The Rudolf Steiner Archive

This is the 9th of 16 lectures given by Rudolf Steiner at Berlin, in Autumn of 1911 through the Spring of 1912. The title of the series of lectures is: Human History in the Light of Spiritual Investigation. It was published in German as: Menschengeschichte im Lichte der Geistesforschung.

If it was already somewhat difficult from the point of view of the ideas ruling at present to explain the origin of man spiritual-scientifically (what should have been done in the last lecture of this cycle) it will be today still less easy to speak about the origin of the animal world. For, if on the one hand the difficulty results from the fact that everything concerning the animal world is still much more remote for the human observation—at least seemingly—than everything concerning nature and essence of man, so on the other hand a quite special difficulty must arise because according to the present world conception, an influence of spiritual events, spiritual causes on the development and origin of animal existence will not at all be admitted. Instead, we find that in the course of the development of our mental life in the last periods the notion is formed quite specially that exactly the same causes, powers and realities partake in the development of animals' life as in the development of the lifeless, so-called inorganic nature, and we know that the greatest triumphs of natural science have been realized just in this sphere of the so-called pure natural development of living beings.

Now we must certainly say, on the one side the great longing aims at a pure natural development—as one usually says—that means such a development that only considers those powers which also rule in lifeless existence, and we see on the other side how a research moving in this direction thinks to hurry from triumph to triumph—nay, if we interpret it in the right sense, even does so. Nevertheless, on the other hand we can perceive how deeper thinkers who stand entirely on the basis of facts of natural science, and who are also fully acquainted with that which natural science has brought forward in recent times, are not in a position to share the opinion of those thinkers who want throughout to derive life from a mere union or a mere combination—although from a very complicated one—of those powers and events which are also present in lifeless nature. A great part of the thinkers of the present and the recent past did not take much trouble saying: up to a certain time probably the development of our earth has principally consisted in unfolding out of itself lifeless processes, and at a certain point of time some materials have joined in such a complicated way that the simplest living beings originated ... where after then the development progressed in such a way that out of these simpler living beings, in the struggle for life and in adaptation to the surrounding, so to speak, more and more complicated living beings have developed up to man. But in contradiction to this idea many philosophers of recent time have argued that it is impossible to think that at any time, that which can be called in the real sense an original procreation or an issuing forth of the living from the lifeless, could arise out of a mere union of lifeless matter.

To such thinkers mentioned above Gustav Theodor Fechner, a man of genius in many ways, belongs. Because really important progress in natural science in various regions is connected with this personality, we should truly not pass by so lightly the theories of such a thinker as it is generally done today. Gustav Theodor Fechner cannot understand that the living ever could have developed out of the lifeless. It is much more obvious to Fechner to imagine that the lifeless can go forth out of the living through processes of isolation, because we see indeed that the inner life process of the living beings excretes the materials which, after having served a certain time in the life process, pass over to the rest of nature and belong then, as it were, to lifeless, to inorganic processes. So Fechner can well imagine that our earth at its starting point has been a single whole living being. This huge living being “earth” has done its breathing—so to say—from the cosmos and has perhaps also taken its nutrition from the (space of the) universe. Out of the entirety of this huge, enormous organism, which has once been our earth, on the one hand, living beings have developed as through a special constriction of that which in the huge earth organism has been living organs only, which thus became independent. And on the other hand—so Fechner imagines—those substances which today belong to the lifeless nature processes were excreted in a similar way as today substances are excreted from an organism after having served the living processes for a certain time. Thus, on the lines of this thinker, not the living came forth from the lifeless, but the lifeless came forth from the living. In a similar way, perhaps in a still more fantastic one, the natural investigator Wilhelm Preyer forms his own imagination. He has proved his legitimacy, his qualification for speaking about natural science not only through his abundant physiological and biological research, but also through his publications about Darwinism. Preyer also pictured to himself that the earth, at its starting point, was a kind of living being; he was always disinclined to speak of something lifeless in an absolute sense. He says we have really no right to look upon a flame as a kind of life process on the lowest level, a life process which is simplified, and has descended from a higher level; just so such life processes as we observe today could have developed in ascending. What Preyer means is: when a flame is burning, then it seems as if something like a life process is displayed to us in the consuming of the matter, in the entire method and way in which the burning, as a fact, presents itself to us. And he therefore supposes that it may not be out of the question that the earth itself was a huge life process, a life process that took place, nevertheless, under quite other conditions than the life processes of today. And so we see the most curious imagination has issued from the head of an investigator of nature, which Preyer expresses as follows: The earth could have been at the starting point of its evolution a huge enormous organism, the breathing of which we have to look for in the glowing vapors of iron, the blood flow of which we have to imagine in the glowing liquid metals, and the nourishment of which must have been brought about through meteorites drawn from the universe. This is certainly a peculiar life process, but this natural investigator thinks he couldn't go in another way if he were to trace back, not the living from the lifeless, but the apparently lifeless from the original living. And that which appears to us today as our life, in various realms appeared to him only as a life shaped especially, whereas the life of a burning candle seemed to him as a life formed backwards, in a certain way, so that the latter may appear to us outwardly as lifeless.

