on, what had been Central Europe was quite systematically drawn over to the West. I am not uttering any reproach, for it was a historical necessity. But one ought to know it and not apply moral judgements to such things. What is essential is to develop the will to see things, to see how human beings are manipulated, to see where there might be impulses by which people are manipulated. This is the same as striving for the sense for truth. I have often stressed that this is not something that enables one to say: But I really believed it, it was my honest and sincere opinion! No indeed. One who possesses the sense for truth is one who unremittingly strives to find the truth of the matter, one who never ceases to seek the truth and who takes responsibility for himself even when he says something untrue out of ignorance. For, objectively, it is irrelevant whether something wrong is said knowingly or unknowingly. Similarly it is irrelevant whether you hold your finger in the candle flame through ignorance or on purpose; either way you burn it.

At this point we must understand what happened at the transition from the fourth post-Atlantean period-when commerce was still just under the influence of the spiritual world, as is indicated in the story of Gerhard the Good—to the fifth period, when everything commercial was drawn over into the occult sphere which is guided by the so-called ‘Brothers of the Shadow’. These brotherhoods guard certain principles. From their point of view it would be extremely dangerous if these principles should be betrayed. That is why they were so careful to prevent Blavatsky from making them public or causing them to pass over into other hands. They were, in fact, to be passed over from the West to the East; not to India but to the East of Russia.

Someone with a sense for what lies behind maya can understand that external institutions and external measures can have differing values, differing degrees of importance in the total context. Consider an incident in recent history. I have told you so many occult, spiritual things that I have, in a way, ‘done my time’ and am now free to go on and give you some indications out of more recent history. No one should say that I am taking this time away from that devoted to occult matters; these things are also important.

So let us take an example from more recent history. In 1909 a meeting was arranged between the King of Italy and the Tsar of Russia. So far there had not been much love lost between these two representatives, but from then on it was considered a good thing to manoeuvre them into each other's company. So the meeting at Racconigi took place. It was not easy to arrange. In the description of all the measures he had to take to prevent ‘incidents of an assassinatory nature’ you can read how difficult it was for poor Giolitti, who was Prime Minister at the time.

Then there was the question of finding a suitable personage who would pay Rome's homage to the Tsar. This had to be a personage of a particular kind. Such things have to be prepared well in advance so that when the right moment arrives they can be set in train on the spot. For a really ‘juicy’ effect to be achieved, not just any personage would do for the purpose of paying Rome's homage to the Tsar—the homage of the Latin West to the self-styled Slav East. It would have to be a special personage, even one who might not easily be persuaded to undertake this task. Now ‘by chance’, as the materialists would say, but ‘not by chance’, as those who are not materialists would say, a certain Signor Nathan—what a very Italian name!—was at that time the mayor of Rome. For many reasons his attitude was rather democratic and not at all one that would make him inclined to pay homage to the Tsar, of all people. He had only taken Italian citizenship shortly before becoming mayor of Rome. Before that he had been an English citizen. The fact that he was of mixed blood should be taken into account; he was the son of a German mother and had assumed the name of Nathan because his father was the famous Italian revolutionary Mazzini. This is a fact.

So persuading him to pay homage to the Tsar made it possible to say: See how thoroughly democracy has been converted. Here was someone who was not an ordinary person but one who had been anointed with all the oils of democracy, but—also someone who had been well prepared. From that moment onwards certain things start to become embarrassing. Today it is known, for example, that from that moment onwards all the correspondence within the Triple Alliance was promptly reported to St Petersburg! Human passions also played some part in the matter, since a special role was carried out in this reporting by a lady who had found a ‘sisterly’ route between Rome and St Petersburg. Such things can obviously be ascribed to coincidence. But those who want to see beyond maya will not ascribe them to coincidence but will seek the deeper connections between them. Then, when one seeks these deeper connections, one is no longer capable of lying as much, is no longer capable of deceiving people in order to distract them from the truth, which is what matters.

For instance—I am saying this in order to describe the truth—it would obviously have been most embarrassing for the widest circles if people's attention had been drawn to the fact that the whole invasion of Belgium would not have taken place if that sentence I have already mentioned, which could have been spoken by Lord Grey—Sir Edward Grey has now become a lord—if that sentence had really been spoken. The whole invasion of Belgium would not have taken place. It would have been a non-event, it would not have happened. But instead of speaking about the real cause, in so far as this is the cause because it could have prevented the invasion, it was obviously more comfortable to waste people's time by telling them about the ‘Belgian atrocities’. Yet these, too, would not have happened if Sir Edward Grey had taken this one, brief measure. In order to hide the simple truth something different is needed, something that arouses justified human passions and moral indignation. I am not saying anything against this. Something different is needed. It is a characteristic of our time, even today when it is particularly painful, to make every effort to obscure the truth, to blind people to the truth.

This, too, had to be prepared carefully. Any gap in the calculation would have made it impossible. The whole of the periphery, which had prudently been created for this very purpose, was needed.

But these things were very carefully prepared, both politically and culturally. Every possibility was reckoned with; and this was certainly necessary, since the most unbelievable carelessness sometimes prevailed, even in places where such a thing would be least expected. Let me give you an example, an objective fact, which will allow us to study this carelessness.

At one time Bismarck had a connection with a certain Usedom in Florence and Turin. I have told you before: Modern Italy came into being by roundabout means and actually owes her existence to Germany; but this is connected with all sorts of other things. What I am saying has profound foundations, and in politics all sorts of threads interweave. Thus at one time threads were woven which were to win over the Italian republicans. In short, at a certain time one such link existed between Bismarck and Usedom in Florence and Turin. Usedom was a friend of Mazzini and of others who enjoyed a certain prominence in nationalistic circles. Usedom was a man who posed very much as a wise person. He employed as his personal secretary somebody who was supposed to be a follower of Mazzini. Later it turned out that this personal secretary, of whom it had been said that he was initiated into Mazzini's secret societies, was nothing but an ordinary spy. Bismarck tells this tale quite naively and then adds, as an excuse for having been so mistaken: But Usedom was a high-grade Freemason. Many things could be told in this way and often it would turn out that those involved are totally innocent because the ones who pull the strings remain in the background.

You cannot maintain that there is no point in asking why such things are permitted to happen by the wise guides of world evolution—why human beings are, to a large degree, abandoned to such machinations, by making the excuse that there is no way of getting to the bottom of these things. For, indeed, if one only seeks them honestly, there are many ways of finding out what is going on. But we see, even in our own Society, how much resistance is put up by individuals when there is a question of following the simple path of truth. We see how many things which should be taken objectively in pursuit of knowledge, when they would best serve the good of mankind, are instead taken subjectively and personally. There are—are there not?—within our Society groups who have studied very attentively an essay of, I believe, 287 pages which they have taken utterly seriously and about which they are still puzzling, as to whether the writer—who is well enough known to us—might be right. In short, within our own circles we may sometimes discover why it is so difficult to see through things. Yet it is, in fact, not at all difficult to see through things if only one strives honestly for the truth. For years so much has been said within our Society. If you were to bring together all that has been said since 1902 you would see that it contains much that could help us to see through a great deal that is going on in the world. Yet our anthroposophical spiritual science has never been presented as belonging to a secret society. Indeed the most important things have always been dealt with in public lectures open to anybody. This is a contrast which should be noted.

I might as well say now: If certain streams within our Anthroposophical Society continue to exist and if, for the sake of human vanity, they continue to interpret to their own advantage certain things which have been said behind closed doors—for no more reason than one would exclude first-year students in a university from what is told to those in their second year—then, eventually there will be nothing esoteric left. If things are not taken perfectly naturally, if people continue to stand up and say: This is secret, that is very esoteric, this is occult, and I am not allowed to speak about this!—if this policy continues to be followed by certain streams in our Society, if they continually fail to understand that any degree of vanity must stop, then everything mankind must be told about today will have to be discussed in public. Whether it is possible to make known certain things, the needs of the moment will tell. But the Anthroposophical Society is only meaningful if it is a ‘society’, that is, if each individual is concerned to make a stand against vanity, against folly and vanity and everything else which clothes things in false veils of mysticism, serving only to puzzle other people and make them spiteful. The mysteriousness of certain secret brotherhoods has nothing to do with our Society, for we must be concerned solely with bringing about what is needed for the good of mankind. As I have often said, our enemies will become more and more numerous. Perhaps we shall discover what our enemies are made of by the manner in which they quarrel with us. So far we have had no honest opponents worth mentioning. They would, in effect, only be to our advantage! The kind of opposition we have met hitherto is perfectly obvious through their ways and means of operation. We might as well wait patiently to discover whether further opponents will be from within our circle, as is frequently the case, or from elsewhere! I have just had news of opposition from one quarter which will empty itself over us like a cold shower. A forthcoming book has been announced during some lectures. The author, a conceited fellow, has never belonged to our Society but has been entertaining the world with all sorts of double egos and such like. He has now used the opportunity of the various national hatreds and passions to mount an attack on our Anthroposophy of a kind which shows that his hands are not clean.

So we must not lose sight of these things and we must realize that it is up to us to hold fast to the direction which will lead to truth and knowledge. Even when we speak about current issues it must only be in pursuit of knowledge and truth. We must look things straight in the eye and then each individual may take up his own position in accordance with his feelings. Every position will be understandable, but it must be based on a foundation of truth.

This is a word which must occupy a special place in our soul today. So much has taken place in our time which has puzzled people and which should have shown them that it is necessary to strive for a healthy judgement based on the truth. We have experienced how the yearning for peace only had to make itself felt in the world for it to be shouted down. And we still see how people actually get angry if peace is mentioned in one quarter or another. They are angry, not only if one of the combatants mentions peace, but even if it is mentioned in a neutral quarter.

It remains to be seen whether the world will be capable of sufficient astonishment about these things. Experience so far has been telling, to say the least. In April and May 1915 a large territory was to have been voluntarily ceded, but the offer was rejected so that war could be waged. Since world opinion failed to form an even partially adequate judgement about this event, there seems to be really nothing for it but to expect the worst. We might as well expect the worst, because people seem bent on telling, not the truth, but what suits their purposes. Their thinking is strange and peculiar to a degree. Yet to tackle things properly the right points have to be found.

Let me read you a short passage written by an Italian before the outbreak of the present war, at a time when the Italians were jubilant about the Tripoli conflict—which I am not criticizing. I shall never say anything against the annexation of Tripoli by Italy, for these things are judged differently by those who know what is necessary and possible in the relationships between states and nations. They do not form judgements based on lies and express opinions steeped in all kinds of moralistic virtues. But here we have a man, Prezzolini, who writes about an Italy which pleases him, which has evolved out of an Italy which did not please him. He starts by describing what this Italy had come to, how it had gone down in the world, and he then continues—directly under the impression of the Tripoli conflict:

‘And yet, totally unaware of this economic risorgimento, Italy underwent at the same time the period of depression described above. Foreigners were the first to notice the reawakening. Some Italians had also expressed it, but they were windbags carrying on about the famous and infamous “primacy of Italy”. The book by Fischer, a German, was written in 1899, and that by Bolton-King, an Englishman, in 1901. To date no Italian has published a work comparable to these, even to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of “unification”. The exceptional good sense of these foreigners is notable for, truly, outsiders have neither wanted, nor do they now want, to know anything about modern Italy. Then, as now, people's judgement, or rather prejudgement of Italy amounted to saying: Italy is a land of the past, not the present; she should “rest on her past glory” and not enter into the present. They long for an Italy of archives, museums, hotels for honeymooners and for the amusement of spleen and lung patients—an Italy of organ-grinders, serenades, gondolas—full of ciceroni, shoe-shiners, polyglots and pulcinelli. Though they are delighted to travel nowadays in sleeping cars instead of diligences, they nevertheless regret a little the absence of Calabrese highwaymen with pistol and pointed velvet hat. Oh, the glorious Italian sky, defaced by factory chimneys. Oh, la bella Napoli, defamed by steamships and the unloading thereof; Rome filled with Italian soldiers; such regret for the wonderful days of Papal, Bourbon and Leopoldine Rome! These philanthropic feelings still provide the basis for every Anglo-Saxon and German opinion about us. To show how deeply they run, remember that they are expressed by people of high standing in other directions, such as Gregorovius and Bourget. The Italy who reformed herself and grew fat, the Italy who is seen to carry large banknotes in her purse—this is the Italy who has at last gained a proper self-confidence. We should forgive and understand her if she now reacts by going a little further than she ought in her enthusiasm. Ten years have hardly sufficed for the idea of the future and strength of Italy to pass from those who first saw it, to the populace at large who are now filled and convinced by it. It would have been in vain had our great thinkers piled up volumes of journals, statistical papers, philosophical works and books of modern art.’

This is the attitude, my dear friends! ‘It would have been in vain had our great thinkers piled up volumes of journals, statistical papers, philosophical works and books of modern art.’ All this would be worthless, he thinks, to raise up a people. This modern man has no faith in the worth and working of culture and spiritual values!

‘It would have been in vain had our great thinkers piled up volumes of journals, statistical papers, philosophical works and books of modern art; neither the people nor the foreigners would ever have been convinced, at least not before the passage of very many years.’

So this man has no confidence in creating spiritual culture in this way.

‘A great and brutal force was needed to smash the illusion and give every last and miserable village square a sense of national solidarity and upward progress.’

To what does he attribute the capacity to achieve what no spiritual culture could produce? He says:

‘It is the war which has served to do this.’

There you have it! This is what people believed. Tripoli was there and it had to be there. Moreover, they also said: War is needed to bring the nation to a point which it was not found necessary to reach by means of spiritual culture.

Indeed, my dear friends, such things speak to us when we place them side by side with another voice which says: We did not want this war; we are innocent lambs who have been taken by surprise. Even from this side comes the cry: To save freedom, to save the small nations, we are forced to go to war. This man continues:

‘We young people born around the year 1880 entered life in the world with the new century. Our land had lost courage. Its intellectual life was at a low ebb.’

These were the people born around the year 1880.

‘Philosophy: positivism. History: sociology. Criticism: historical method, if not even psychiatry.’

This may indeed be said in the land of Lombroso!

‘Hot on the heels of Italy's deliverers came Italy's parasites; not only their sons, our fathers, but also their grandsons, our elder brothers. The heroic tradition of risorgimento was lost; there was no idea to fire the new generation. Among the best, religion had sunk in estimation but had left a vacuum. For the rest it was a habit. Art was reeling in a sensuous and aesthetic frenzy and lacked any basis or faith. From Carducci, whom papa read to the accompaniment of a glass of Tuscan wine and a cheap cigar, they turned to d'Annunzio, the bible of our elder brothers, dressed according to the latest fashion, his pockets full of sweets, a ladies' man and vain braggart.’

Yet this marionette—of whom it is said here that he was ‘dressed according to the latest fashion, his pockets full of sweets, a ladies' man and vain braggart’—this marionette had made clear to the people at Whitsuntide in 1915 that they needed what no work of the spirit could give them!

When times are grave it is most necessary to make the effort to look straight at the truth, to join forces with the truth. If we do not want to recognize the truth we deviate from what may be good for mankind. Therefore it is necessary to understand that precisely in these times serious words need to be spoken. For we are in a position today in which even one who is seven-eighths blind should see what is happening when the call for peace is shouted down. Someone who believes that you can fight for permanent peace while shouting down the call for peace might, conceivably, hold worthwhile opinions in some other fields; but he cannot be taken seriously with regard to what is going on. If, now that we are faced with this, we cannot commit ourselves to truth, then the prospects for the world are very, very bad indeed.

It is for me truly not a pleasant task to draw attention to much that is going on at present. But when you hear what is said on all sides, you realize the necessity. We must not lose courage, so long as the worst has not yet happened. But the spark of hope is tiny. Much will depend on this tiny spark of hope over the next few days. Much also depends on whether there are still people willing to cry out to the world the utter absurdity of such goings on—as has been done just now, even in the great cities of the world.

The world needs peace and will suffer great privation if peace is not achieved. And it will suffer great privation if credence continues to be given to those who say: We are forced to fight for permanent peace; and if these same people continue to meet every possibility for peace with scorn, however disguised in clever words. But we have reached a point, my dear friends, when even a Lloyd George can be taken for a great man by the widest circles! We may well say: Things have come a very long way indeed!

Yet these things are also only trials to test mankind. They would even be trials if what I permitted myself to express at the end of the Christmas lecture were to happen, namely, if it were to be recorded for all time that, in the Christmas season of the nineteen hundred and sixteenth year after the Mystery of Golgotha, the call for ‘peace on earth among men and women who are of good will’ was shouted down on the most empty pretexts. If the pretexts are not entirely empty, then they are indeed more sinister still. If this is the case, then it will be necessary to recognize what is really at work in this shouting down of every thought of peace: that it is not even a question of what is said in the periphery, but of quite other things. Then it will be understood that it is justified to say that what happens now is crucial for the fortune or misfortune of Europe.

I cannot go further tonight because of the lateness of the hour. But I did want to impress these words on your heart!

In September and October of this year, we held courses at the Goetheanum in Dornach that attempted to apply the anthroposophical perspective to a wide range of academic subjects and to various areas of practical life. The aim of these college courses was not merely to discuss anthroposophy as such, but rather to bring together experts from a wide range of scientific fields, artists and also practitioners of commercial, industrial and other practical life. was precisely that they should show how the anthroposophical point of view, the anthroposophical way of examining life and the world, can be used to fertilize the most diverse scientific and practical areas of life.

You are aware that today, despite the great triumphs fully recognized by spiritual science, in particular in the field of natural science, the scientist everywhere comes up against certain limits wherever questions arise that cannot be answered at all with the methods and means of observation recognized by official science today. Then one is inclined to say: Well, there we have insurmountable limits to human knowledge, to human cognitive power, and man simply cannot transcend these limits. Anthroposophical spiritual science is intended to show precisely how the research methods, the way of thinking and looking at things, which the more materialistically oriented scientific and life attitude of modern times has brought about, can be fertilized when one moves on to a completely different way of knowing, to a completely different way of looking at things.

And here I touch upon the point that still earns anthroposophy the most opponents and even enemies in the present day. Opposition to anthroposophy does not arise so much from certain logical foundations or from scientifically well-tested objections, but this opposition comes from a quarter that recently - whole books are now appearing, almost every week one, to refute anthroposophy - a licentiate in theology described it in the following way: He said that anthroposophy makes one angry, that it is unpleasant and unsettling. So it is not from logical grounds that a certain antagonism arises, but, one might say, from feeling. And this stems from the fact that anthroposophy does not simply accept the knowledge that has been developed by mankind to date, which is simply structured in such a way that one says: Man has inherited certain abilities for his cognition; he gradually brings these to light through his natural development; through ordinary education he is then further trained to become a useful member of human society - and so on, and so on. With what one acquires on one side, one now also approaches knowledge itself, scientific life. One then tries to develop different methods: methods of observation, methods of experimentation, logical methods, and so on. But if one looks at the whole methodology of today's science, it is based on the assumption that one has once achieved something in the normal in terms of cognitive power, and that is not exceeded. No matter how much one is armed with the microscope, the telescope, the X-ray apparatus and so on, one does not go beyond a certain level of cognitive ability, which is regarded today as the average human being. Scientific progress is made by developing this ordinary method of knowledge in a complicated way or in exact detail, but above all, it is not thought of in the way that anthroposophy does. It starts from what I would call 'intellectual modesty'. And that is precisely where it becomes provocative for people of the present day, who, to a certain extent, do not want to hear anything like that from the outset. But one cannot help but present the facts in an unembellished way.