If we must say that such developments in recent mental life can show us—so to speak—how notable thinkers standing firmly upon the grounds of natural science, not only with regard to their convictions but also their comprehension, do not refer to the earth at all as the glowing liquid lifeless gas ball of the Kant-Laplace, but look upon the earth at its origin as a huge living being, in order to be able to explain that what is living today, this fact can, in some respects, teach us that it is, indeed, not so easy to trace back the living to the lifeless. Yes, we even must say that just the (human?) spirits having struck out in a new direction who have obtained the greatest results of research in natural science recently, cannot teach us that natural-scientific thinking has traced back all living to the lifeless, and that in this regard, natural science would just contradict what Spiritual Science has to say: that all substances, and then in general, all life can be traced back to spiritual causes. It is indeed true that the great results of natural science performed by Darwin or Lamarck or other pioneer spirits exclude any regard of spiritual causes, fundamental for these phenomena.

I have already, several times, pointed out a notable passage in Darwin's publications, in which this great pioneer points out the way in which he succeeded in showing the metamorphosis of one form of life into another, and how, by this experience, it seemed to him quite well possible to trace back today's complicated living beings to earlier, perhaps less complicated living beings and thus explain the variety of today's life forms, perhaps by means of a few differentiated original life forms. But then Darwin says, in a very characteristic manner: (in this way) we succeeded in tracing today's various forms of life back to an original one and in explaining the life of today, in its multifariousness, through evolution. But Darwin is speaking of these original forms of life in such a way that he assumes that—as he says literally—“the Creator once has poured life into them.” Yes, we may say outright that this natural investigator, Darwin, working in the midst of the 19^th Century, was convinced he was authorized in his explanation of the metamorphosis of the species in living nature, by just simply assuming that he retraced back the development in nature to issue from the Creator. As we can know from Darwin's whole manner of thinking, he must have realized at once the insufficiency of his explanation if he were not permitted to assume the action of spiritual realities at any point in earth evolution. He felt himself firm and strong on the grounds he took a stand upon, just by saying that if we could assume there was life in its simplest forms created out of the spiritual, then we also could expect of this life of simplest forms full of such impulsion power, such impetus that it was able to transform itself to complicated and manifold forms.—And in a stronger sense, this can be applied to Jean Lamarck, who was the first to speak about the natural development of living beings to more and more complicated forms through adaptation to their surroundings. We see that Lamarck's idea is the following: We may assume a development from the outwardly unaccomplished to the outwardly more and more accomplished, because by so thinking we are not at all in contradiction to evolution as a whole being interwoven with, and inspired by, spiritual fundamental forces. How else could it be possible that there is a passage in one of Lamarck's fundamental works, which we can take quite literally, and which is just significant for the way and manner characteristic for earlier natural-scientific thinkers. Lamarck says in his “Philosophie Zoologique” (“Volksausgabe's Leipzig”, ed. Alfred Kroener, p. 21):

“As it had not been taken into consideration that the individuals of one specie must remain unchanged as long as the conditions mainly influencing their manner of life don't change, and as the ruling prejudices are in accordance with the assumption of this progressive generation of similar individuals, it is assumed that every specie is unchangeable and as old as nature, and that they are separately created by the sublime Originator of all things.”

Lamarck is conscious that he must break with the concept of the one and only creation of all species at their starting point, and that he must imagine the species, now around us, as having arisen through evolution. But then he continues as follows:

“Surely, everything exists only through the will of the sublime Originator of all things. But can we order His rules in the exercise of His will? Or could we decide the way and manner in which he has done this? Could not the Almighty Infinite create an order of matter (things?) unknown to us which lets all that we see and all that exists enter into it one after another? Whatsoever His Will may have been, the immeasurable magnitude of His Might is surely always the same, and in whatsoever manner He May have accomplished His Will, nothing can diminish His Magnitude.
“Thus honoring the dispensations of this infinite wisdom, I restrict myself to the limits of a simple observer of nature.”

Thus speaks he to whom one appeals today—quite rightly—when one speaks about the doctrine of evolution. But at the same time we see that this man has thereby pointed out to himself his program in the most distinct way. What is this program?

Lamarck argues that by ascertaining through observation all that is of service to the mere natural observer, the possibility results of imagining that organisms have gradually developed in a running(?) succession; however, we must also imagine that spiritual impulses were originally holding sway in the entirety of evolution, otherwise we have no firm basis at all. We recognize this by all means as the conviction of the pioneer Lamarck. And certainly in this case we must say: Thus this natural investigator has traced for himself his special program by restricting himself to the species of the outer world, and by not ascending farther to that which must be spiritually fundamental for the whole process of evolution. He consigns the spiritual to a world into which he is not inclined to penetrate, and which he presumes, from the outset, to be a region of total, unimpeded Will of the Creator—but he restricts himself to the presentation of what has emanated out of this Will of the Creator and what issues forth in the progress of evolution.

Now on the other hand we must again say, as matters stand today, that it can never result from the experiences or research of the natural-scientific observer, that at any time the living could have developed out of the lifeless on our earth, in the conditions which are available for today's external observation. The imagination that the living developed out of the lifeless is by no means a new one—it is, in truth, the older one. In this regard I have already emphasized that it was a great progress in natural science, if one goes back only about two centuries ago, when Francesco Redi spoke the sentence: “Living can only go forth from living.” It is interesting that throughout all the earlier centuries before Francesco Redi's time, it was assumed that not only simple, but also even very complicated, living beings could come forth out of mere lifeless matter. Not only was it assumed that out of the mud of the rivers, something lifeless for the outward consideration—lower animals such as rainworms, for instance—could develop without a living germ of the rainworm ancestor put into the mud, but it was also systematically assumed that animals up to the insects or still higher ones, could develop out of lifeless matter. It is interesting that we find in a work of St. Isidor, who died in 636, that it is quoted quite systematically that out of an ox corpse—that means something gone over already into the lifeless—that if it is beaten enough, a species of worms would develop which could become bees. Indeed, this man at the head of the erudition of his time not only indicated how bees could come out of an ox corpse, but he also tells us how in the same way hornets can develop out of horse corpses, drones out of mules and wasps out of donkey corpses. And as if this were not enough, it was alleged up to the 17^th Century how mice, eels, and frogs originate out of that which is already transformed into the lifeless. And the belief that life can originate out of the lifeless in the simplest way, this belief was so strong that Francesco Redi narrowly escaped from the fate of Giordano Bruno, because he was so bold as to proclaim that the living can only originate from the living; for the supposition that living beings can originate out of lifeless matter could only depend on inexact observation, because the living germs of the living beings must have been already in the river mud if living should originate.