You see, if a five-year-old child is given a volume of Goethe's poetry, all they might know how to do with it is tear it up. When the child is ten years older, they will do something completely different with the volume of Goethe's poetry. They will delve into what is written on the individual pages. Something has grown with the child. The child has matured. The child has brought forth from its depths something that was not there ten years ago. A real, not merely a logical process has taken place. The child has, as it were, become a different being.

Intellectual modesty, I said, must be shown by anyone who wants to become a spiritual researcher in the anthroposophical sense. At a certain moment in their lives, they must be able to say to themselves: just as a real process takes place with the child between the ages of five and fifteen, and just as soul forces that have not revealed themselves before actually do so after ten years, so can one further develop what the cognitive faculty and the soul forces are in ordinary life. One can move away from the scientific point of view that one once accepts as the normal one; one can undergo a real process in one's knowledge. One can also develop further that which most people today already regard as the end of the cognitive faculty and at most further develop in science logically or through experimental arrangements - one can develop this further by bringing forth further powers from within the soul. And the anthroposophical method is based on this bringing forth of the forces slumbering in the soul. It is based on the fact - I will characterize it quite concretely right away - that one completely subordinates to the will that which otherwise exists as thinking merely in reference to the external world.

So how do we actually think in everyday life? How do we think in science? We think in science in such a way that we abandon ourselves to the external world or to our experiences. We think, so to speak, along the thread of our experiences or of appearances. To a certain extent we apply our will to our thinking, in judgment and in drawing conclusions; but something entirely different arises when that which otherwise lives only instinctively as a thought in man, when that, if I may use the comparison, is taken up by man inwardly in self-education into his hand.

When a person has practised for years the art of placing easily comprehended ideas in his consciousness, when he has brought certain ideas (and I emphasize the term “easily comprehended”) into the centre of his consciousness entirely through his own will and not through stimuli from the outside world, and when he has then, again with the application of his full will, on such inner visualization, inwardly resting, diverting attention from everything else and inwardly resting on a complex of ideas that he himself has placed at the center of his consciousness, he can exercise the powers of the soul in a different way than one does in ordinary life and also in science. And just as a muscle acquires a certain strength when it is exercised, so the soul powers acquire a definite power through exercise. They are trained in a very definite direction when one applies these inner methods, these intimate soul methods that I have described, to oneself as a spiritual researcher. I have described these methods in detail in my book 'How to Know Higher Worlds', in my 'Occult Science' and in other books; there one can read in full detail what I now only want to characterize in principle. I have called meditation and concentration that which the soul undertakes with itself, which is an inward, intimate spiritual-scientific method. But I would like to make it very clear that these things cannot be mastered in a short time. It is rather the case that spiritual scientific research takes no less time than research in clinics, in chemical laboratories or at the observatory. Just as in these fields one must acquire methods through years of practice, so too must one, and with a strong inner power of concentration, greater conscientiousness, still bring the soul faculties out of the soul itself.

And then, when such methods are applied to the soul, the capacity for knowledge expands. Then one certainly comes to see how man can recognize quite different things than he can perceive through his sensory eyes and through the combination of appearances presented by the sensory eyes or the senses in general.

That is one way. It goes through concentration, through the power of imagination, and through this one arrives at inner beholding, at what I have called in my book 'Mysteries of the Soul', the human being's power of beholding, of beholding cognition.

One can also develop the soul powers in another way, indeed one must do so if one really wants to achieve something. We must also train that faculty, which you all know well in its simplest manifestation: attention. We do not relate to external life and internal phenomena merely by surrendering to them passively, but we direct our power of observation, our attention, to something in particular, which I might call, we carve out of our surroundings. Even when we are doing scientific research, we have to focus on something in particular and link the other things to it. Then, when you train this attentiveness through inner will, through the application of the most active soul powers, when you do exercises that make you aware of the power you use when you pay attention to something, when one practices this power of focusing, this ability to concentrate one's soul life on something isolated from life, over and over again, then one makes a remarkable discovery. Then one makes the discovery that one gradually develops more and more the soul power that otherwise only comes to us in what we call interest in the world around us. We pay more or less interest to the one object and less to the other. This reveals a gradation in our soul's behavior towards the inner world. This interest is accompanied by an enormous liveliness; it becomes such a liveliness that one can truly say: it becomes something quite different from what it is in ordinary life and in science. It becomes what one can call: one feels at one with things. The soul's powers gradually permeate the essence of things. And this experience of an increased power of interest goes even further. It now goes so far as to develop a special power that is otherwise only brought to bear in another area of life, but which, through anthroposophical spiritual science, becomes a power of knowledge.

We have arrived at a point where, if we express the realities that are within Anthroposophy and reveal themselves as such, we are quite understandably considered to be amateurs or fantasists when compared to the views of today. What at first is attention in itself is transformed into the power of interest with which one experiences so clearly how the whole human being can be drawn out of the world; how one does not first have to prove and hypothesize whether this or that wave vibration underlies red or blue, but rather one grows with red and blue; where that is further developed, which Goethe so ingeniously developed in the chapter “Sensual-moral effect of color” in his theory of colors, where man really feels his soul life flowing out into the world, so that his cognitive faculty becomes like a flowing out of his soul life into the world phenomena. And his power of knowledge is transformed into that which we otherwise call love in life. Love, through which we become one with another being, is present in ordinary life, I would say only in its beginning; through the soul exercises I have indicated, it becomes such a soul power that recognizes itself in the whole environment.

And so one can say – I can only hint at all this, in my books it is presented in more detail – by developing the imagination on the one hand, and on the other hand the power of attention, the power of interest, the power of love, which underlie the life of the will, new powers of knowledge develop, and the human being experiences an expansion of his knowledge. What is otherwise called the limit of knowledge and what is often described as insurmountable, especially by contemporary researchers, can only be transcended through the development of the soul's inner powers - not by arming the eye with the microscope and telescope or with the X-ray apparatus, but only by training the human soul itself, by developing that power of knowledge that takes us beyond the sensual and the combination of the sensual through the mind. What now reveals itself to the human being is not a second edition of the sensory world, but the real spiritual world. And by awakening in this way what works in him supernaturally as spiritual life – for that is awakened by these two powers that I have mentioned – by awakening this in himself and bringing it to real exactness, in a way that otherwise only mathematics can achieve, he is led beyond the world of the senses, not through speculation about atoms and molecules, but through direct experience and observation of what the senses present. And man comes to recognize that which underlies him as a supersensible world just as his physical body underlies him as a physical thing. Man comes to know the spiritual world.

The anthroposophical spiritual science that emanates from the Goetheanum in Dornach is not to be confused with the many attempts today to study the mind by imitating the methods that are otherwise used in laboratories. There are certain people — just think of spiritualism — who believe that today, through external actions, through external experiments, they can penetrate deeper into the essence of things; they would like to recognize the supersensible through sensory research. That is precisely the essential point: that the supersensible can only be recognized with supersensible powers. And since these supersensible powers are slumbering in man at first - because, as he is once constituted between birth and death, he must first become proficient in the sensory world - he must get to know through the development of supersensible powers that which goes beyond death and birth, that which belonged to him even before he entered into this existence through birth, that which he retains when he passes through the gate of death.

I will just briefly mention how, in fact, when man penetrates to this supersensible faculty of knowledge, regions are opened up that cannot be opened up in any other way, namely, precisely that which is beyond birth and beyond death. Today it is almost entirely left to the faith of the creeds to teach people anything about what is beyond death. But even our language testifies to the fact that we are actually proceeding in a fundamentally one-sided way in this respect. We have the word 'immortality'. Admittedly, it does not come from knowledge, but from faith. But this immortality only wants to speak of the life that is beyond death. Spiritual science shows, by opening up the supersensible worlds, that man was also present in the spiritual world before birth, or let us say before conception. And the fact that we do not have the word “unborn” testifies that we have not recognized a real spiritual science in the present. As soon as man penetrates into the supersensible world through knowledge, not merely through faith, not only the prospect of the immortality of his being opens up to him, but also of the unborn of his being.

I can only briefly touch on all this, because my task today is to show how this anthroposophical spiritual science – which is intended to be modelled on a very exact science, but which is also taken entirely from the human soul: mathematics – can actually lead to cognitive insights into spiritual and supersensible life. We draw mathematics from the inner being, and if one person is familiar with the Pythagorean theorem, thousands or millions of people could come and deny it, he would know the truth of the mathematical field simply by having this content in his consciousness. It is the same with the inner experiences of the supersensible, as they come to light through spiritual science. This spiritual science is already developed in many details today, and, as I indicated in my introduction, it can have a fruitful effect on individual sciences as well as on practical life. Although this spiritual science is already being actively researched in the field of medical therapy, for example, I myself held a course for doctors and medical students in Dornach this spring, in which I tried to show how spiritual scientific observations can lead to a much more rational therapy than the one we have today.

We have also founded institutions for practical life, such as the Futurum in Dornach, which is intended to be a purely practical undertaking and to found an association in which various branches of industry are united in order to make further progress in rational administration than time has brought us, which has led us so much into an economic catastrophe. Everything in practical life today testifies that humanity is at a boundary that must be crossed.

Now, I do not have to spread out today over the other areas in which spiritual science is already proving its fertility through the practice of life itself; I have to speak primarily about the fertilization that education, the pedagogical art, can experience through this spiritual science.

First of all, it should be noted that the knowledge and understanding that is gained in the way I have just described is not the kind that has been brought to humanity in particular in the last three to four centuries. This knowledge of the last three to four centuries, although based on experiment and observation, is essentially knowledge that is developed by the intellect and speaks only to the intellect. It is essentially head knowledge. The knowledge and insight that is gained through anthroposophical spiritual science speaks to the whole person. It not only engages the intellect, but it spreads out in such a way that what can be recognized there also permeates our emotional life. We do not draw a conclusion from our feelings — that would be an ambiguity, a nebulous mysticism. Knowledge is attained through vision. But what is attained in this way then has an effect on the human emotional life, it stimulates the human will, it leads the human being to develop this knowledge, this insight, into their daily life, so that it permeates them like a soul blood, which in turn communicates itself to the physical body's functions, impulses and practical life. And so we can say that the whole human being is affected.

And it is precisely for this reason that this anthroposophical spiritual science, when it permeates the individual, is a foundation for what the educator, the teacher, has as a task in relation to the developing human being. As you know, it is always emphasized today that the art of education must be based on psychology, on the study of the soul. But if we look around at what is considered psychology by our contemporaries, we have to say that the many judgments and discussions that take place show how much it is all just empty words, how little this contemporary science, which has achieved such great triumphs in its research into the external world, can penetrate into the actual knowledge of the human being. This is the peculiarity of anthroposophical spiritual science: it does not acquire this knowledge through external experimental psychology – although nothing should be said against this, because its results only become truly fruitful when they are also fertilized by anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. What one must penetrate in the science of the soul, if one wants to become an educator, a teacher, one acquires by allowing oneself to be seized by anthroposophical spiritual science. One learns to recognize what actually lives in the human being as body, soul and spirit when one approaches the anthroposophical methods and through them inwardly grasps the human being.

I have already described how anthroposophical spiritual science strives to inwardly grasp what lives in our environment by means of its special methods of knowledge. But we must penetrate to the core of the human being, especially if we want to treat him pedagogically. And here it is a matter of the fact that our time cannot at all build a bridge between the soul-spiritual on the one hand and the physical-bodily on the other. All manner of psychological hypotheses have been put forward, ranging from the interaction of body and soul to 'psychophysical parallelism', in order to explain the mystery that lies before us in the relationship between body and soul or the spiritual-soul and the physical-bodily. But our psychology, because it does not use spiritual scientific methods for research, is not at all so far advanced that it could provide any basis for real pedagogy, for the real art of teaching. And I must point out something here that I only hinted at in my book 'Von Seelenrätseln' ('On Soul Mysteries'), but which is the result of thirty years of research by me. I would not have allowed myself to express it earlier, what I now have to say and what I hinted at in that book after thirty years of research. It is that today it is commonly believed that mental life is mediated only by the nervous system. The nervous system is regarded as the sole physical basis of human mental life. It is not! It can be shown in detail – and I have also hinted at such details in my book 'Von Seelenrätseln' – that only what we call the life of thinking has the nerve sense system as its physical basis and that the actual organ of the life of feeling in man is not the nerve sense system, but directly the rhythmic system, the respiratory system, the blood circulation system. Just as the nervous system underlies the life of thinking, so the rhythmic system underlies the life of feeling in the human being, and the life of will is based on the metabolic system.

These three systems, however, comprise all the inner processes that a person undergoes. The human being is a threefold creature. But we must not imagine that these three parts of the human being - the nervous-sensory system, the rhythmic system and the metabolic system - are juxtaposed. No, they are interwoven, and we have to separate them from each other in a spiritual-soul-like way if we want to see through the essence of the human being at all; because, of course, the nerves also need to be nourished. The metabolic system also plays a role in the nervous system, and also in the organs of the rhythmic system; but the organs of the rhythmic system serve only the will insofar as the metabolism plays a role in them; whereas insofar as they represent actual rhythmic movements, they serve the emotional life. And again, when our rhythmic being encounters something, when our breathing rhythm, for example, encounters our nervous system indirectly through the cerebral fluid, the interaction between the life of feeling and of imagination arises. In short, the human being is a more complex creature than is usually believed. Even that which one can ultimately have as the correct physical view of a person cannot be achieved with today's scientific methods, but only through inner vision, through growing together with the person himself in such an insight as I have described.

When one grows together with the being of a person in this way, when one sees the soul's activity in the physical body, then the growing person also presents himself in a new light. For someone who does not grasp things with a sober, dry intellect, but who can recognize the world through feeling, the growing child is a wonderful mystery as it reveals more and more of its inner life from day to day, from week to week, from month to month, from year to year. That which we cannot observe merely with the abstract faculty of knowledge, that which we can only observe if we ourselves can inwardly immerse ourselves in what is revealed on the face, what is revealed in the movements, what is revealed in the development of speech and so on, that can only be truly grasped with a knowledge that inwardly penetrates the outer world.

And such knowledge reaches us not only by grasping our intellect – with this intellect we then want to recognize externally the tasks that we should apply to educate and teach the child – no, anthroposophical spiritual science encompasses the whole human being. And in that it reveals the developing child to the whole human being in the interaction of body, soul and spirit, anthroposophical knowledge permeates our minds and our will — I would say in a way that is as natural as the blood, enlivened by the breath, permeates the human body. We are not only inwardly connected with the child through our intellect, we are also connected through our soul. We are connected through our will, in that we know directly: when we recognize how the child develops, we know what we have to do in this or that year of the child's development. Just as the air sets our blood in motion, just as the organism comes into its functions through what the outside world invigorates in it, just as it is seized by what the outside world accomplishes in it, so our soul and spirit are seized by such a living knowledge as we receive through anthroposophical spiritual science. And then, that which is developing within the human being as his individuality reveals itself to us, and we learn in an inward way to treat this individuality in an educational and teaching way.

Do not expect anthroposophical spiritual science to establish new educational principles. Educational principles, beautiful ones – I am completely serious when I say this – deeply penetrating pedagogical rules: the great educators have found them, and no spiritual science would dare to object to the genius of the great educators of the 18th and 19th centuries. But there is something here that needs to be pointed out very clearly.

You see, people say today, and have been saying for decades, that education should not be about just introducing something to the child; rather, one should develop what is in the child, his or her inner individuality. One should draw everything out of the child. In an abstract form, spiritual science must also say this. But precisely for this reason, spiritual science is misunderstood. If I want to make myself understood, I would like to recall something that I am using for comparison. It was in 1858 when the socialist Proudhon was accused of disrupting society. After the judges had reproached him with various things, he said that it was not at all his aim to disrupt human society, but rather to lead human society towards better conditions. The judges then said: Yes, that is what we all want, we want exactly the same as you. So spiritual science says: We want to develop human individuality. It has also been said in a certain abstract form for a long time that human individuality should be developed. But the point at issue is not to express such a principle in abstract forms; the point at issue is to really see this human individuality developing in a living contemplation, to really grasp the human being inwardly.

And now I would like to illustrate how the developing human being presents himself to spiritual science. First of all, we have clearly definable stages of life in a human being. We have a stage of life that begins at birth and lasts until about the age of seven, when the teeth change. Then, if one is able to observe correctly, a very intense change takes place in the human being – physically, mentally and spiritually. Then the development continues again until about sexual maturity, when a new change takes place. Within these individual stages of life, there are smaller stages. I would like to say that in each of these stages, we can distinguish three smaller stages that can only be properly obtained through observation that penetrates into the inner being of the human being. That is what it is about. Because what we want to know about the human being is at the same time the driving force for pedagogy, in that pedagogy should become art.

First of all, the first phase of life up to the age of seven shows us, above all, how the human being, as a spiritual, soulful and bodily creature, is entirely inclined to be an imitative being. If you study the human being in this phase of life and see how strongly he is predisposed to devote himself entirely to his surroundings, to carry out within himself what is presented to him in his surroundings, then you understand the human being. But one must be able to observe this concretely. One must then see how, for example, in the first two and a quarter years of life - these are, of course, all approximate figures - what occurs in the human being does not yet show itself as a real imitation, how organizing forces prevail inwardly, but But then, as the human being progresses in the third year of life, they show themselves in such a way that the human being becomes more attentive to his fellow human beings with these forces, so to speak directing these forces to what emanates from his fellow human beings. And then, around the fifth year, the time begins when the human being actually becomes an imitative being. And now one must be able to observe in the right intimate way what the relationship is like from person to person, and thus also between educator and child. One must know that this is profound for the whole human development, that this phase of life tends towards imitation.