Spiritual Science must add to the achievements of Francesco Redi the sentence that the spiritual can only originate from spiritual. And because the entirety of earth evolution finally culminates in the spiritual, as it presents itself in a simple way and on an inferior level in the animal world, on a higher level in normal man, and on the highest one in the human spirit itself, thus this spiritual likewise originating itself at last out of the seeming unspiritual, can only be traced back to an original spiritual. If Spiritual Science is compelled today to state this fact, as we have heard in the earlier lectures and also in the past years in these cycles of lectures, and if in order to confirm further entirely in every region the sentence: “the spiritual can only originate from spiritual” it says, all that appears to us as matter is only a transformed spiritual—then it (Spiritual Science) is today not doomed to the fate of Francesco Redi or Giordano Bruno (for other things are now in fashion and people are no longer burned), but suffer other fates. It has today, anticipating, advocating a truth which will familiarize itself with the cultural life as likewise the sentence “living can only originate from living” has done, and therefore man will consider Spiritual Science as a revere, as something which is by no means based on the fundamentals of a real, scientific knowledge.

Now, at first an outline of what Spiritual Science has to say from its point of view about the question of the origins of the animal world will be outlined. Then it will be shown how the comprehension of Spiritual Science about the origin of the animal world can be entirely reconciled with the acquisitions of natural-scientific knowledge of the present, for I have set myself the task in these lectures to harmonize what Spiritual Science produces out of itself with the acquisitions of natural science.

Spiritual Science as such cannot go back to that which Gustav Theodor Fechner or Preyer have assumed as the original earth organism. On the other hand, however, we must emphasize again and again that no explanation will succeed in making it logically plausible, if only to some extent, that the manifoldness of the living beings could have, in earth evolution, developed out of a mere nebular organization, as assumed by Kant-Laplace's theory; unless we had, so to speak, to take up the expedients of the most recent mental attitude, if we would reconcile the origin of the organic or animal world with this idea. Then we would arrive at the method of thinking of the Swedish investigator Svante Arrhenius, today indeed very much admired, but not less fantastic: that germs of living beings got planted into the earth, from the space of the universe, by “compression (gravitation) of radiation” just—let us say—at the right time, when the earth was in a state to receive such germs. Everyone will realize very easily that such an explanation is no explanation, for we have then to explain where and how these living beings originated, even if they are only flown as simple germs into the earth through compression (gravitation) of radiation.

Spiritual Science must go back to a form of the earth where the earth does not present itself to us as so occupied and populated by such living beings as we know today. In a certain regard, Spiritual Science shows us something similar to what Fechner and Preyer have pictured to themselves by mere intellectual conclusions (deductions); namely, that the earth at and since its beginning has been a living being, which contained in itself gas and vapor, not only in a lifeless manner, as the theory of Kant-Laplace assumes. This theory can be explained very easily to the simplest pupil by saying: Look here, by mere rotation something can split off from a drop of a liquid, if we let it rotate, and as a little drop is thrown off it rotates around the big drop—thus in this way we originate a world system on a small scale. But doing this, we forget that we ourselves have moved this drop by rotation and that, in case such an event should have indeed happened once on a large scale—namely, that the planets have split off by means of the rotation of a gas ball—then a giant professor or a giant teacher must have ruled in the cosmos, for if we exercise an experiment we must consider all conditions and not forget our own part. If it is already impossible to explain from what we know at present the splitting off of the planets, from a gas ball which at any time may have existed, it is far less possible to explain life in a planetarian life without something living, if only lifelessness existed beforehand.

Spiritual Science leads us back to an earth which, indeed at its starting point, was not only full of life, but also spiritualized, impregnated, by spirit, so that we have to trace back earth evolution to an originally spiritualized earth being. If we picture this spiritualized earth being to our senses, as it were, in an image, this being would present itself to us in its substance in such a way that we have, comparatively around us today like the last reminders of this original state of the earth, moving, but not formed, living matter in the most inferior organisms, which are really not quite exactly easy to define as plant beings or animal beings. These most inferior organisms could really be defined as flowing life, for they appear at first as a round drop which changes its matter, so to say, through no outward cause with regard to shape and situation—lengthens into tentacles or feet, creeping over the ground, but has in itself no distinct shape. If we picture to ourselves these inferior organisms, this original life substance, then we have before us, in the sense of Spiritual Science, the whole of the original earth matter, and within this earth matter nothing at all that we have today as lifeless matter. The whole earth matter is, so to say, a living but still unformed substance, and Spiritual Science must imagine, aside from this unshaped substance, that which we call the formative principle, the transcendental formative principle, as something purely spiritual at the starting point of earth evolution.

We can imagine today what the earth had been at the starting point of its evolution along the lines of Spiritual Science, by imagining, as we have often done in previous lectures, the sleeping human being. Then we picture to ourselves sleeping man—we have the physical body, lying in bed, and this physical body is permeated with that which in a spiritual-scientific way we no longer call a material bodily form: the etheric body—but outwardly, comparatively, in the sphere of this physical body we have that which is within this physical body during the waking day life: the living life of the soul, which we call the connection between the ego and the astral body of man. So we have before us in man who is awake, the inner mental essence, or essential part of the soul nature, permeating the external bodily nature; but in sleeping man we have the external-bodily secluded from the inmost soul life. The inner soul life is unconscious in sleeping man of today. It is, as it were, not permeated with a real inner content, at least not consciously. But for a real thinker it is impossible to imagine that the sleeping man really still has this in himself, or that what is living and acting in sleeping man also brings about the appearance of soul life itself during waking. What else can we imagine, when we proceed to really logical thinking? Today we can only sketch it in rough outlines—but anyone who thinks logically cannot as a result come to any other conclusion—we can imagine nothing else than that the man, who is awake, practices, expresses his soul activity through the organs of his body, so that the man who is awake needs his bodily organs in order to develop consciousness, and that the bodily organs must be formed in such a way that when enlivened from the soul principle, they can be the bearers or mediators of the life of consciousness. But a man can never imagine that, by means of inner, living, organic action, that which comes into our consciousness as inner soul processes while awake can be produced in sleep. We only have to make a simple comparison, entirely sufficient for this purpose, to discover this fact.

Instead of the brain let us place, as the soul organ mediating our waking conscious state, the lung which breathes and mediates the life processes. Then we must say the lung breathes only by means of oxygen flowing into it from outside. But the action of the lung does not consist only in receiving the oxygen flowing into it, for the organic action cannot have an influence on the supply of oxygen. We cannot experience anything about the nature and substance of oxygen from the manner in which we nourish and enliven our lung, and the lung cannot be supplied with oxygen from inside, either. But just as we have to imagine the inner life process as going over into the lung, so we also have to imagine the inner life process going over into the brain and other organs during sleeping life. In the evening our organs are exhausted, because soul activity wears out the organs, and they must be impregnated again with a pure life activity in order to again be able to be mediators of soul activity. But just as the mere inner life activity cannot supply the lung with oxygen, the activity of the inner life cannot supply sleeping man with that which we can call the instincts, desires, and passions (emotions) of man. The nature of the soul life is not a consequence or result of the mere bodily activity of man, just as the nature of oxygen, which only unites itself with the lung from outside, is not the result of mere life activity. No one can escape the quite cogent conclusion that just as soul activity must flow into the organs for knowledge of man from outside on the moment of waking, likewise the oxygen flows into the lungs from outside, just as the oxygen as such exists in the outer world and imparts itself to the lung, with the only difference being that the lung is supplied with oxygen not alternately but always, because the lung does not sleep. Consequently, there must be something which, combining with the human ego, flows into the bodily function in the morning, when man wakes, and then works in the human soul organs. Thus we must conclude that in the life during sleep the spiritual is separated and we must regard this spiritual essence, as it were, as something that wakens in the morning apart from our bodily organs, to act as soul organs.