For those who work with such things, I would say professionally, some of the complaints of a mother or father, for example, are on a par with that. They come and say: my child has stolen! - Well, one asks: Yes, what has the child actually done? He opened the drawer in the cupboard, took out some money, and - I am telling you a specific case - didn't even use this money to buy something for himself, but even distributed what he had bought among his fellow pupils! You have to say: Yes, my dear woman, at this age it cannot be called theft at all, because the child has clearly seen how you go to the cupboard every day and open the drawer; the child has done nothing other than try to do the same. It imitates that. In the first seven years, there is no other way to approach the child than to set an example for the child and let it imitate intimately what is to be brought to the child through education. Therefore, it is of such great importance for the first seven years of life that the educator, the parents, not only act as role models for the child in their outer actions, so that everything can be imitated, but that they also think and feel only what the child can think and feel. There is no boundary between the person with the child in his or her environment and the child itself. Through mysterious powers, our innermost thoughts are also transferred to the child. A person who is moral, who is truthful, makes different movements, has a different expression, walks differently than a person who is untruthful. This is something in the outer appearance, which is completely blurred in later life – but it is there for the child. The child does not merely see the morality of those around it through its ideas, but the child sees, through its movements, not with intellectual knowledge but through a subconscious knowledge that rests deep within, if I may use the paradoxical word, from mysterious hints in the way the person expresses themselves, what it should imitate. There are imponderables not only in nature, but also in human life.

Then, when the child has passed the age of imitation, what the child brings to school comes into play, and here it is particularly important to ensure that teaching and education really do help the developing human being to grow in terms of his or her individuality, humanity and human dignity. We have already made a practical attempt in this direction. The Waldorf School has existed for more than a year in Stuttgart, and there the lessons are taught entirely according to the principles that arise from this anthroposophical worldview and scientific method.

The Waldorf School in Stuttgart is not a school of any particular worldview. We are not interested in introducing anthroposophy to children in the same way that we would a religion. Oh no, that is not what we consider to be the main focus. We leave the parents and the children themselves entirely free, because it could not be otherwise in the present situation. Those who wish to be taught in the Protestant faith are taught by the Protestant pastor, those who wish to be taught in the Catholic faith are taught by the Catholic pastor; those who wish to have free religious education in line with their parents' beliefs or their own will receive such education from us. We cannot help the fact that the number of the latter - but not by our will, but in accordance with the current circumstances - is overwhelmingly large, especially in the Waldorf School. We have no interest in making the Waldorf school a school of direct world view, but we want to let what the anthroposophical knowledge gives flow into the art of education, into the practice of this educational art. How we do it with the child, not what we bring to the child, that is what matters to us.

And so we see that, as the child passes the change of teeth and crosses a significant point in life, the power of imitation continues to have an effect into the seventh or eighth year. The power of imitation continues to have an effect until about the age of eight. It is particularly strong in the child during this time, which is an element of will in the human being.

When a child starts school, we should not focus on the intellectual side of things, but rather take the whole person into account. I would like to explain this in relation to something specific. We take this into account in Waldorf schools. We don't start by teaching children to write by teaching them the letters of the alphabet. These letters, as they are written today, actually only speak to the intellect. They have become conventional signs. The head has to be strained on one side. We therefore teach writing by starting from drawing or even from painting visible forms. We first introduce the child to something that is artistic and then develop the forms of the letters from the artistic, from drawing, from painting. It is not so important to go back to the study of primitive peoples and their writing, which has developed in a similar way. Rather, one can trace the individual letters back to what one can make of them in terms of painting and drawing. But the essential thing is that one methodically starts from that which takes hold of the whole person, which is not just to be thought about, but where the will comes to expression. In what the child accomplishes through painting, the whole human being lives, so to speak, the whole human being becomes one with what the child can create. Then, on the one hand, what should interest the head can also be developed from what engages the whole person.

So we start from that which initially affects the child's will. And even what is expressed in an intellectualistic way in writing lessons, we first develop out of the will. Then the soul is particularly involved. The child feels something by first developing the form, and then letting the forms merge into the existing signs. Only then do we develop reading more out of what writing has become. So that, as I said, we appeal to the whole person, not just to the head. And it becomes clear when we carry out something like this, what a difference it makes whether you simply teach people from the point of view of the current external social life in that to which they have no reference, or bring them to that which you extract from their inner whole person, which is inherent in them.

During this time from the age of seven to sexual maturity, we see how the child's inner development is not focused on imitation – which continues to play a role until after the age of eight with the particular application of the will – but we now gradually see a completely different force entering the child's life. This is what I would call the natural sense of authority. This is something that is perhaps more or less mentioned today, but it is not properly considered. Just as a plant must have its growth forces if it is to develop flowers at a certain time and in a certain way, so the child must develop an elementary sense of authority within itself from the change of teeth to sexual maturity, because this belongs to its physical, mental and spiritual growth forces. It must rely on the teacher and educator, and it must accept the things that it then believes, that then approach it, that become the content of its feeling, its will, it must accept them, just as it in imitation, now it must accept them on the basis that it sees them in the behavior of the teacher, that it hears them expressed by the educator, and that the child looks up to its educator in such a way that what lives in the educator is a guiding force for it. This is not something that one can hope for through anything else, let us say in a more free-spirited time than today, which one is supposed to long for. No, one cannot replace what simply grows up with us through this elementary sense of authority, through devotion to the educator or instructor, with anything else. And throughout one's entire life, it has an enormous significance whether, between the ages of seven and fourteen, one has been at the side of teachers or educators in relation to whom one has developed a natural sense of authority.

This touches on a point where the materialistic view goes too far astray, for example when it says: after all, what does the individuality of the teacher do in its effect on the child! We should teach the child primarily through observation; we should lead it to think and feel for itself. I need hardly say that in some methods this has been reduced to the absurdity that we should only bring to the child what it already understands, so that it can analyze it in its own observations. I would like to draw attention to the following: In this phase of life, which I am now talking about, it is of particular importance what we accept on authority, what we take in out of a sense of authority, even if we do not immediately understand it, and that we do not just acquire what is tangible. For just as willpower underlies the imitation instinct in the first seven years of life, so between the seventh year and the year of sexual maturity everything that is memorized underlies the child's expressions. The child wants to memorize things under the influence of the sense of authority. And precisely what is said against the memory-based appropriation shows that, basically, all possible life practices are built on theories today, without taking the whole of human life into account.

Those who want to trace everything back to intuition fail to take two things into account: firstly, there are very broad areas of the world that cannot be made vivid. These are the realms of the beautiful; but above all, they are the moral and religious realms. Those who want to base everything on intuition do not take into account the fact that the most valuable thing, without which man cannot be, the moral and religious and its impulses, cannot be brought to man intuitively - especially not in these years of life - but that it must take hold of man supersensibly. In these years of life, when it is time, it can only do so through a sense of authority. That is one thing.

The other thing, however, is this. If you look at the whole of human life, not just a period of life in theory, then you know what it means when you are thirty-five or forty years old and look back on something you experienced in childhood, assuming it without understanding it at the time, because you said to yourself: the person who lives next to you as a teacher knows, it must be so. You accept it. You are in much older decades – it comes up again. Now you are mature enough to understand it. It has become a force of life. It is a wonderful thing in human life when you see something emerging from the depths of the human soul, for which you are ripe in later human life, but which has already been implanted in youth. It is a remedy against growing old; it is a life force. One has an enormous amount of what one has absorbed in childhood.

It is not a matter of demanding something out of some prejudice, of taking something on the authority of someone else, or of accepting something literally on mere authority, but it is a matter of demanding this for the sake of human salvation. Why do people today grow old so quickly? Because they have no life forces within them. We must know in detail what forces we must implant in the child if we want to see these forces emerge in a rejuvenating way in the later decades of life.

I will now give another example. Anyone who has a good understanding of how children play in the first years of life, up to around the age of five, and who pleasantly arranges their play according to the child's individuality, prepares something in the child that will in turn be expressed in much later life. To do this, one must understand human life in its totality. The botanist looks at the plant in its totality. What today wants to be “psychology” only ever looks at the moment. Anyone who observes a person at around the ages of twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight – or a little earlier – when they are supposed to find their way into life experience, find a relationship with life practice, become a skillful person, a purposeful person, anyone who can be properly and accurately observed, it can be seen how, in childhood play — between birth and about five years of age — the nature of the playing has announced the way in which, in one's twenties, the person finds their way into life as a practical person, as a skillful, purposeful person. In earliest childhood we bring forth what later comes as a flower, I might say at the root of development. But this must be understood from such an inner knowledge as anthroposophy offers, which delves into human nature. This must be recognized by observing the whole human being. We must, so to speak, if we want to be teachers and educators, feel the whole burden of the human being on us. We must feel what we can learn from each individual, what we can find in the child.

And so we know that up to the age of nine, a child cannot yet distinguish between subject and object in the right way. The outer world merges with the inner. Therefore, in these years, only that which lives, I would say, more in the form of fantasy, in images, should be brought to the child – so [should] everything [be designed] that one wants to bring as teaching in these years. Observation of plants, simple natural science, history can only be taught to the child from the ninth year onwards. Physical or historical facts that are not biographical but concern the context of historical epochs can only be taught to children after the age of twelve because only then can they be built upon something related in the child's nature. And again, one should not stick to the abstract principle of developing individuality, but one must really be able to observe this individuality from week to week.

This has proved to be a fruitful method in Waldorf schools and must be so by its very nature. When the teacher is imbued and enkindled by all that can be awakened in his soul and will, he enters into a quite different relationship with his pupils. I will again make this clear by means of an example. It is not only the rough line that extends from the educator to the child or from the teacher to the child, which is the result of the external materialistic way of observing, but there are always imponderables at play. Let us assume that the child is to be taught the idea of immortality at a suitable age. Now this idea of immortality can be very easily conveyed in pictures, and up to the age of nine one should actually teach quite pictorially. Everything should be transformed into pictures. But if you first develop the picture with your mind, if you proceed abstractly in developing the picture, then you do not stand in the picture. For example, you can say to a child: Look at a butterfly chrysalis; the butterfly crawls out of the chrysalis. Just as the butterfly visibly crawls out of the butterfly chrysalis here, so the human being's immortal soul escapes from the body. But if I have first created this image from my inner abstraction, if I am not present myself, if I am only adjusting everything for the child, I am not teaching the child anything. It is a peculiar secret that when one regards the whole of nature as spiritualized, as is natural in spiritual science, one does not merely adjust the image, but knows: What higher level than immortality is not conceived by my intellect but is modeled on things themselves; for example, the butterfly struggling out of its chrysalis is an image presented by nature itself. I believe in what I tell the child. I am of the same faith and conviction that I wish to instill in the child. Anyone who is observant can see that it makes a completely different impression on the child if I teach it a belief that I can believe in myself, that I do not merely present to the child intellectually and have stated because I am so clever and the child is still so stupid.

This shows what imponderables are at play. And I would like to mention one more thing. During the time at primary school, the situation is such that, initially, up to about the age of nine, what remains is the tendency to imitate what the predominant will is. But then something occurs for the child that teaches it to distinguish itself from its environment. Anyone who is really able to observe children knows that it is only between the ages of nine and ten that the child really begins to distinguish between subject and object, between itself and its environment. Everything must be organized with this in mind. But one would look at many things in life differently than one does, and in particular shape them differently than one does, if one were to see that in the same phase of life in which the child between the ages of nine and ten really learns to distinguish between its surroundings, in this phase of life it is indispensable for the whole moral life of the human being in the future that he can attach himself with the highest respect and with the highest sense of authority to someone who is his teacher or educator.

If a child crosses this Rubicon between the ages of nine and ten without this feeling, it will have a deficiency in its whole life and can later, at best with great effort, conquer from life itself what should be transmitted to the child in a natural way at this point in life. Therefore, we should organize our education and teaching in such a way that, especially in the class where the child crosses the Rubicon between the ninth and tenth year, we stand before the child in such a way that we really have something to offer the child through our own inner morality, through what we have in the way of inner truthfulness, of inner soul content, we can really be something for the child, that we do not just act as a model for it, that everything we say to it is felt by it as the truth. And one must establish in it the feeling that must exist in social life between the maturing child and the adult and the old person. The fact that this child goes through its reverence at this point in life between the ages of nine and ten is also the basis of what moral religious education is. Developing intellectuality too early, not taking into account the fact that the will must be influenced by images – especially from primary school onwards – and that one must not immediately penetrate into the abstract of writing and reading , nor does such an understanding of the human being provide those feelings and sensations that become useful when we want to teach the child moral maxims, ethical principles, when we want to instill religious feelings in it. They do not take effect later, nor do they work through a sense of authority, if we are not able to use the individual predisposition of the whole human being from the age of seven, for example, from the age of seven.

And so we can follow the development of the child in a very real way. Teachers and educators become pedagogical artists when they allow the knowledge they can gain about the human being through anthroposophical spiritual science to take effect in them. We do not want to create new, abstract educational principles, but we do believe that the human being's entire personality is stimulated by what anthroposophy can give as a spiritual-soul breath of life. Just as blood invigorates the organism as a matter of course, so spiritual science should invigorate those whose profession it is to educate and teach in such a way that they truly become one with the child and education and teaching become a matter of course. We would like those who enter the gates of their class to do so with such an attitude before the children in the Waldorf school.

Not because we want to add our two cents in every possible field, we also talk about pedagogical art, we also cultivate pedagogical art, but because we have to believe from our insights that a new fertilization is actually also necessary there. The phenomena of life have led to such terrible times that they demand a new fertilization. Not out of some foolish attitude or ideology, or because it wants to agitate for something, but out of the realization of the true needs of our time, anthroposophy also wants to have a fertilizing effect on the art of education. It wants to understand and feel correctly that which must underlie all real education and all real teaching. A true sense of this can be summarized in the words with which I want to conclude today, because I believe that if anthroposophy shows that it has an understanding for these words, the most inner, truest understanding, one will also not deny it its calling to speak into the pedagogical art, into the science of education. She does not want this out of some revolutionary sentiment, she wants this out of the needs of the time, and she wants this out of the great truths of humanity, which lie in the fact that one says: Oh, in the hand of the educator, in the hand of the teacher, the future of humanity, the near future, the future of the next generation, is given. The way in which education is provided, the way in which the human being is introduced to life as a becoming, depends, firstly, on the inner harmonious strength with which he can lead his life to his inner satisfaction as an individual. And this determines how he will become a useful and beneficial member of human society. A human being can only fulfill his destiny if, first, he has inner harmony and strength, so that he cannot be complacent about himself, but can always draw from this harmony the strength to work, the strength to be active and to feelings for his surroundings, and if, on the other hand, through his diligence, through his growing together with the needs of the time and the humanity surrounding him, he is a useful, a salutarily effective member of the whole of society. Anthroposophical spiritual science would like to contribute to making him such, for the reason that it believes that one can find a very special understanding of the human being in its way and thereby also a very special art of treating people.

Answering Questions

Rudolf Steiner: First of all, a written question has been received:

In what way should the individuality of the child be influenced by play?

The spiritual science referred to here should be completely realistic and never work as an abstraction and from theories; therefore, those questions that one is otherwise accustomed to answering, I might say, briefly, in a nutshell, cannot be answered briefly for spiritual science. But one can always point to the direction in which spiritual science sees. One will indeed come across it in the play of the youngest children. Play is most characteristic up to about the age of five. Of course children play afterwards too, but then all kinds of other things get mixed into the game, and the game loses the character, completely, I would like to say, of flowing out of the arbitrariness of the inner being. Now, if you want to guide the game appropriately, you will, above all, have to keep an eye out for what is called the child's temperament and other things that are related to temperament. The usual approach is to think that a child who, for example, shows a phlegmatic character should be guided towards the right path by something particularly lively that will excite them; or a child who shows a tendency towards a more introverted nature, such as a melancholic temperament – even if this does not yet appear in the child as such, but it may be there in the disposition – one would like to bring it, in turn, onto the right path by means of something uplifting. This is basically, especially as far as play is concerned, not very well thought out, but on the contrary, it is a matter of trying to study the child's basic character – let us say whether he is a slow or a quick child – and then one should also try to adapt the game to this. So, for a child who is slow, one should try to maintain a slow pace in the game, too, and for a child who is quick, maintain a quick pace in the game and only seek a gradual transition. One should give the child just what flows from his inner being. The worst educational mistakes are made precisely because one thinks that the same should not be treated the same, but the opposite should be treated by the opposite. There is one thing that is always particularly missed.

There are excited children. Of course, you want to calm these excited children down, and you think that if you buy them toys in darker colors, i.e., the less exciting colors, blue and the like, or if you buy them clothes in blue, it would be good for the child. In my little booklet 'The Education of the Child from the Point of View of Spiritual Science', I pointed out that this is not the case, that one should make the toys reddish for the excited child, and blue and violet for the careless child, the child who is not lively. Through all these things one will find out what is suitable for the child according to his or her particular individual disposition. There is an extraordinary amount to be considered. You see, it is commonly believed – as I said – that if you have a lively child, too lively a child, you should approach him with dark colors, with blue or violet; but you can see for yourself that if you look at red, at a red surface, and then look away at a white one, you have the tendency to see the so-called complementary color as a subjective form. So it is the complementary color that is inwardly stimulated. The dark colors are inwardly experienced by the light ones. Therefore, when a child is excited, it is good to keep its toys and clothes in light colors so that it is inwardly stimulated. So these things, too, may only be considered in such a way that one penetrates, as it were, into the inner nature of human nature and being.

Then I would like to point out that, as a rule, one does not meet the individuality of a child, or any individuality at all, if one listens too intently to the combinative aspects of the games. Therefore, from his point of view, the humanities scholar must actually consider everything that is a game of combinations, building blocks and the like, to be of lesser value because it is too much like an intellectual exercise for children; on the other hand, anything that brings more life to the child – appropriately varied according to their individuality – will make a particularly good toy. I have long endeavored to somehow bring about a movement for this - but it is so difficult in the present day to inspire people for such little things, seemingly little things - that more would be reintroduced the movable picture books for children. There used to be such picture books, which had pictures and you could pull on strings at the bottom; the pictures moved, whole stories were told by the pictures. This is something that can have a particularly favorable effect on children when it is varied in different ways. On the other hand, anything that remains static and requires a particular combination, such as a building-block story, is not really suitable for children's play, and building blocks are just one manifestation of our materialistic age.

Then I would also like to point out that when it comes to games, it is important to consider how much the child's imagination is involved. You can kill the most beautiful powers in a person by giving them, the developing human, a “beautiful” clown as a boy or a very “beautiful” doll as a girl - after all, they are always hideous from an artistic point of view, but people strive for “beautiful dolls”. The child is best served when the imagination itself is given the greatest possible leeway when it comes to such toys. The child is happiest when it can make a doll or a clown out of a handkerchief that is tied at the top to form a little head. This is something that should be encouraged. The activity of the soul should be able to be set in motion. If we have an eye for temperament, we will get it right, for example, by giving a particularly excited child the most complicated toys possible and a slow child the simplest toys possible, and then, when it comes to handling, proceeding in the same way. What the child does with himself is also of particular importance in later years. You can also tell by letting a child run fast or slow: you let an excited child run fast, and you force a casual child, a child who is lazy in thinking, to run slowly in games and the like. So it is a matter of treating like with like when adapting the game to the individuality, and not with the opposite. This will go a long way for those who really strive in this direction to treat children accordingly.

Question: What about introducing fairy tales to children? If we bring, for example, the image of the butterfly pupa and the butterfly, then we ourselves can believe in it; but if we tell stories such as about the Easter Bunny or Santa Claus, stories that we ourselves do not believe in but that make children so happy, does that have a damaging effect on the child, or is it harmless simply as an image?

Rudolf Steiner: It is only a matter of approaching these things in the right way. Of course, there are some things that you have to tell the child in his childlike way, and that will be the case with such things because the image is somewhat far removed from what it is about. But I certainly can't say, for example, that I don't believe in the Easter Bunny! So it's just a matter of finding the way to this belief. You'll forgive me for making such a frank confession. But I don't know of anything, especially in this area, that I couldn't believe if only I could find the way to it. The point is that where things are not as simple as with the butterfly, but more complicated, one must then also undergo a certain more complicated mental process in order to have within oneself the frame of mind that brings this to the child in the right, credible way. There is a meaning to the legend that lives on in certain parts of the Orient that when the Buddha died he was transported to the moon and there he looks down on us in the form of a hare. These things, which are originally contained in the deeper legends, point to the fact that deep natural secrets underlie things.

I would like to draw your attention to the fact that today such things are extremely difficult to judge. There is a very famous philosopher of nature, Ernst Mach. Most of you will know the name. Mach claims that it is no longer appropriate to teach children fairy tales or the like; this is not appropriate for such an enlightened time as ours. He assures us that he raised his children without fairy tales and the like. Now Mach has also given us a remarkable example of his inability to get to the human ego at all. Mach once said – I don't want to say anything against his importance in a limited area, where he has it; but we live in a time in which even a person like that can say something like this – he said: self-knowledge is actually something that is very far from a person, because he was once he was quite tired – he was a university professor – walking along, a bus had just come along, so he jumped in and saw a strange man getting in on the other side – as if the bus could have been boarded from the other side as well. He was amazed at that, but he just saw a man approaching, and he thought to himself: What kind of a neglected schoolmaster gets on there! Only then did he realize that there was a mirror on the other side and that he knew so little about his own outward appearance that he had not recognized his reflection. Another time, the same thing happened to him: he was walking along the sidewalk on the street and there was a mirror that was slightly askew, so that he also saw himself there, without immediately recognizing himself.

In this instance, he offers this as a kind of explanation of how little a person actually penetrates to his or her true self. He also regards this self-knowledge only from an entirely external point of view. He rejects fairy tales out of the same impulse. Now, of course, the fact is that, as the fairy tales are widely available today, it seems that one cannot cling to the fairy tales as an adult with inner involvement and a certain inner conviction; but that is something deceptive. If you go back to what is actually experienced, then you come to something completely different.

In this respect, it is truly regrettable that certain beginnings, which, according to spiritual science, have been pending for a long time, have not been developed at all. My old friend Ludwig Laistner had written his two-volume work “The Riddle of the Sphinx” in the 1880s. x», in which he proves what a foolish idea it is to believe that myths, sagas and legends came about because people made up something about clouds, something about the sun, earth and the like; that spring myths came about because the popular imagination invented them. Ludwig Laistner – in this respect his book is, of course, imperfect because he knows nothing of the actual state of mind of earlier people, which was more directed towards the real observation of reality – attributes everything to dreams, but at least he goes so far as to ascribe an experience, even if a dream experience, to every mythical construct.

Now, let us look at the dream. It certainly does not correspond to the kind of knowledge we have during the day, when we approach things through our senses; but anyone who studies the dream life intimately – of course, there is no need to stray to the side of the dream books – will see that the dream life is also an expression of a reality. You dream of a tiled stove, feel the heat radiating on you – and wake up with a pounding heart. The dream has symbolized an inner process for you. You dream – I am telling you real things – of snakes that represent all kinds of things to you; you wake up and have some kind of pain in your intestines; the pain in the intestines is symbolized by the snakes. Every dream is basically indicative of a person's inner processes, and a person's inner processes are in turn an expression of the great soul processes. Truly, the world is much deeper than we think in our so-called enlightened times. And anyone who actually studies fairy tales will find such significant psychology in them, for example, that there is already a way to believe in fairy tales, so that the degree of inner soul mood that I use to teach the child something from “Snow White” or “The Easter Bunny” or “St. Nicholas” is such that it can give rise to the very feeling that has a belief in me. I just have to be inwardly imbued with a relationship to the thing. Take 'St. Nicholas': St. Nicholas is definitely what leads back to the old Germanic Wotan, is actually the same as the old Germanic Wotan, and then we come to the World Tree, and we have a clue in the branch that St. Nicholas carries. It is this branch – the Christmas tree is hardly a hundred and fifty years old, it is still quite young – that gradually grows into the Christmas tree. You can see that there are inner connections everywhere. It is only necessary to find one's way into these inner connections, but it is already possible. And then there are quite different imponderables that extend from the mind of the teacher and educator to that of the child. I am not sure whether my answer quite meets the point of your question; it is something like this.

Question (not recorded verbatim): What is the relationship between psychoanalysis and spiritual science?

Rudolf Steiner: You see, in relation to many things, anthroposophical spiritual science is in a position where it has to speak. There are small circles and it forms a large circle; the small circle lies within the large one, but the large one does not lie within the small one, and mostly those people who have the small circles are the most fanatical. Anthroposophy is absolutely the opposite of any fanaticism. Isn't it true that there is a quarter or half truth in psychoanalysis? They try to extract the soul provinces and so on from within, the isolated soul provinces and so on. There is a truth in this, but you have to dig deeper if you want to find the actual basis. So that one can say, as we find with very many views, “Yes, but the other person does not return the same love for us, he finds that because one has to present it more comprehensively, one contradicts him.

I will remind you only of the shining example that is almost always given in most books of psychoanalysis. You will remember it if you have studied the material: a lady is invited to an evening party. The lady of the house – not the invited guest – is supposed to leave for a spa that very evening, leaving the master of the house at home alone. Now the evening party is taking place; the lady of the house is sent off to the spa, the master is back again, the evening party breaks up. The people are walking on the street. Around the corner rushes a droshky – not a car, a droshky. The evening party moves aside to the left and right, but one lady runs in front of the horses, always away, running, running, running, as the others also try and the coachman curses and swears, but she runs until she comes to a stream. She knows very well that you can't drown in the stream – she throws herself into it and is of course now saved. The people don't know what else to do: she is taken back to the house where she just came from, where the master of the house is, in which the lady of the house has just been sent to the bathroom.

Now, a real Freudian – I followed this from the beginning, was very well acquainted with Dr. Breuer, who together with Freud founded psychoanalysis – yes, a real Freudian looks for some hidden complex of the soul: In her seventh or eighth year, when the lady was still a child, she was followed by a horse; this is now a suppressed complex of the soul, and it is coming out. But things are not that simple. I must now apologize, but things are such that the subconscious can sometimes be quite sophisticated. This subconscious has been working in the lady the whole time: if only she could be with the man after the other one has been sent to the bathroom! And now she is getting everything ready – in her conscious mind, of course, the lady would be terribly ashamed to do this, she would not be trusted to do this in her conscious mind, but the deeper, the subconscious mind is much more sophisticated, much worse – she knows how to arrange everything, knows very well in advance: If she runs ahead of the horse and throws herself into the water, she will be carried back into the house because the others know nothing of her real intention.

Sometimes you have to look at completely different things. There is far too much artifice in the method of psychoanalysis today, although it basically points to part of the truth. It is simply an experiment with inadequate means, which is understandable from the materialistic spirit of the age, where one also seeks the spiritual first with materialistic methods.

[ 1 ] In future there will be found in these columns something in the nature of anthroposophical ‘Leading Thoughts’ or principles. These may be taken to contain advice on the direction which members can give to the lectures and discussions in the several Groups. It is but a stimulus and suggestion which the Goetheanum would like to give to the whole Society. The independence of individual leading members in their work is in no way to be interfered with. We shall develop healthily if the Society gives free play to what leading members have to offer in all the different Groups. This will enrich and make manifold the life of the Society.

[ 2 ] But it should also be possible for a unity of consciousness to arise in the whole Society—which will happen if the initiative and ideas that emerge at different places become known everywhere. Thus in these columns we shall sum up in short paragraphs the descriptions and lines of thought given by me in my lectures to the Society at the Goetheanum. I imagine that those who lecture or conduct the discussions in the Groups will be able to take what is here given as guiding lines, with which they may freely connect what they have to say. This will contribute to the unity and organic wholeness of the work of the Society without there being any question of constraint.

[ 3 ] The plan will become fruitful for the whole Society if it meets with a true response—if the leading members will inform the Executive at the Goetheanum too of the content and nature of their own lectures and suggestions. Then only shall we grow, from a chaos of separate Groups, into a Society with a real spiritual content.

[ 4 ] The Leading Thoughts here given are meant to open up subjects for study and discussion. Points of contact with them will be found in countless places in the anthroposophical books and lecture-courses, so that the subjects thus opened up can be enlarged upon and the discussions in the Groups centred around them.

[ 5 ] When new ideas emerge among leading members in the several Groups, these too can be brought into connection with the suggestions we shall send out from the Goetheanum. We would thus provide an open framework for all the spiritual activity in the Society.

[ 6 ] Spiritual activity can of course only thrive by free unfoldment on the part of the active individuals—and we must never sin against this truth. But there is no need to do so when one group or member within the Society acts in proper harmony with the other. If such co-operation were impossible, the attachment of individuals or groups to the Society would always remain a purely external thing—where it should in fact be felt as an inner reality.

[ 7 ] It cannot be allowed that the existence of the Anthroposophical Society is merely made use of by this or that individual as an opportunity to say what he personally wishes to say with this or that intention. The Society must rather be the place where true Anthroposophy is cultivated. Anything that is not Anthroposophy can, after all, be pursued outside it. The Society is not there for extraneous objects.

[ 8 ] It has not helped us that in the last few years individual members have brought into the Society their own personal wishes simply because they thought that as it increased it would become a suitable sphere of action for them. It may be said, Why was this not met and counteracted with the proper firmness? If that had been done, we should now be hearing it said on all sides, ‘Oh, if only the initiative that arose in this or that quarter had been followed up at the time, how much farther we should be today!’ Well, many things were followed up, which ended in sad disaster and only resulted in throwing us back.

[ 9 ] But now it is enough. The demonstrations which individual experimenters in the Society wished to provide are done with. Such things need not be repeated endlessly. In the Executive at the Goetheanum we have a body which intends to cultivate Anthroposophy itself; and the Society should be an association of human beings who have the same object and are ready to enter into a living understanding with the Executive in the pursuit of it.

[ 10 ] We must not think that our ideal in the Society can be attained from one day to the next. Time will be needed, and patience too. If we imagined that what lay in the intentions of the Christmas meeting could be brought into existence in a few weeks' time, this again would be harmful.

Anthroposophical Leading Thoughts given out as suggestions from the Goetheanum

[ 11 ] 1. Anthroposophy is a path of knowledge, to guide the Spiritual in the human being to the Spiritual in the universe. It arises in man as a need of the heart, of the life of feeling; and it can be justified only inasmuch as it can satisfy this inner need. He alone can acknowledge Anthroposophy, who finds in it what he himself in his own inner life feels impelled to seek. Hence only they can be anthroposophists who feel certain questions on the nature of man and the universe as an elemental need of life, just as one feels hunger and thirst.

[ 12 ] 2. Anthroposophy communicates knowledge that is gained in a spiritual way. Yet it only does so because everyday life, and the science founded on sense-perception and intellectual activity, lead to a barrier along life's way—a limit where the life of the soul in man would die if it could go no farther. Everyday life and science do not lead to this limit in such a way as to compel man to stop short at it. For at the very frontier where the knowledge derived from sense perception ceases, there is opened through the human soul itself the further outlook into the spiritual world.

[ 13 ] 3. There are those who believe that with the limits of knowledge derived from sense perception the limits of all insight are given. Yet if they would carefully observe how they become conscious of these limits, they would find in the very consciousness of the limits the faculties to transcend them. The fish swims up to the limits of the water; it must return because it lacks the physical organs to live outside this element. Man reaches the limits of knowledge attainable by sense perception; but he can recognise that on the way to this point powers of soul have arisen in him—powers whereby the soul can live in an element that goes beyond the horizon of the senses.

Further Leading Thoughts issued from the Goetheanum for the Anthroposophical Society

[ 14 ] 4. For certainty of feeling and for a strong unfolding of his will, man needs a knowledge of the spiritual world. However widely he may feel the greatness, beauty and wisdom of the natural world, this world gives him no answer to the question of his own being. His own being holds together the materials and forces of the natural world in the living and sensitive form of man until the moment when he passes through the gate of death. Then Nature receives this human form, and Nature cannot hold it together; she can but dissolve and disperse it. Great, beautiful, wisdom-filled Nature does indeed answer the question, How is the human form dissolved and destroyed? but not the other question, How is it maintained and held together? No theoretical objection can dispel this question from the feeling soul of man, unless indeed he prefers to lull himself to sleep. The presence of this question must incessantly maintain alive, in every human soul that is really awake, the longing for spiritual paths of World-knowledge.

[ 15 ] 5. For peace in his inner life, man needs Self-knowledge in the Spirit. He finds himself in his Thinking, Feeling and Willing. He sees how Thinking, Feeling and Willing are dependent on the natural man. In all their developments, they must follow the health and sickness, the strengthening and weakening of the body. Every sleep blots them out. Thus the experience of everyday life shows the spiritual consciousness of man in the greatest imaginable dependence on his bodily existence. Man suddenly becomes aware that in this realm of ordinary experience Self-knowledge may be utterly lost—the search for it a vain quest. Then first the anxious question arises: Can there be a Self-knowledge transcending the ordinary experiences of life? Can we have any certainty at all, as to a true Self of man? Anthroposophy would fain answer this question on a firm basis of spiritual experience. In so doing it takes its stand, not on any opinion or belief, but on a conscious experience in the Spirit—an experience in its own nature no less certain than the conscious experience in the body.

Further Leading Thoughts issued from the Goetheanum for the Anthroposophical Society

[ 16 ] 6. When we look out on lifeless Nature, we find a world full of inner relationships of law and order. We seek for these relationships and find in them the content of the ‘Laws of Nature.’ We find, moreover, that by virtue of these Laws lifeless Nature forms a connected whole with the entire Earth. We may now pass from this earthly connection which rules in all lifeless things, to contemplate the living world of plants. We see how the Universe beyond the Earth sends in from distances of space the forces which draw the Living forth out of the womb of the Lifeless. In all living things we are made aware of an element of being, which, freeing itself from the mere earthly connection, makes manifest the forces that work down on to the Earth from realms of cosmic space. As in the eye we become aware of the luminous object which confronts it, so in the tiniest plant we are made aware of the nature of the Light from beyond the Earth. Through this ascent in contemplation, we can perceive the difference of the earthly and physical which holds sway in the lifeless world, from the extra-earthly and ethereal which abounds in all living things.

[ 17 ] 7. We find man with his transcendent being of soul and spirit placed into this world of the earthly and the extra earthly. Inasmuch as he is placed into the earthly connection which contains all lifeless things, he bears with him his physical body. Inasmuch as he unfolds within him the forces which the living world draws into this earthly sphere from cosmic space, he has an etheric or life-body. The trend of science in modern times has taken no account of this essential contrast of the earthly and the ethereal. For this very reason, science has given birth to the most impossible conceptions of the ether. For fear of losing their way in fanciful and nebulous ideas, scientists have refrained from dwelling on the real contrast. But unless we do so, we can attain no true insight into the Universe and Man.

Further Leading Thoughts issued from the Goetheanum for the Anthroposophical Society

[ 18 ] 8. We may consider the nature of man in so far as it results from his physical and his etheric body. We shall find that all the phenomena of man's life which proceed from this side of his nature remain in the unconscious, nor do they ever lead to consciousness. Consciousness is not lighted up but darkened when the activity of the physical and the etheric body is enhanced. Conditions of faintness and the like can be recognised as the result of such enhancement. Following up this line of thought, we recognise that something is at work in man—and in the animal—which is not of the same nature as the physical and the etheric. It takes effect, not when the forces of the physical and the etheric are active in their own way, but when they cease to be thus active. In this way we arrive at the conception of the astral body.

[ 19 ] 9. The reality of this astral body is discovered when we rise in meditation from the Thinking that is stimulated by the outer senses to an inner act of Vision. To this end, the Thinking that is stimulated from without must be taken hold of inwardly, and experienced as such, intensely in the soul, apart from its relation to the outer world. Through the strength of soul thus engendered, we become aware that there are inner organs of perception, which see a spiritual reality working in the animal and man at the very point where the physical and the etheric body are held in check in order that consciousness may arise.

[ 20 ] 10. Consciousness, therefore, does not arise by a further enhancement of activities which proceed from the physical and etheric bodies. On the contrary, these two bodies, with their activities, must be reduced to zero—nay even below zero—to ‘make room’ for the working of consciousness. They do not generate consciousness, they only furnish the ground on which the Spirit must stand in order to bring forth consciousness within the earthly life. As man on Earth needs the ground on which to stand, so does the Spiritual, within the earthly realm, need a material foundation on which it may unfold itself. And as a planet in the cosmic spaces does not require any ground beneath it in order to assert its place, so too the Spirit, when it looks—not through the senses into material—but through its own power into spiritual things, needs no material foundation to call its conscious activity to life.

Further Leading Thoughts issued from the Goetheanum for the Anthroposophical Society

[ 21 ] 11. The Self-consciousness which is summed up in the ‘I’ or ‘Ego’ emerges out of the sea of consciousness. Consciousness arises when the forces of the physical and etheric bodies disintegrate these bodies, and thus make way for the Spiritual to enter into man. For through this disintegration is provided the ground on which the life of consciousness can develop. If, however, the organism is not to be destroyed, the disintegration must be followed by a reconstruction. Thus, when for an experience in consciousness a process of disintegration has taken place, that which has been demolished will be built up again exactly. The experience of Self-consciousness lies in the perception of this upbuilding process. The same process can be observed with inner vision. We then feel how the Conscious is led over into the Self-conscious by man's creating out of himself an after-image of the merely Conscious. The latter has its image in the emptiness, as it were, produced within the organism by the disintegration. It has passed into Self-consciousness when the emptiness has been filled up again from within. The Being, capable of this ‘fulfilment,’ is experienced as ‘I.’

[ 22 ] 12. The reality of the ‘I’ is found when the inner vision whereby the astral body is known and taken hold of, is carried a stage further. The Thinking which has become alive in meditation must now be permeated by the Will. To begin with we simply gave ourselves up to this new Thinking, without active Will. We thereby enabled spiritual realities to enter into this thinking life, even as in outer sense perception colour enters the eye or sound the ear. What we have thus called to life in our consciousness by a more passive devotion, must now be reproduced by ourselves, by an act of Will. When we do so, there enters into this act of Will the perception of our own ‘I’ or Ego.

[ 23 ] 13. On the path of meditation we discover, beside the form in which the ‘I’ occurs in ordinary consciousness, three further forms: (1) In the consciousness which takes hold of the etheric body, the ‘I’ appears in picture-form; yet the picture is at the same time active Being, and as such it gives man form and figure, growth, and the plastic forces that create his body. (2) In the consciousness which takes hold of the astral body, the ‘I’ is manifested as a member of a spiritual world whence it receives its forces. (3) In the consciousness just indicated, as the last to be achieved, the ‘I’ reveals itself as a self-contained spiritual Being—relatively independent of the surrounding spiritual world.

Further Leading Thoughts issued from the Goetheanum for the Anthroposophical Society

[ 24 ] 14. The second form of the ‘I’—first of the three forms that were indicated in the last section—appears as a ‘picture’ of the I. When we become aware of this picture-character, a light is also thrown on the quality of thought in which the ‘I’ appears before the ordinary consciousness. With all manner of reflections, men have sought within this consciousness for the ‘true I.’ Yet an earnest insight into the experiences of the ordinary consciousness will suffice to show that the ‘true I’ cannot be found therein. Only a shadow-in-thought is able to appear there—a shadowy reflection, even less than a picture. The truth of this seizes us all the more when we progress to the ‘I’ as a picture, which lives in the etheric body. Only now are we rightly kindled to search for the ‘I’, for the true being of man.

[ 25 ] 15. Insight into the form in which the ‘I’ lives in the astral body leads to a right feeling of the relation of man to the spiritual world. For ordinary consciousness this form of the ‘I’ is buried in the dark depths of the unconscious, where man enters into connection with the spiritual being of the Universe through Inspiration. Ordinary consciousness experiences only a faint echo-in-feeling of this Inspiration from the wide expanse of the spiritual world, which holds sway in depths of the soul.

[ 26 ] 16. It is the third form of the ‘I’ which gives us insight into the independent Being of man within a spiritual world. It makes us feel how, with his earthly-sensible nature, man stands before himself as a mere manifestation of what he really is. Here lies the starting-point of true Self-knowledge. For the Self which fashions man in his true nature is revealed to him in Knowledge only when he progresses from the thought of the ‘I’ to its picture, from the picture to the creative forces of the picture, and from the creative forces to the spiritual Beings who sustain them.

Further Leading Thoughts issued from the Goetheanum for the Anthroposophical Society

[ 27 ] 17. Man is a being who unfolds his life in the midst, between two regions of the world. With his bodily development he is a member of a ‘lower world’; with his soul-nature he himself constitutes a ‘middle world’; and with his faculties of Spirit he is ever striving towards an ‘upper world.’ He owes his bodily development to all that Nature has given him; he bears the being of his soul within him as his own portion; and he discovers in himself the forces of the Spirit, as the gifts that lead him out beyond himself to participate in a Divine World.

[ 28 ] 18. The Spirit is creative in these three regions of the World. Nature is not void of Spirit. We lose even Nature from our knowledge if we do not become aware of the Spirit within her. Nevertheless, in Nature's existence we find the Spirit as it were asleep. Yet just as sleep has its task in human life—as the ‘I’ must be asleep at one time in order to be the more awake at another—so must the World-Spirit be asleep where Nature is, in order to be the more awake elsewhere.

[ 29 ] 19. In relation to the World, the soul of man is like a dreamer if it does not pay heed to the Spirit at work within it. The Spirit awakens the dreams of the soul from their ceaseless weaving in the inner life, to active participation in the World where man's true Being has its origin. As the dreamer shuts himself off from the surrounding physical world and entwines himself into himself, so would the soul lose connection with the Spirit of the World in whom it has its source, if it turned a deaf ear to the awakening calls of the Spirit within it.

Further Leading Thoughts issued from the Goetheanum for the Anthroposophical Society

[ 30 ] 20. For a right development of the life of the human soul, it is essential for man to become fully conscious of working actively from out of spiritual sources in his being. Many adherents of the modern scientific world-conception are victims of a strong prejudice in this respect. They say that a universal causality is dominant in all phenomena of the world; and that if man believes that he himself, out of his own resources, can be the cause of anything, it is a mere illusion on his part. Modern Natural Science wishes to follow observation and experience faithfully in all things, but in its prejudice about the hidden causality of man's inner sources of action it sins against its own principle. For the free and active working, straight from the inner resources of the human being, is a perfectly elementary experience of self-observation. It cannot be argued away; rather must we harmonise it with our insight into the universal causation of things within the order of Nature.

[ 31 ] 21. Non-recognition of this impulse out of the Spirit working in the inner life of man, is the greatest hindrance to the attainment of an insight into the spiritual world. For to consider our own being as a mere part of the order of Nature is in reality to divert the soul's attention from our own being. Nor can we penetrate into the spiritual world unless we first take hold of the Spirit where it is immediately given to us, namely in clear and open-minded self-observation.

[ 32 ] 22. Self-observation is the first beginning in the observation of the Spirit. It can indeed be the right beginning, for if it is true, man cannot possibly stop short at it, but is bound to progress to the further spiritual content of the World. As the human body pines away when bereft of physical nourishment, so will the man who rightly observes himself feel that his Self is becoming stunted if he does not see working into it the forces from a creative spiritual World outside him.

Further Leading Thoughts issued from the Goetheanum for the Anthroposophical Society

[ 33 ] 23. Passing through the gate of death, man goes out into the spiritual world, in that he feels falling away from him all the impressions and contents of soul which he received during earthly life through the bodily senses and the brain. His consciousness then has before it in an all-embracing picture-tableau the whole content of life which, during his earthly wanderings, entered as pictureless thoughts into his memory, or which—remaining unnoticed by the earthly consciousness—nevertheless made a subconscious impression on his soul. After a very few days these pictures grow faint and fade away. When they have altogether vanished, he knows that he has laid aside his etheric body too; for in the etheric body he can recognise the bearer of these pictures.

[ 34 ] 24. Having laid aside the etheric body, man has the astral body and the Ego as the members of his being still remaining to him. The astral body, so long as it is with him, brings to his consciousness all that during earthly life was the unconscious content of the soul when at rest in sleep. This content includes the judgements instilled into the astral body by Spirit-beings of a higher World during the periods of sleep—judgements which remain concealed from earthly consciousness. Man now lives through his earthly life a second time, yet so, that the content of his soul is now the judgement of his thought and action from the standpoint of the Spirit-world. He lives it through in backward order: first the last night, then the last but one, and so on.

[ 35 ] 25. This judgement of his life, which man experiences in the astral body after passing through the gate of death, lasts as long as the sum-total of the times he spent during his earthly life in sleep.

Further Leading Thoughts issued from the Goetheanum for the Anthroposophical Society

[ 36 ] 26. Only when the astral body has been laid aside—when the judgement of his life is over—man enters the spiritual world. There he stands in like relation to Beings of purely spiritual character as on Earth to the beings and processes of the Nature-kingdoms. In spiritual experience, everything that was his outer world on Earth now becomes his inner world. He no longer merely perceives it, but experiences it in its spiritual being which was hid from him on Earth, as his own world.

[ 37 ] 27. In the Spirit-realm, man as he is on Earth becomes an outer world. We gaze upon him, even as on Earth we gaze upon the stars and clouds, the mountains and rivers. Nor is this ‘outer world’ any less rich in content than the glory of the Cosmos as it appears to us in earthly life.

[ 38 ] 28. The forces begotten by the human Spirit in the Spirit-realm work on in the fashioning of earthly Man, even as the deeds we accomplish in the Physical work on as a content of the soul in the life after death.

Further Leading Thoughts issued from the Goetheanum for the Anthroposophical Society

[ 39 ] 29. In the evolved Imaginative Knowledge there works what lives as soul and spirit in the inner life of man, fashioning the physical body in its life, and unfolding man's existence in the physical world on this bodily foundation. Over against the physical body, whose substances are renewed again and again in the process of metabolism, we here come to the inner nature of man, unfolding itself continuously from birth (or conception) until death. Over against the physical Space-body, we come to a Time-body.

[ 40 ] 30. In the Inspired Knowledge there lives, in picture-form, what man experiences in a spiritual environment in the time between death and a new birth. What Man is in his own Being and in relation to cosmic worlds—without the physical and etheric bodies by means of which he undergoes his earthly life—is here made visible.

[ 41 ] 31. In the Intuitive Knowledge there comes to consciousness the working-over of former earthly lives into the present. In the further course of evolution these former lives have been divested of their erstwhile connections with the physical world. They have become the purely spiritual kernel of man's being, and, as such, are working in his present life. In this way, they too are an object of Knowledge—of that Knowledge which results with the further unfolding of the Imaginative and Inspired.

Further Leading Thoughts issued from the Goetheanum for the Anthroposophical Society

[ 42 ] 32. In the head of man, the physical Organisation is a copy, an impress of the spiritual individuality. The physical and the etheric part of the head stand out as complete and self-contained pictures of the Spiritual; beside them, in independent soul-spiritual existence, there stand the astral and the Ego-part. Thus in the head of man we have to do with a development, side by side, of the physical and etheric, relatively independent on the one hand, and of the astral and Ego-organisation on the other.

[ 43 ] 33. In the limbs and metabolic part of man the four members of the human being are intimately bound up with one another. The Ego-organisation and astral body are not there beside the physical and etheric part. They are within them, vitalising them, working in their growth, their faculty of movement and so forth. Through this very fact, the limbs and metabolic part of man is like a germinating seed, striving for ever to unfold; striving continually to become a ‘head,’ and—during the earthly life of man—no less continually prevented.

[ 44 ] 34. The rhythmic Organisation stands in the midst. Here the Ego-organisation and astral body alternately unite with the physical and etheric part, and loose themselves again. The breathing and the circulation of the blood are the physical impress of this alternate union and loosening. The inbreathing process portrays the union; the out-breathing the loosening. The processes in the arterial blood represent the union; those in the venous blood the loosening.

Further Leading Thoughts issued from the Goetheanum for the Anthroposophical Society

[ 45 ] 35. We understand the physical nature of man only if we regard it as a picture of the soul and spirit. Taken by itself, the physical corporality of man is unintelligible. But it is a picture of the soul and spirit in different ways in its several members. The head is the most perfect and complete symbolic picture of the soul and spirit. All that pertains to the system of the metabolism and the limbs is like a picture that has not yet assumed its finished forms, but is still being worked upon. Lastly, in all that belongs to the rhythmic Organisation of man, the relation of the soul and spirit to the body is intermediate between these opposites.

[ 46 ] 36. If we contemplate the human head from this spiritual point of view, we shall find in it a help to the understanding of spiritual Imaginations. For in the forms of the head, Imaginative forms are as it were coagulated to the point of physical density.

[ 47 ] 37. Similarly, if we contemplate the rhythmic part of man's Organisation it will help us to understand Inspirations. The physical appearance of the rhythms of life bears even in the sense-perceptible picture the character of Inspiration. Lastly, in the system of the metabolism and the limbs—if we observe it in full action, in the exercise of its necessary or possible functions—we have a picture, supersensible yet sensible, of pure supersensible Intuitions.

Many people who are naturally fitted to receive Anthroposophy in our present age will find it necessary to clear away various contradictions that may arise in their minds. In particular, the soul can be brought up against a certain contradiction when it wants to take seriously the memories of such a season of festival as that which includes Christmas and the New Year. When we take these memories seriously, then it becomes clear to us that at the same time as we try to gain knowledge, we must penetrate into the spiritual history of mankind if we are to understand rightly our own spiritual evolution. We need only take a certain thought, and we shall find it on the one hand full of light, while on the other it makes us disturbingly aware of how contradictions, difficulties, must pile up before the soul of anyone who wants to accept in the right sense our anthroposophical knowledge concerning man and the evolution of the world.

Among the varied forms of knowledge that we try to reach through our anthroposophical studies we must of course include knowledge of the Christ; knowledge of the fundamentally important impulse—we have called it the Christ Impulse—which came in at the beginning of our era. And we are bound often to ask ourselves how we can hope to penetrate more effectively, with deepened anthroposophical knowledge, into the course of human evolution, in order to understand the Christ Impulse, than those who lived at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha were able to do. Was it not much easier for them to penetrate into this Mystery, whose secret is specially bound up with the evolution of humanity, than it is for us, at this great distance in time? That might be a troublesome question for persons who want to seek an understanding of Christ in the light of Anthroposophy. It might become one of those contradictions which have a depressing effect just when we want to take most earnestly the deeper principles of our anthroposophical knowledge. This contradiction can be cleared away only when we call up before our souls the whole spiritual situation of humanity at the beginning of our era.

If we try—at first without any kind of religious or similar feeling—to enter into the psychic disposition of man at that time, we can make a most peculiar discovery. We can say to ourselves that we will rely on what cannot be denied even by minds most given over to externals; we will draw on the old tradition as found in history, but we will try to penetrate into that part of it which embraces the purest spiritual life. In this way we may hope to lay hold of essential elements in the evolution of humanity. Let us therefore try to enter quite historically into the endeavours that were made by men, say two hundred years before the Mystery of Golgotha and a hundred and fifty years after it, to deepen their thinking in order to understand the secrets, the riddles, of the world. Then we realise that during the centuries before and after the Mystery of Golgotha a change of far-reaching significance occurred in the souls of men with regard to the life of thought. We find that a large part of the civilised world received the influence of that which Greek culture and other deepened forms of thinking had achieved some centuries previously.

When we consider what mankind had accomplished in this way by its own efforts, not in response to any impulse from without, and how much had been attained by men called “sages” in the Stoic sense (and a good many personalities in Roman history were so ranked), then we are bound to say: These conquests in the realm of thought and ideas were made at the beginning of our era, and Western life has not added very much to them. We have gained an endless amount of knowledge concerning the facts of Nature and have been through revolutions in our ways of thinking about the external world. But the thoughts, the ideas themselves, through which these advances have been made, and with which men have tried to discern the secrets of existence in external, spatial terms, have really developed very little since the beginning of our era. They were all present—even those of which the modern world is so proud, including the idea of evolution—in the souls of that period. What might be called an intellectual laying hold of the world, a life of ideas, had reached a certain summit, and not only among particular individuals, such as the pupils of Socrates a little earlier; it had become popular in a limited sense and had spread widely over Southern Europe and other regions. This deepening of thought is truly astonishing.

An impartial history of philosophy would have to pay special attention to this triumph of human thinking at that time.

But if we now take these highly significant advances in the realm of ideas, and on the other hand the secrets bound up with the Mystery of Golgotha, we become aware of something different. We realise that as the story of the event on Golgotha became known in that age, an immense wrestling of thought with that Mystery occurred. We see how the philosophies of the period, especially the Gnostic philosophy in its much profounder form, struggled to bring all the ideas it had gained to bear on this one purpose. And it is most important to let this struggle work upon us. For we then come to recognise that the struggle was in vain; that the Mystery of Golgotha appeared to human understanding as though it were dispersed through far-distant spiritual worlds and would not unveil itself.

Now from the outset I would like to say that when in these lectures I speak of the Mystery of Golgotha, I do not wish to invest this term with any colouring drawn from religious traditions or convictions. We shall be concerned purely with objective facts that are fundamental to human evolution, and with what physical and spiritual observation can bring to light. I shall leave aside everything that individual religious creeds have to say about the Mystery of Golgotha and shall look only at what has happened in the course of human evolution. I shall have to say many things which will be made clear and substantiated later on.

In setting the Mystery of Golgotha by the side of the deepest thought of that time, the first thing that strikes one is what I expressed by saying: The nature of this Mystery lies far, far beyond what can be reached by the development of thinking. And the more exactly one studies this contrast, the more is one brought to the following recognition. One can enter deeply into the thought-world that belongs to the beginning of our era; one can try to bring livingly before one's soul what thinking meant for those men of Greece and Rome; one can call up before one's soul the ideas that sprang from their thinking, and then one comes to the feeling: Yes, that was the time when thought underwent an unprecedented deepening. Something happened with thought; it approached the human soul in a quite new way. But if then, after living back into the thought-world of that time and recreating it in one's soul, one brings clairvoyant perception to bear on this experience, then suddenly something surprising emerges. One feels that something is happening far, far away in the spiritual worlds and that the deepening of thought is a consequence of it.

We have already called attention to the fact that behind our world lie other worlds—the Astral, the Devachanic, and the Higher Devachanic. Let us first remind ourselves that these three worlds lie behind our own! Then, if the clairvoyant state of soul is raised to full activity within oneself, the impression is received that neither in the Astral world nor in the lower Devachanic world can a complete explanation of the deepening of thought at that time be found. Only if one could place one's soul in the higher Devachanic world—so says clairvoyant insight—would one experience what it is that streams through the other two worlds and penetrates right down into our physical world.

On this physical plane there is no need to be aware, while steeping oneself in that past world of ideas, of anything told concerning the Mystery of Golgotha. One can leave that quite out of account and ask simply: No matter what happened over there in Palestine, what does external history indicate? It shows that in Greece and Rome an infinite deepening of thought took place. Let us put a circle round this Greek and Roman thought-world and make it an enclosed island, as it were, in our soul-life—an island shut off from everything outside; let us imagine that no report of the Mystery of Golgotha has reached it. Then, when we inwardly contemplate this world, we certainly find there nothing that is known to-day about the Mystery of Golgotha, but we find an infinite deepening of thought which indicates that here in the evolution of humanity something happened which took hold of the innermost being of the soul on the physical plane. We are persuaded that in no previous age and among no other people had thinking ever been like that! However sceptical anyone may be, however little he may care to know about the Mystery of Golgotha, he must admit one thing—that in this island world that we have enclosed there was a deepening of thought never previously known.

But if one places oneself in this thought-world, and has a clairvoyant faculty in the background, then one feels truly immersed in the individual character of this thought. And then one says to oneself: Yes, as this thinking flowers into idea, with Plato and others, as it passes over into the world we tried to enclose, it has a quality which sets the soul free, which lays hold of the soul and brings it to a loftier view of itself. Whatever else you may apprehend in the external world or in the spiritual world makes you dependent on those worlds; in thinking you take hold of something which lives in you and which you can experience completely. You may draw back from the physical world, you may disbelieve in a spiritual world, you may refuse to know anything about clairvoyant impressions, you may shut out all physical impressions—with thoughts you can live in yourself; in your thinking you lay hold, as it were, of your own being!

But then—and it cannot be otherwise if one enters with clairvoyant perception into this sea of thought, as I might call it—a feeling of the isolation of thought comes over one; a feeling that thought is still only thought; that it lives first of all only in the soul, and that one cannot draw from it the power to go out into a world where the ground of the rest of our being—the ground of what else we are—is to be found. In the very moment when one discerns the grandeur of thought, one discerns also its unreality. Then one can see also how in the surrounding world that one has come to know through clairvoyance, there is fundamentally nothing to sustain thought.

Then why should thought be there at all? The physical world can do nothing but falsify it. Those who wish to be pure materialists, who refuse to ascribe to thought any primal reality of its own, should really prefer to prohibit it. For if the natural world is the only real world, thought can only falsify it. It is only because materialists are illogical that they do not embrace the only theory of cognition that goes with monistic Materialism—the refrain-from-thinking, think-no-more theory. But to anyone who immerses himself with clairvoyant perception in the world of thought there comes this disquieting awareness of the isolation of thought, as though he were standing quite alone with it. And then only one thing remains for him; but it does remain. Something comes towards him, even though it be from a far spiritual distance, separated from him by two worlds; and it becomes apparent—so the clairvoyant soul says to itself—that in this third world lies the true origin, the fountain-head, of that which is in the life of thought. For clairvoyant souls in our time it could be a powerful experience to immerse themselves, alone with their thinking, in the time when thought underwent its deepening; to shut out everything else, including knowledge of the Mystery of Golgotha, and to reflect how the thought-content on which we still nourish ourselves came forth in the Graeco-Roman world.

Then one should turn one's gaze to other worlds and feel rising over the Devachanic world a star that belongs to a higher spiritual world; the star from which rays out the power that makes itself felt in the thought world of Graeco-Roman antiquity. Then one feels oneself here on Earth, but carried away from the world of today and plunged into the Graeco-Roman world, with its influence spreading out over other regions at that time, before the Mystery of Golgotha. But as soon as one lets the spiritual world make its impression on one, there appears again, shining over Devachan, the star (I speak symbolically), or the spiritual Being of whom one says to oneself: Yes, the experience of the isolation of thought, and of the possibility of thought having undergone such a deepening at the beginning of our era—this is a consequence of the rays that shine out from this star in the higher spiritual world. And then comes a feeling which at first knows nothing of the historical tradition of the Mystery of Golgotha but can be expressed thus: Yes, you are there in the Graeco-Roman world of ideas, with all that Plato and others were able to give to the general education of mankind, with what they have imparted to the souls of men—you feel yourself living in the midst of that. And then you wait ... and truly not in vain, for as though deep in the background of spiritual life appears the star which sends forth its rays of power; and you can say that what you have experienced is a result of that power.

This experience can be gone through. And in going through it one has not relied on any kind of tradition, but has quite impartially sought the origin of what took place in the Graeco-Roman world. But one has also had the experience of being separated by three worlds from understanding the root-causes of that Graeco-Roman world.

And then, perhaps, one turns to the men of that time who tried in their own way to understand the change. Even the external scholarship of today has come to recognise that in this period of transition at the beginning of our era some religious-philosophic geniuses lived. And they can best be encountered by looking at Gnosticism. The Gnosis is known in the most varied ways. Externally, remarkably little is really known about it, but from the available documents one can still get an impression of its endless depth. We will speak of it only in so far as it bears on our present considerations.

Above all we can say that the Gnostics had a feeling for what I have just described; that for the causes of what happened in that past epoch one must look to worlds lying infinitely far away in the background. This awareness was passed on to others, and if we are not superficial we can, if we will, see it glimmering through what we may call the theology of Paul, and in many other manifestations also.

Now, anyone who steeps himself in the Gnosis of that period will have great difficulty in understanding it. Our souls are too much affected and infected by the fruits of the materialistic developments of the last few centuries. In tracing back the evolution of the world they are too readily inclined to think in terms of the Kant-Laplace theory of a cosmic nebula, of something quite material. And even those who seek for a more spiritual conception of the world—even they, when they look back to the beginning of time, think of this cosmic nebula or something similar. These modern people, even the most spiritual, feel very happy when they are spared the trouble of discerning the spiritual in the primal beginnings of cosmic evolution. They find it a great relief, these souls of today, when they can say to themselves: “This or that rarefied form of material substance was there to start with, and out of it everything spiritual developed side by side with everything physical.” And so we often find souls who are greatly comforted when they can apply the most materialistic methods of inquiry to the beginning of the cosmos and arrive at the most abstract conception of some kind of gaseous body.

That is why it is so difficult to enter into the thoughts of the Gnosis. For what the Gnosis places at the beginning of the world carries no suggestion of anything at all material. Anyone thoroughly attuned to modern education will perhaps be unable to restrain a slight smile if he is invited to think in the sense of the Gnosis that the world in which he finds himself, the world he explains so beautifully with his Darwinism, bears no relation to a true picture of how the world began! Indeed, he will hardly be able to help smiling when he is asked to think that the origin of the world resides in that cosmic Being who is beyond all concepts, not to be reached by any of the means that are applied nowadays to explaining the world. In the primal Divine Father—says the Gnosis—lies the ground of the world, and only in what proceeds from Him do we find something to which the soul can struggle through if it turns away from all material conceptions and searches a little for its own innermost depth. And this is Silence: the eternal Silence in which there is neither space nor time, but silence only.

It was to this duality of the primal Father and the Silence preceding time and space that the Gnostic looked up; and then, from the union of the primal Father with the Silence, as it were, he conceived other existences proceeding: one can equally well call them Worlds or Beings. And from them others, and again others, and again others—and so on through thirty stages. And only at the thirtieth stage did the Gnostic posit a condition prior to our present mentality—a condition so delightfully explained by Darwinism in terms of that mentality. Or, strictly speaking, at the thirty-first stage, for thirty of these existences, which can be called Worlds or Beings, precede our world. “Aeon” is the name generally given to these thirty Beings or Worlds that precede our own.

One can get a clear idea of what is meant by this Aeon-world only by saying to oneself: To the thirty-first stage there belongs not only what your senses perceive as the external world, but also the way in which your thinking as physical man tries to explain the sense world. It is easy enough to come to terms with a spiritual conception of the world if one says: Yes, the external world is certainly Maya, but with thinking we penetrate into a spiritual world—and if one hopes that this thinking really can reach the spiritual world. But according to the Gnostic this is not so; for him, this thinking belongs to the thirty-first Aeon, to the physical world. So not only sense perception, but human thinking, lies outside the thirty Aeons, who can be looked up to through the stages of spiritual evolution, and who reveal themselves in ever-mounting perfection.

One can easily imagine the smile that comes to a Monist, standing at the summit of his time, if he is asked to believe in thirty preceding worlds—thirty worlds with a content entirely different from anything his thinking can conceive. But that was the view of the Gnostics. And then they asked themselves: How is it with this world?

We will disregard for a while what we have ourselves said about the world in the sense of the early twentieth century. What I am now telling you must not be taken as offering a convincing world-picture. In the Anthroposophy of the twentieth century we have naturally to get beyond the Gnosis, but just now we want to sink ourselves in it.

Why is this surrounding world, including the human faculty of thinking about it, shut off from the thirty Aeons? We must look, said the Gnostic, to the lowest but still purely spiritual Aeon. And there we find the Divine Sophia, the Divine Wisdom. She had evolved in a spiritual way through the twenty-nine stages, and in the spiritual world she looked up to the highest Aeon through the ranks of spiritual Beings or Worlds. But one day, one cosmic day, it became evident, to her that if she was to maintain a free vision into the spiritual world of the Aeons, she had to separate something from herself. And she separated from herself that which existed in her as desire. And this desire, being no longer present in the Divine Sophia, the Divine Wisdom, now wanders through the realms of space and permeates everything that comes into being in the realms of space. Desire does not live only in sense perception, but also in human thinking, and in the longing that looks back to the spiritual world; but always as something cast out into the souls of men. As an image, but as an image of the Divine Sophia cast out from her, lives this desire, Achamod, thrown out into the world and permeating it.

If you look into yourself, without raising yourself into spiritual worlds, you look into the desire-filled world of Achamod. Because this world is filled with desire, it cannot disclose within itself that which is revealed by looking out into the world of the Aeons. Far, far away in the world of the Aeons—so thought the Gnosis—the pure spirituality of the Aeons engenders what the Gnostics called the Son of the Father-God, and also what they called the pure Holy Spirit. So we have here another generation, as it were, another evolutionary line, different from that which led to the Divine Sophia. As in the propagation of physical life the sexes are separate, so in the progression of the Aeons another stream took its origin from a very high level in the spiritual world: the stream of the Son and the Holy Spirit stemming from the Father. So in the world of Aeons there was one stream leading to the Divine Sophia and another to the Son and the Holy Spirit. If one rises through the Aeons, one comes eventually to an Aeon from whom there arose on the one hand the succession leading to the Divine Sophia, and on the other the succession leading to the Son and the Holy Spirit. And then we ascend to the Father-God and the Divine Silence.

Because the human soul is shut off with Achamod in the material world, it has in the sense of the Gnosis a longing for the spiritual world, and above all for the Divine Sophia, from whom it is separated through being filled with Achamod. This feeling of being separated from the Divine, of not being within the Divine—this feeling is actually experienced, according to the Gnostic, as the material world. And the Gnostic sees originating from the divine-spiritual world, but bound up with Achamod, what one might call (to borrow a Greek word) the Demiurgos, the cosmic Architect.

This Demiurgos is the real arch-creator and sustainer of that which is permeated with Achamod and the material. The souls of men are woven into his world. But they are imbued also with longing for the Divine Sophia. As though in the far distance of the Aeon-world appear the Son and the Holy Spirit in their pure divine spirituality, but they appear only to someone who has—in the sense of the Gnosis—raised himself above everything in which is embodied Achamod, the desire that pervades space.

Why is there this longing in the souls that have been drawn into the world of Achamod? Why, after their separation from the divine-spiritual world, do they feel a longing for it? The Gnostics also asked themselves these questions, and they said: Achamod was cast out from the Divine Wisdom, the Divine Sophia, but before Achamod had completely become this material world, where men now live, there came to her something like a brief raying-out of light from the Son of God; and then immediately the light vanished again. For the Gnostic this was an important concept: that Achamod—the same Achamod that lives in the souls of men—had been granted in the primal remote past a glimpse of Divine light, which had then immediately disappeared. But the memory of it lives on today in human souls, however deeply enmeshed in the material world the soul may be. “I live in the world of Achamod, the material world”, such a soul might have said. “I am surrounded with a sheath drawn from the material world, but when I sink into my inner being, a memory comes to life within me. The element that holds me bound to the material world longs after the Divine Sophia, the Divine Wisdom; for the being of Achamod, which lives in me, was once illuminated by a. ray from the Son of God, who dwells in the world of the Aeons.”

We should try to picture clearly to ourselves such a soul as this, a disciple of the Gnosis. There were such souls: they are not a hypothetical invention. Anyone who studies history with understanding will come to realise through the external documents that many souls of this kind lived in that period.

. We need to see clearly why there are such strong objections nowadays to what I have been saying. What will a thoroughly level-headed man of today have to say about the Gnosis? We have already had to listen to the view that the theology of Paul gives an impression of rabbinical subtleties, far too intricate for a sensible Monist to concern himself with—a Monist who looks out proudly over the world and draws it all together with the simple concept of evolution or with the still simpler concept of energy, and says: “Now at last we have grown up; we have acquired the ideas which give us a picture of the world based on energy, and we look back at these children, these poor dear children, who centuries ago built up the Gnosis out of childishness—they imagined all sorts of spirits, thirty Aeons! That is what the human soul does in its time of nursery play. The grown-up soul of today, with its far-reaching Monism, has left such fancies far behind. We must look back indulgently at these Gnostic infantilisms—they are really charming!”

Such is the prevailing mood today, and it is not easily teachable. One might say to it: Yes, if a Gnostic, with his soul born out of the Gnosis, were to stand before you, he might also take the liberty of expressing his outlook, somewhat like this: “I understand very well how you have become so proud and arrogant, with your ideas of evolution and energy, but this is because your thinking has become so crude and simple and primitive that you are satisfied with your nebulae and your entirely abstract concepts. You say the words ‘evolution’ and ‘energy’ and think you have got something, but you are blind to the finer spiritual life that seeks its way up into that which rises through thirty stages above anything you have.”

But for us the antithesis mentioned at the beginning of this lecture becomes all the sharper. We see on the one hand our own time, with its quite crude and primitive concepts, and on the other the Gnosis. And we have seen how the Gnosis employs endlessly complicated concepts—thirty Aeons—in order to find in the course of evolution the Son of God and the Holy Spirit, and to find in the soul the longing for the Divine Sophia and the Holy Spirit.

Then we ask ourselves: Is it not from the deepening of thought in the Graeco-Roman world that we have gained what we have carried so splendidly far in our thoughts about energy and evolution? And in this Gnosis, with its complicated ideas, so unsympathetic to the present day, are we not looking at something quite strange? Are not these colossal contrasts? Indeed they are. And the contradiction, lying like a weight on the soul, becomes even greater if we reflect on what was said about clairvoyant souls: that they can transpose themselves into the thought-world of the Greeks and Romans, and then see the world with the star, of which we have spoken. And mingled everywhere with this deepening of Greek thought we find that other deepening which the Gnosis exemplifies. Yet when we look at this with the aid of what Anthroposophy should give us today, and are yet powerless to understand what the star should signify, separated as we are from it by three worlds—and if we ask the Gnostics: Have you understood what happened at that time in the historical evolution of humanity? ... then, standing on the ground of Anthroposophy, we cannot take the answer from the Gnostics, for it could never satisfy us; it would throw no light on what is shown to the clairvoyant soul.

It is not my wish that you should treat our considerations today as offering an explanation of anything. The more you feel that what I have told you is not an explanation; the more you feel that I have put before you contradiction after contradiction and have shown you only one occult experience, the perception of the star, the better will you have understood me for today. I would wish you to see clearly that at the beginning of our era there appeared in the world something which influenced human understanding and was yet far, far from being understood; I would like you to feel that the period at the beginning of our era was a great riddle. I want you to feel that in human evolution there happened something which seemed at first like a deepening of thought, or a discovery of thought; and that the root causes of this are a profound enigma. You must seek in hidden worlds for that which appeared in the Maya of the physical sense-world as a deepening of Graeco-Roman thought. And it is not an explanation of what we have heard, but the setting out of a riddle, that I wished to give you today. We will continue tomorrow.

Yesterday we indicated that it was now necessary to answer the question: What really happened to that Being whom we designate as Christ Jesus from the Baptism by John in Jordan to the Mystery of Golgotha? To answer this question as far as possible, we must recall briefly what we know from former lectures concerning the life of Jesus of Nazareth, who in his thirtieth year became the bearer of the Christ. The essential points are given in my recently published book, The Spiritual Guidance of Mankind.

We know that in Palestine, at the time which concerns us, not one but two Jesus-children were born, one of them from the Solomon line of the House of David. This is the Jesus child of whom the Matthew Gospel speaks. The peculiar contradiction between the beginnings of the Matthew and the Luke Gospels derives from the fact that the writer of the Matthew Gospel was concerned with one of the Jesus-children, the one born from the Solomon line. Then, at almost but not quite the same time, another Jesus-child was born, from the Nathan line of the House of David.

The important thing is to understand clearly what kind of beings these two children were. Occult investigation shows that the individuality who was in the Solomon Jesus-child was none other than Zarathustra. After Zarathustra's most important mission, of which we have spoken in connection with the ancient Persian civilisation, he had been incarnated again and again; lastly during the Babylonian-Chaldaic civilisation, and now as the Solomon Jesus-child. This Zarathustra individuality, with all the great and powerful inner forces which in the nature of things he had brought over from earlier incarnations, had to incarnate in a body descended from the Solomon side of the House of David; a body adapted for working up and further developing the great faculties of Zarathustra, in the way that human faculties, when they are already at a very high level, can be brought further on, in so far as they belong to the being who is going from incarnation to incarnation. We are concerned therefore with a human body which did not wait until later years to work on these faculties, but could do so in a youthful, child-like and yet powerful organism. Hence we see the Zarathustra-individuality growing up in such a way that the faculties of the child developed comparatively early. The child soon showed an extent of knowledge which would normally have been impossible at his age.

One fact, however, we must keep firmly in mind: the Solomon Jesus-child, although the incarnation of so lofty an individuality, was only a highly developed man. Hence he was encumbered—as even the most highly developed man must be—with certain liabilities to error and moral difficulties, though not exactly vices or sins. Then we know that in his twelfth year the individuality of Zarathustra, by an occult process known to everyone who has made himself conversant with such facts, forsook the body of the Solomon Jesus-child and went over into the body of the Nathan Jesus-child. Now the body of this Nathan Jesus-child—or, better, his three-fold bodily organisation physical body, etheric body, astral body—was formed in a quite special manner. In fact, this body was such that the child showed capacities exactly contrary to those of the Solomon Jesus-child. Whereas the latter was remarkable because of his great gifts in relation to things one can learn externally, it might almost be said that in this respect the Nathan Jesus-child was untalented. You will understand that saying this implies not the slightest deprecation. The Nathan Jesus-child was not in a position to familiarise himself with the products of human culture on earth. By contrast, the remarkable fact is that he could speak as soon as he was born. A faculty which belongs more to the physical body was thus present in him from his birth. But—according to a good tradition which can be occultly confirmed—the language he spoke could be understood by his Mother only. The child's most strongly marked characteristics were qualities of the heart. He had an immense capacity for love and a disposition capable of immense self-sacrifice. And the remarkable thing is that from the first days of his life his mere presence, or his touch, had beneficent effects—magnetic effects, one might perhaps call them nowadays. Thus all the qualities of heart were manifest in this child, enhanced to such a degree that they could have a beneficent magnetic influence on his environment.

We know also that active in the astral body of this child were the forces which had once been acquired by that Bodhisattva who became Gautama Buddha. We know indeed—and in this respect the oriental tradition is absolutely correct, for it can be confirmed by occult science—that the Bodhisattva, who on becoming Buddha five centuries before our era no longer needed to incarnate further on earth, worked from the spiritual world upon all those who devoted themselves to his teachings. It is characteristic of such an individuality, who rises to heights from which he need no longer incarnate in a body of flesh, that he can then take part in the affairs and destiny of our earth existence from out of the spiritual worlds. This can happen in the most manifold ways. In fact, the Bodhisattva who went through his last incarnation on the earth as Gautama Buddha has taken an essential part in the further evolution of humanity. Our human spiritual world stands continually in connection with all the rest of the spiritual world. The human being not only eats and drinks and so takes into himself the substance of the physical earth; he continually receives soul-spiritual nourishment from the spiritual world. In the most varied ways forces continually flow into physical earthly-existence from out of the spiritual world. Such an in-flow of the forces which Buddha had gained for himself came into the wider stream of humanity through the fact that the Buddha forces permeated the astral body of the Nathan Jesus-child. We know, too, from earlier lectures that the words we still have today as a Christmas message—‘The Divine reveals itself from the heights, and on earth peace will spread in the hearts of men of good will!’—originate in essence from the influence which flowed down into human evolution through the immersion of the Buddha powers in the astral body of the Nathan Jesus-child.

Thus we see the Buddha forces working further in the stream of earth-existence which took its start from the Events of Palestine. And it is interesting that precisely the researches made by western occultism in quite recent years have led to the recognition of a very important connection between European civilisation and the Buddha forces. For a long time these Buddha forces have been working from the spiritual worlds, particularly upon everything in Western civilisation which is unthinkable without the specific influence of Christianity. All those philosophical streams which have developed during recent centuries up to the nineteenth century, in so far as they are Western spiritual currents, are permeated by the Christ-Impulse, but the Buddha has always been working into them from out of the spiritual worlds. Hence the most important thing that European humanity can receive from Buddha today does not depend on the handing down of the teaching that Buddha gave to men about 500 years before the Christian era, but on what he has become since that time. For he has not remained at a standstill; he has progressed; and it is through this progress, as a spiritual being in the spiritual worlds, that he has in the highest sense been able to take part in the further evolution of Western civilisation. The outcome of our own occult investigation harmonises in a wonderful way with much that had been known previously, before this important influence could be investigated again. For we know that the same individuality who appeared as Gautama Buddha in the East had previously worked in the West, and that certain legends and traditions connected with the name of Buddha or Wotan have to do with this same individuality, just as Buddhism has with Gautama Buddha in the East; hence the same field of action in human evolution which had been prepared earlier by the same individuality has again been occupied in a certain sense. Thus are interlaced the ways taken by the spiritual currents within the evolution of humanity.

Today the most important thing for us is to establish that in the astral body of the Jesus-child described by Luke we have the Buddha forces at work. And when this Nathan Jesus-child was twelve years old, the Zarathustra individuality passed over into his three-fold being.

Why is it, then, that this Jesus-child had the remarkable qualities we have just characterised? It was because he was not a human individuality like every other, but in a certain respect quite different, and in order to understand him we must go back to the ancient Lemurian time in which, strictly speaking, the Earth-evolution of man took its start. We must clearly understand that everything before the Lemurian time was really only a repetition of the Saturn, Sun, and Moon periods. Only in the Lemurian time was the first germ-condition laid down in man as a potentiality, so that during the Earth-evolution he could receive the fourth member of his being, the Ego. We can say the extension of mankind over the Earth—a subject dealt with more precisely in the Outline of Occult Science—is to be traced to certain human ancestors in the Lemurian period, the period with which our present Earth took its start.

It is only after a certain point of time in this Lemurian period that we can speak correctly, in a modern sense, of the human race. Before this, those Egos who have since continued to incarnate were not present in men on Earth. They were not yet separate from the substance of that Hierarchy which had first brought the human Ego into being: the Hierarchy of the Spirits of Form. We can now picture to ourselves—occult research shows this—that part of the substance of the Spirits of Form entered into the incarnations of men for the building up of the human Ego. But when in due time man was given over to his physical incarnations on the Earth, something was held back. A certain Ego substance was not brought into the stream of physical incarnations. If we were to represent the stream of physical human incarnations, beginning with him whom the Bible calls ‘Adam’, the progenitor of the human race, we should have to draw a genealogical tree with wide-spreading branches. Instead, let us simply imagine that the substance poured down from the Spirits of Form now flows onward, but that something was held back: an Ego that was now protected from entering into physical incarnations. Instead, this Ego preserved the form, the substantiality, which man had had before proceeding to his first earthly incarnation. This Ego lived on collaterally with the rest of humanity, and at the time of which we are now speaking, when the Event of Palestine was to take place, it was still in the same condition, if we wish to speak according to the Bible, as was the Ego of Adam before his first embodiment in flesh.

In examining what occult science knows about this Ego—which naturally for modern man is something extremely foolish—we see that this Ego, which was, as it were, held back ‘in reserve’, was given into the care of the Holy Mysteries through Atlantean and post-Atlantean times. It was preserved in an important Mystery centre, as in a tabernacle, and because of this it had quite special characteristics; it was untouched by everything that a human Ego could have learnt on Earth. It was therefore untouched by any Luciferic and Ahrimanic influences; it was indeed something we can think of, in contrast to other human Egos, as an empty sphere, still completely virginal with regard to all earth experiences—a nothing, a negative, in this respect. Hence it seemed as though the Nathan-child, described in the Luke Gospel, really had no Ego; as though he consisted only of physical, etheric and astral body. And it is quite adequate if at first we say that an Ego, developed as Egos had developed in Atlantean and post-Atlantean times, was not there at all in the Luke Jesus-child.

We speak in the true sense of the words when we say that in the Matthew Jesus-child we have to do with a completely human being; whereas in the Nathan Jesus-child of the Luke Gospel we have to do with a physical, an etheric and an astral body which are interrelated in the harmonious unity that belonged to man when he emerged from the Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions. Hence this Jesus-child, as the Akashic Record tells us, was untalented for all that human culture had developed. He could not receive it because he had never been among it. External abilities and adaptations to existence are the outcome of certain experiences in earlier incarnations. Anyone who had never shared in such experiences would show himself without talent for all that men have accomplished during the earth-evolution. If the Nathan Jesus-child had been born in our time, he would have been totally ungifted for learning to write, since in Adamic times writing was unknown. By contrast, the Luke Jesus-child revealed in a high degree the qualities he had brought with him—qualities that had not fallen into decadence through the Luciferic influence. Even more interesting is the remarkable language he spoke.

Here we must bring to mind something I mentioned in The Spiritual Guidance of Mankind: that the languages which are now spread over the earth took their rise comparatively late in evolution: they were preceded by what can truly be called a primal human language. It is the disuniting spirits of the Luciferic and Ahrimanic world who have made many languages out of the primal language. The primal language is lost, and can be spoken today by nobody with an Ego which in the course of earth-evolution has passed from incarnation to incarnation. This Jesus-child, who had not gone through human incarnations, acquired from the starting-point of human evolution the faculty of speaking, not this or that language, but a language of which we can rightly say that it was not comprehensible to those around him. But, because of the inner qualities of heart that lived in it, it was understood by his Mother's heart. This points to a phenomenon of immense significance in the case of the Luke Jesus-child.

We have seen that when this Luke Jesus-child was born, he was provided with everything that had not been influenced by the Lucifer-Ahrimanic forces. He did not possess an Ego that had been through a series of incarnations; therefore nothing had to be discarded when, in his twelfth year, the individuality of Zarathustra passed over from the Solomon Jesus-child into the Nathan Jesus-child. I have already said that the human element which had remained behind, and up to this time had developed in the Mysteries by the side of the rest of humanity, was born for the first time in the Palestine period as the Nathan Jesus-child. There was a transference from a Mystery centre in Western Asia, where this human kernel had been preserved, into the body of the Nathan Jesus-child. This child grew on, and in his twelfth year the individuality of Zarathustra passed into him. We know also that this passing over is intimated in the scene of the twelve-year-old Jesus in the Temple. It was quite natural that the parents of the Nathan Jesus-child, who were accustomed to regard him in the light we have described, should find a remarkable change when they discovered him in the Temple after he had been lost. For that was the moment when Zarathustra passed over into this twelve-year-old child. From the twelfth to the thirtieth year, therefore, we have to do with the individuality of Zarathustra in the Luke Jesus-child.

Now in the Luke Gospel we have a remarkable expression which indicates something that can be made clear only by occult investigation. You know that in the Luke Gospel, after the description of the scene with the twelve-year-old Jesus in the Temple, there is a passage: ‘And Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and man’. (Luke II:52). In truth this passage stands as follows when we restore the text of the Gospels from the Akashic record: The twelve-year-old child increased in everything wherein an astral body can increase, i.e., in wisdom; in everything wherein an etheric body can increase, i.e. in all the qualities of kindliness, goodness, etc; and in everything wherein a physical body can increase, i.e., in all that pours itself into external beauty of form. In this passage, therefore, a special indication is given that the Jesus-child, not having gone from incarnation to incarnation, had up to his twelfth year remained untouched, and could not be touched in his individuality, by the Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces. The Luke Gospel intimates this again by tracing the sequence of generations back through Adam to God, thus indicating that the substance in question was uninfluenced by all that had taken place in human evolution.

So this Jesus-child lived on, increasing in all that was possible for a three-fold organism not touched by the contamination which has affected the three-fold bodies of other men. And this enabled the individuality of Zarathustra, from the twelfth to the thirtieth year of life, to pour into this three-fold human being all that could come from the heights to which he himself had previously attained. Hence we form a correct idea of Jesus of Nazareth, up to the thirtieth year of his life, when we think of him as a lofty human individuality, for whose coming into existence the greatest possible preparations had been made.

But we must now be clear about one thing if we want to understand how the fruits of a development we go through in our bodies are of benefit to the individuality. Our bodies enable our individuality to absorb the fruits of our life for its future evolution. When in death we forsake our bodies, we do not usually leave in them what we have achieved and gained for ourselves as individuals. Later on we shall see under what special conditions something may remain in the bodies; but it is not the rule that the individuality should leave behind in his bodies whatever he has won for himself. When Zarathustra forsook the threefold bodily being of Jesus of Nazareth in the thirtieth year, he left behind the three bodies, physical, etheric, and astral. But all that he had been able to gain through these instruments went into the individuality of Zarathustra and lived on further with him, to his benefit. Something however, was gained by the three-fold bodily organism of Jesus of Nazareth. His human nature, still free, as it always had been, from Luciferic and Ahrimanic influences, was conjoined for a period with the individuality who had unequalled insight into the spirituality of the cosmos.

Think what this Zarathustra had experienced! While he was founding the ancient Persian civilisation and looking up to the great Sun Spirit, he was even then gazing out into the cosmic realms of the spiritual. Through successive incarnations his development went on. When the innermost part of human nature, together with the most intensive powers of sympathy and love, had become manifest through the unsullied human substance which had been preserved until the birth of the Nathan Jesus, and when the astral body had permeated itself with the forces of Gautama Buddha, there was present in this child what we may call the most intimate inwardness of man. And then into this bodily nature there entered the individuality who above all others had seen most clearly and deeply into the spirituality of the Macrocosm. By this means the bodily instrument, the entire organism, of the Nathan Jesus was so transformed that it could be the vehicle capable of receiving into itself the Christ-extract of the Macrocosm. If this bodily nature had not been permeated by the Zarathustra-individuality up to the thirtieth year, the eyes would not have been able to endure the substance of the Christ from the thirtieth year up to the Mystery of Golgotha; the hands would not have been capable of being permeated with the substance of the Christ in the thirtieth year. To be able to receive the Christ, this bodily nature had to be prepared, expanded, through the individuality of Zarathustra. Thus in Jesus of Nazareth, as he was at the moment when Zarathustra took leave of him and the Christ-Individuality entered into him, we have to do neither with an adept, nor with anything like a higher human being. For an adept is an adept because he has a highly developed individuality, and it was just this that had passed out of the threefold bodily nature of Jesus of Nazareth. We have simply the bodily nature so prepared through the indwelling of Zarathustra that it could take into itself the Christ-Individuality. But now, through the union of the Christ-Individuality with this bodily nature, by necessity the following consequence came about.

During these three years, from the Baptism by John in Jordan onwards to the Mystery of Golgotha, the development of the physical body, the etheric body, and the astral body was quite different from the bodily development of other human beings. Since the Nathan Jesus had received no influence from the Luciferic and Ahrimanic powers, the possibility was given that, from the Baptism in Jordan onwards—now that there was in Jesus of Nazareth no human Ego, but solely the Christ Individuality—everything which is normally at work in a human organism was not developed.

We said yesterday that the human Phantom, the primal form which draws into itself the material elements that fill out the physical body and are laid aside at death, had degenerated in the course of time up to the Mystery of Golgotha. At the beginning of human evolution it was intended that the Phantom should remain untouched by the material elements that man takes for his nutrition from the animal, plant, and mineral kingdoms. But it did not remain untouched. For the Luciferic influence brought about a close connection between the Phantom and the forces which man absorbs through his earthly evolution; a connection particularly with the ashy constituents. The result was that the Phantom, while continuing to accompany man during his further evolution, was strongly drawn to these ashy constituents, and instead of adhering to the etheric body, it attached itself to these products of disintegration. But where the Luciferic influences had been kept away, as they were from the Nathan Jesus, no force of attraction arose between the Phantom and the material elements that had been taken into the bodily organism. Throughout the three years from the Baptism up to the Mystery of Golgotha, the Phantom remained untouched by these elements.

In occult terms we can say: The human Phantom, according to its intended development through the Saturn, Sun, and Moon periods, should not have been attracted to the ashy constituents but only to the dissolving salt constituents, so that it would have taken the path of volatilisation in so far as the salt constituents dissolved. In an occult sense one can say that it would have dissolved and passed over, not into the earth but into the volatile constituents. The remarkable fact is that with the Baptism in Jordan and the entry of the Christ Individuality into the body of the Nathan Jesus, all connection of the Phantom with the ashy constituents was wiped out; only the connection with the salt constituents remained.

This is alluded to in the passage where Christ Jesus wishes to explain to his first-chosen disciples: ‘Through the way in which you feel yourselves united with the Christ Being, a certain possibility for the future evolution of humanity will come about. It will be possible for the one body risen from the grave—the spiritual body—to pass over into men’. That is what Christ wished to say when he used the phrase, ‘You are the salt of the earth’. All these words we find in the Gospels, reminding us of the terminology and craft language of the later alchemists, the later occultism, have the deepest imaginable significance. And in fact this significance was well known to the mediaeval and later alchemists—not to the charlatans mentioned in the history books—and not one of them spoke of these connections without feeling in his heart a connection with Christ.

Thus it followed that when Christ Jesus was crucified, when his body was nailed to the Cross—you will notice that here I use the exact words of the Gospel, for they are con-firmed by true occult research—when this body of Jesus of Nazareth was fastened to the Cross, the Phantom was perfectly intact; it existed in a spiritual bodily form, visible only to super-sensible sight, and was much more loosely connected with the body's material content of earth-elements than has ever happened with any other human being. In every other human being a connection of the Phantom with these elements has occurred, and it is this that holds them together. In the case of Christ Jesus it was quite different. The ordinary law of inertia sees to it that certain material portions of a human body hold together after death in the form man has given them, until after some time they crumble away, so that hardly anything of them is visible. So it was with the material portions of the body of Christ Jesus. When the body was taken down from the Cross, the parts were still coherent, but they had no connection with the Phantom; the Phantom was completely free of them. When the body became permeated with certain substances, which in this case worked quite differently from the way in which they affect any other body that is embalmed, it came to pass that after the burial the material parts quickly volatilised and passed over into the elements. Hence the disciples who looked into the grave found the linen cloths in which the body had been wrapped, but the Phantom, on which the evolution of the Ego depends, had risen from the grave. It is not surprising that Mary of Magdala, who had known only the earlier Phantom when it was permeated by earthly elements, did not recognise the same form in the Phantom, now freed from terrestrial gravity, when she saw it clairvoyantly. It seemed to her different.

Moreover we must clearly understand that it was only through the power of the companionship of the disciples with the Christ that all the disciples, and all those persons of whom the same is told, could see the Risen One, for He appeared to them in the spiritual body, the body of which Paul says that it increases as a grain of seed and passes over into all people. Paul himself is convinced that it was not a body permeated by the earthly elements which had appeared to the other apostles, but that the same which had appeared to him had also appeared to them, as he says in the following passage:

For I have delivered unto you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, that He was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures; and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brethren at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. Then He appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me. (I Corinthians XV:3–8.)

But what was it that convinced Paul? In a certain sense Paul was an Initiate before the Event of Damascus. His Initiation had combined the ancient Hebrew principle and the Greek principle. He knew that an Initiate became, in his etheric body, independent of the physical body, and could appear in the purest form of his etheric body to those who were capable of seeing it. If Paul had had the vision of a pure etheric body, independent of a physical body, he would have spoken differently. He would have said that he had seen someone who had been initiated and would be living on further in the course of earth-evolution, independently of the physical body. He would not have found this particularly surprising. What Paul experienced on the road to Damascus could not have been that. He had experienced something which he knew could be experienced only when the Scriptures were fulfilled; when a perfect human Phantom, a human body risen from the grave in a super-sensible form, would appear in the spiritual atmosphere of the earth. And that is what he saw! That is what appeared to him on the road to Damascus and left him with the conviction: ‘He was there—He is risen! For what is there could come only from Him: it is the Phantom which can be seen by all human individualities who seek to relate themselves to the Christ.’ This is what convinced him that Christ was already there; that he would not come first in the future, but was actually present there in a physical body, and that this physical body had rescued the primal form of the human physical body for the salvation of all men.

That this deed could be accomplished only through the greatest unfolding of divine love, and in what sense it was an act of love, and then in what sense the word ‘salvation’ is to be understood in the further evolution of humanity—this will be our subject tomorrow.

In the various recent reflections that have been presented here, I have tried less to convey individual concepts and ideas to you than to characterize a certain way of relating to the world. For it must be borne in mind over and over again that the most important thing in relation to the acquisitions to be made through spiritual science is not the conceptual, the imaginative, but the whole soul disposition, the whole soul mood, which the human being of the future will be able to acquire for our development on earth through spiritual science.

Today, almost all those who engage with spiritual science still have some remnants of old attitudes and old soul moods. And this is especially the case to an even greater extent because a certain soul mood in the modern soul has only been evoked for a relatively short time, for three, four to five centuries, in the search for the unraveling of natural phenomena. This soul mood, which I would like to describe as emanating from the so-called scientific world view, is regarded in the broadest circles today as the only valid one. We know that the permeation of scientific concepts and ideas as the basis of a world view has only taken hold among a small part of the world's population today; after all, modern school education basically ensures that it is not so much science as this scientific attitude that is spreading rapidly. And since this scientific frame of mind has only taken hold for a short time, it is naturally difficult for the spiritual-scientific world-view to become established in that which has only taken hold for a short time and which must first develop in the majority of people as a transitional stage in evolution. This scientific world-view mood necessarily leads gradually to a kind of materialism, because it cannot be otherwise than one-sided. It has been acquired in a one-sided way through what may be called man's head experiences, and it also strives to exclude from the mentioned world-view conceptions everything that does not correspond to this head mood of man, that is not thought up, invented, won through experiment or observation with the help of thinking and inventing. One could say that this world-view sentiment has also really retained its one-sidedness with regard to the view of the human being, and in view of the many impulses that have entered the human soul, we can feel how difficult it will be to unfold through spiritual science the more comprehensive soul mood of the world, which emanates from the whole human being again.

If someone today who is thoroughly steeped in the scientific world view gets hold of a book such as, for example, “The Secret Science in the Outline”, he naturally regards the content of this book as a kind of crazy nonsense, because he cannot derive any special meaning from this book due to his one-sided brain and head mood. Now, something of a radical contrast between the spiritual-scientific world-view mood and the natural-scientific world-view mood is evident from one phenomenon in particular – from many phenomena, of course, but most strikingly from one phenomenon. I would like to emphasize this point first.

When we study the human being from a spiritual scientific perspective, we see that the further we go back into the distant past, as we say, into the lunar evolution of our planetary existence, the more we realize that what appears to be so significant for the human being's development on earth was not actually present in the old lunar evolution. In this ancient lunar development, what was present in today's human being was essentially – I say essentially – that which is more or less connected with the present-day development of the human brain. And what the human being has besides his head, besides what mainly belongs to the skull, to the head, his remaining physicality, that is essentially an earthly product, a product of earthly organization.

Essentially, I say again. One could also say: if one traces man back to the ancient development of the moon, then one gradually sees, the further one goes back, his outer limbs, through which he is an earthly human being today, shrink, and what remains is his head, which has of course been transformed by the development of the earth, but which essentially remains when one goes back to the development of the moon. The other has become inorganic, attached. I once explained this in more detail in the lectures on 'Occult Physiology', which I hope will be published soon, in the Prague cycle that I gave in 1911. So, essentially, we come to the conclusion that the human being has emerged from what is now compressed and concentrated in his skull organization; the other has become attached. We must therefore say that, schematically drawn, we would have man in his lunar development like this, and in his earthly development we would have him like this, with the rest of the organization attached to it.

Take what I have just said and compare it with what the one-sided natural scientific world view has achieved to date. In a one-sided way - of course there is something justified at the basis of all these things - it assumes that man has gradually developed from the lower animal stages to his present perfection. What do we see in the lower animal kingdom? We see in them precisely that which has been added to the development of the brain and head in the course of human evolution; and we see the atrophy in the animals of precisely that which is contained in the human head. In animals we see the limbs, the appendages, particularly developed, and what had already developed particularly in the head in man during the ancient lunar evolution, and what then concentrated, we see in animals still shrivelled up and stunted. But only this is seen by the scientific world view. We can say that the scientific world view actually puts the cart before the horse, because it takes what has only been added in humans as its starting point, and what was present in humans before they even had organs like those that present-day animals have, as something that is supposed to have developed from these forms themselves.

From a logical point of view, this means nothing less than concluding: First you look at a child and then at the father and find that the father is taller than the child. Since you now assume, as a result of a logical conclusion, that the larger, developing thing could only have emerged from the smaller, the father would have to have developed from the child, and not the other way around. That is how one actually concludes. The one-sidedness of the modern scientific way of thinking will one day seem as grotesque as the newer awareness of humanity. It will be known that the one-sidedly conceived Darwinian theory is logically nothing more than the assertion that the child has born its father.

Now you can imagine the efforts that will be necessary before humanity relearns about such things, as they have now been hinted at, and what is needed to truly relearn. They have happily managed to establish a world view that turns the world upside down, and now humanity will be confronted with the necessity of turning the world right side up again. But it has taken hardly three to four centuries to get used to the idea that the “upside down” position is the right one.

It is truly one of our tasks not just to acquire theoretical ideas about this or that in the world, but to acquire feelings and perceptions for the tasks that lie before us within the spiritual-scientific movement. We must be clear about how much what must follow for us from the spiritual-scientific view of the world must really differ from what surrounds us everywhere outside today. Otherwise we shall fall again and again into the error of not noticing the radical differences and of wanting to make compromises thoughtlessly, whereas we must be aware that we cannot but develop something from the earlier world-views by grafting it on, but must develop out of a new original cell of world-view life that which can more and more come to our mind as the right thing out of spiritual science. Only with this consciousness will we succeed in putting our soul into our task, and we must get used to the fact that many questions that arise outside the circle of spiritual science can only be tackled, as I showed with reference to a question yesterday, if we open ourselves to what spiritual science can trigger in our soul.

Let us consider something else that may be close to us in relation to the place where we are now standing, the place where we have built our structure. I have emphasized it often in the past, how art, science and religion are three branches of human spiritual life that spring from one root. If we go back, as I have often said, to the time of the primeval mysteries, we do not find the practices of the primeval mysteries in such a way that we could say they were art or religion or science, but they are all that together. In the primeval mysteries, science, religion and art are one unit, organically connected with each other.

What people today try to visualize with the impotent concepts and ideas I spoke of yesterday, man saw in living representation, in living contemplation in the primeval mysteries. He perceived what he can only think today. We will not approach a work of art in the future as we look at a work of art today. In the future, we will not approach the work of art by looking at it and then believing that we understand it only with our thoughts, but we will understand it by directly looking at it and experiencing it in our soul. Thus, by directly experiencing what he was looking at, the person who was initiated into the mysteries understood what he was meant to consciously grasp. What he was to grasp so consciously, what he was to understand by looking and to look at by understanding, was at the same time something beautiful, appearing in outer forms and colors, speaking in sounds and words: it was art at the same time. They were one, science and art.

Today only art, which has separated itself from what science is supposed to give us, gives us an idea of how one can be united with the object inwardly at the same time as being united with it outwardly in direct contact; and only those who want to introduce the barbarism of symbolism, of symbolizing, into art sin against this direct experiencing understanding of the work of art. For the moment one begins to interpret a work of art, one leaves behind that which one might call the experiential understanding of the work of art. It is, in fact, a real barbarism, let us say, to proceed in this way with “Hamlet”, so that the individual persons are interpreted as the principles of the theosophical view or the like. I would not like to live to see the individual forms of our structure interpreted symbolically in this way, because it is the direct, understanding experience that is at stake here!

Thus, in the primeval mysteries, the scientific experience of the world was at the same time the artistic experience of the world, and at the same time this scientific and artistic experience of the world was the religious feeling of the world. For what was experienced in this way in direct living contemplation, in experiencing understanding and in understanding experience, was at the same time that which could be venerated, to which one could lift one's whole soul with religious fervor. Religion, art and science were one; and it was because of human weakness through original sin that there had to be a separation into science, art and religion. What was originally one had to split, so that a religious current, an artistic current and a scientific current arose. What originally took hold of the whole human soul as an organism, woven from scientific, religious and artistic content, had to be distributed among the individual powers of the soul. For the intellect, for thinking, science was given to man, so that when he experiences the world in thought through science, his will and feeling can sleep, can rest.

Man became weak. One-sidedly, in thinking, he sought to experience the world scientifically, and again one-sidedly he sought to experience it artistically so that the other powers could sleep. Again one-sidedly, he sought to experience the world religiously for the same reason. Man would not be able to shape in such perfection that which he can work out intellectually, as is happening today, if a one-sided scientific trend had not developed; he would not have been able to achieve what has been accomplished artistically if art had not separated itself; and religious fervor would not have reached the heights it was destined to reach if it had not separated itself from the other powers of the soul that are devoted to science and art.

But with regard to this separation, we have indeed reached a crisis, and this crisis is clearly expressed; it is expressed very, very clearly. In what? I would say that especially in the last few centuries, humanity has had to experience more and more how this crisis expresses itself. Science, art and religion have become so divorced that they no longer understand each other, that they can no longer have any relationship with each other. Slowly we see how the “diplomatic relations” between religion, science and art are broken off. We see how such relationships still existed, say, in the heyday of the Italian Renaissance, where an intimate bond was woven between religion and art in the creations of Raphael, Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci. But the more we delve into more recent times, the more we find that a mutual lack of understanding has gradually developed between science, art and religion. We see – and unfortunately have to admit – how, in many cases in recent centuries, religion has even become hostile to art; we see how it has thrown out art, how there are religious movements that seek to achieve the height of religious feeling by throwing out sculptures and making churches as sober and artless as possible. We also see how another religious current has come to have sculptures, but mostly those that are no longer works of art, because what we still find in churches in the form of sculptures from past centuries is not intended to awaken the sense of art, the aesthetic sense, but to thoroughly eradicate it. And on the other hand, we see how art has increasingly lost sight of its connection with the conception of the divine-spiritual being, how everything has passed over into naturalism, how more and more people only want to depict what has a model in external nature.

Of course, art must then break off its, if I may say so, “diplomatic relations” with religion if it only wants to be naturalistic art, because that which religion must venerate cannot have a model in external nature. That is quite obvious. And how little science has maintained its relations can be seen from the slow approach of this breaking off of relations. Yes, we can see that it is approaching slowly.

We have an excellent artist in the 16th century who was also active as an anatomist and technician in the most diverse fields: Leonardo da Vinci. Anyone who studies his scientific works can still feel everywhere how these scientific works are imbued with artistic meaning. But one can see how this sense has increasingly evaporated in more recent times, how unartistic it has become, and how today it seems to be believed that the greatness of science consists precisely in being unartistic. It has almost become a dogma for a certain direction of modern times that Goethe is such a visionary physicist because the artistic sense did not allow him to become a proper physicist.

In short, misunderstanding has arisen between the three currents. But this marks the crisis. For when that which comes from one root separates in its mutual relationships in such a way that the life juices no longer come from the common root, the crisis must occur, the one-sided development must lead these currents to wither away. In recent times, we have reached a crisis in our failure to understand what a common organism, a coherent organism in human nature, is and how it separates in the outer evolution. We are in the crises. Such crises can be described in such a way that we can say that human nature demands organic unification of what has had to go separate ways in the outer world for some time. In many areas of life, the person who does not go through the evolution of the world indifferently can perceive such crisis, and such a person will observe much of what cannot remain as it is in today's development in these crises, and he will gain insight into what has to happen in order to overcome the crises.

We have already hinted at one crisis in the fact that science, art and religion no longer understand each other. Another crisis is going through the world, which is noticed only by a few, but which is terrible in its effect, a crisis that stems from the lack of understanding between two currents. The one current is that which was once breathed through the world in the infinitely deep sayings engraved in the human heart: “My kingdom is not of this world” and “You are from below, but I am from above”. Man's root is in the spiritual world.

The second current, which must develop more and more into a crisis-ridden confrontation with what is expressed in the words: “My kingdom is not of this world” and “I am from above, but you are from below,” is the word: “L'état c'est moi! The state is me!” My kingdom, the kingdom of my ego, is completely bound to this world. The right way lies in the synthesis of the two sentences. It lies in a universally conceived Christianity, expressed in the words “Give to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's.” In correctly understood Christianity there is no false turning away from the world. But there is also not that one-sidedness in it, which can only be lived out in the attachment to the material institutions of world existence.

In speaking of this, we are touching on the very deepest tasks of anthroposophy. For anthroposophy, in the true sense of the word, must not arise one-sidedly from the mood of the head, but from the whole soul of man. And only then will this soul find the transition into anthroposophical life when it is completely seized by spiritual science, not only in its life of ideas, but when it is completely seized by it.

It is a fact that what has become the human head during the moon-life is on the way to becoming the whole human being during the earth-life. During the old moon-evolution there was a being, the ancestor of the present human being. What was then an outer organism has today become the head. The limbs have been added. When the coming Jupiter evolution is complete, this whole organism of today's human being will have become the head. What you are today as a whole human being will become the brain, the head, of the Jupiter human, just as the whole moon human has become the head of the earth human.

The task of true spiritual development consists in truly anticipating the future. Therefore, we must become aware that there is a head culture around us and that it is our responsibility to create a human culture. Our head could not think, could not reflect any ideas or concepts if it behaved like the rest of our organism; it could never truly fulfill its task. Our head reflects the world, which then becomes our world of perception, only because it can forget itself in its perception, can truly forget itself. In its feeling, the human being is - thank God - always headless. If you try to feel your way through and ask yourself: What do I feel least in my organism? - it is really the head that forgets itself most in normal life. And when it does not forget itself, then it hurts, and then it also prefers not to perceive anything, but to be left in peace and without perception. That is where it asserts its egoism. Otherwise, however, it extinguishes itself, and because it extinguishes itself, we can perceive the whole surrounding world. It is organized to extinguish itself.

If you were to forget even the slightest part of the outer periphery of the head, but instead focus on it, then you would no longer be able to perceive the external environment. Imagine that instead of perceiving the external world, you would see your eye; for example, if you were to take a step back with your perception, then you would see the cranial cavity, but with the perception of the external world it would be nothing. To the same extent and at the same moment that a person succeeds in completely switching off their organism – which, as is well known, is achieved through meditation and in initiation – to that same extent and in that same moment, this organism becomes a real mirror of the world, only that we then see not the organism but the cosmos. Just as the head does not see itself either, but what is around it, so the whole human being, when it becomes an organ of perception, sees the cosmos. This is the ideal that we must have in mind: forgetting the organism as it appears to us on the physical plane, and being able to use it instead as a mirroring apparatus for the secrets of the cosmos.

In this way we gradually expand our head-centered view to a whole-humane view of the world, and we must learn to sense, to feel, to perceive something of how truly anthroposophy human being, overcoming this head-centeredness – so I may call it in contrast to the anthroposophical centeredness – the one-sided head-centeredness that comes from modern science and so only takes hold of the head.

If you take something of what I said yesterday, when I described how man can become aware that he is a lamp for the cherubim, a heating apparatus for the seraphim, how he enters into the world of cherubim and seraphim in thinking and willing, how he means something for this world, how his self is not only there for itself, but stands in a living relationship to the weaving and life of the spiritual hierarchies - if you make that an attitude, then you will feel something of how the whole person can truly become brain, how he as a whole person can thus come into communication with his surroundings, as otherwise only the head can. Then you will feel what is actually meant by this: to perceive the world as a whole human being.

But if you perceive the world as a whole human being, then you cannot think, feel and will one-sidedly, but you become immersed in the whole of earthly existence. You immerse yourself in the whole experience of the world, and it arises by itself, I would say, the inner sense of dependence on it, not only in thoughts but also in forms, not only in the formless thoughts but in the beautiful, expressive forms. The urge arises, the need to express things in artistic forms that you understand intellectually.

And again: when a person delves into the entire spiritual life of the world, his life basically becomes prayer, and he no longer has such an urgent need to single out little minutes in which to pray. Rather, he knows: when I think, I am a lampstand for the cherubim; when I act, when I act with will, I am a heating apparatus for the seraphim. Man knows that he lives in the whole spiritual world structure. Thinking becomes a religious conviction for him, and acting becomes a moral prayer.

We see how these three areas, art, religion and science, which had to go their separate ways in the world for a while, are seeking each other out of the whole human being again. At the beginning of the development of the earth, man brought so much with him from extra-terrestrial development that he still had the living, unified feeling, the unified striving, as it expressed itself in the old days in the union of art, religion and science. One could say that in man at that time there still strove his angel, his Angelos. But man would never have become free if it had continued like this. Man had to be emancipated from this old inheritance. But he must find again in the ascending evolution what he has lost in the descending evolution.

Goethe's beautiful words about architecture have been mentioned several times. He called architecture frozen music. Let us dwell on this saying. It is truly possible to call architecture, in its previous development, a kind of frozen music. The forms of architecture are like frozen melodies, like solidified harmonies and rhythms. But we have the task, since we are in the midst of the crisis mentioned, of bringing the frozen back into motion, into liveliness, of making the frozen forms musically alive again, so to speak. When you see our building, you will see our efforts to set the old, rigid forms of construction in motion, to transform them into life, to make them musical again. This is the reason why we do not have a round building, but a single axis of symmetry, along which the motifs move.

Thus we see how the spiritual-scientific worldview, including its artistic aims, is intimately connected with all the tasks and necessary impulses of our time, which we recognize in the crises of our time. Understanding and seeing this is our task, it is of utmost importance for our task. We must gradually bring together all the details of our task from this point of view.

Today, people quickly forget how to use their entire organism like a kind of brain. He has the potential, but as soon as he has developed from a crawling child into an upright human being in the first years of life, he quickly forgets how to relate to his entire organism, just as he will then relate to his brain throughout his entire life; for this straightening up, this bringing-himself-into-the-vertical is in fact a working of the spirit on the whole human being. This is the last remnant of what we bring with us from our spiritual, prenatal life, because in our earthly life we quickly unlearn it. And then we drag the whole organism, which eats and drinks and digests, through life like a burden; we drag it through life and no longer bring it into a respectful relationship with the spiritual world, but far away from the spiritual world.

The child still has the great wisdom to know that man's task lies in the heights far from the world and has the direction towards heights far from the world in its organism. When that is over, the organism becomes a digestive and gastric sac and is separated from the relationship with the outside world.

Not even the relationship to the outside world, of which I spoke yesterday, is maintained. When we, for example, rest our head in our hand in order to express something weighty in the external organism, we hardly notice it. And if someone in their unconsciousness still retains the habit of using the whole organism and not just thinking with the brain, but also placing the hand or the index finger on the forehead or the nose, thus indicating that they are really distinguishing and judging - we do not notice that this is an instinctive effort to use the whole organism like a brain. It does not have to happen in this external way. Of course, spiritual science does not intend to turn human beings into fidgets who think with their whole bodies. But spiritually, of course, the consciousness must expand to include the whole human being in the cosmos, to know that the cosmos can be mirrored by the whole body, just as the cosmos is now only mirrored by the brain.

When consciousness is broadened in this way, when the human being really goes beyond merely dragging his organism through life, so to speak, and learns to use and handle it, then the foundation is laid for what must be laid in our time: a human, a totally human world view, as opposed to a mere cerebral view, must become what anthroposophy has to strive for.

If we try to do this, and if we try to elevate our attitudes in this way, which otherwise remain only ideas, then we will achieve what is intended with this spiritual scientific movement of ours. For we will gradually find our way as human beings, ascending in development, to the real figure of Christ, when we have become more and more familiarized with the all-human conception of the world. That this Christ-figure cannot be found is only the fault of the brain-view. The moment this is overcome, the moment spiritual science has become so strong that man's consciousness is so completely reorganized in the way described, then what has often been said about the Christ-view will really come to pass. But then our human world will be able to achieve what it can only achieve from within and which will lead it beyond many things that have now led to a crisis among the earth's human race, not only inwardly, in terms of world views, but also outwardly, in terms of people and nations.

One would like people to gradually realize, at least a small part of people, that real help is needed. Then one will also realize that the help that humanity needs can only be provided by the souls, only from within, and that everything else cannot even be a surrogate, because surrogates can no longer help against the great crises of our time, only the real and the true. And the genuine and true must be conquered by humanity in the spirit. Christmas celebration