Consequently we have, comparatively speaking, in sleeping man a living organism, and floating over him a self-dependent, spiritual one. We must picture to ourselves the following: While we are awake, the soul processes, going on in us—that means the spiritual soul life—can really only effectuate certain processes, doubtlessly parallel with the soul processes in the organism. They are effects of the soul processes and cause fatigue, as it were—processes of dissolution of matter, whereas during sleep the body annuls these processes of fatigue.

In a similar way Spiritual Science reveals that the earth, at its starting point, had really consisted of a duality, of something not quite like sleeping and waking man, but that could be compared with what has been, so to say, moving life substance, as the last remainder of the simplest organisms are still today, but that which, in no way, have been organisms transformed into animal or human forms, not even into vegetable, plant forms. And so, if we have to imagine in connection with man's body that which is man's soul content hovering over him in sleep, so we have to picture to ourselves the earth, at its beginning, hovering over what we can call the spirit of the earth, the common, united earth spirit. And within this earth spirit we have to seek that which later becomes form in earth evolution—in this earth spirit we also, above all, have to seek that which affects stimulation of the flowing material substance, so to say the sleeping earth, so that the entire life substance comes into movement in various ways. Thus we have to imagine the stimulating causes as, I might say, spiritual streams from the surrounding of the earth, working into flowing, living matter (substance). At first these causes created in the flowing substance only such forms that did not solidify, but after having formed themselves for the time being, adopted their formless shape again, as the storm whips the ocean and forms it in various wave structures. Formed life must be derived out of formless living. The formative principle itself is to be imagined as a super-sensible, spiritual principle that was connected with the original earth substance. If today we would imagine something similar to this way of working in regard to the earth at its starting point—this reciprocal effect between spirit and matter—so could we imagine a more narrow region, where what happened was similar to what happened at the starting point of earth evolution. (Natural science of the future will prove this). We can still show something that affects unformed life substance. All those processes bringing forth our own spiritual life in brain substance or in blood substance can be compared to the processes which took place, at the earth's beginning, between the spiritual, formative principle and the living substance fundamental to the evolution of earth.

Such a thing is not able to be proved along the lines of our thinking today—it is to be proved only by Spiritual Science, that by means already described, for the whole of earth evolution something is produced, similar to what is produced in the single life of man in memory. By the training of certain forces, here also mentioned, which are resting in the depths of the soul, human memory expands, and man's spiritual outlook—and these powers are the same—the development of which enables the spiritual investigator to look immediately into the spiritual earth being. Thus matter and material life can be penetrated entirely by the spiritual view, and material processes in their existence can display themselves in such a way that not only present conditions, but also previous ones out of which they have developed, can confront the spiritual eye as living memory. Just as man in the present carries in himself that which has formed in the life of his soul since his childhood and can therewith follow the line of remembrance, so also he follows his soul life into earlier conditions; he can thus trace it back, how it has been not only now, but decades ago. If the spiritual outlook does not adhere only to external matter, but penetrates the surface of things and into a spiritual basis, then something works within the spiritual that puts man into a kind of world memory, which is also called reading in the Akasha Chronicle (see Rudolf Steiner, From the Akasha Chronicle, Ed. Phil. Anthropos., Dornach). Man is placed into a world memory, and through this he looks back into earlier original conditions of the earth.

Proofs are therefore only to be given in such a spiritual way and manner and if these things are then so investigated we have the means at our disposal to confirm what is brought to light through spiritual investigators and which reveal that a full harmony exists between that which things present to us still today, and that which the spiritual investigator must proclaim. For this reason, in a popular lecture one can take no other direction but to reveal what presents itself to the spiritual investigator, and what flows out of immediate spiritual observation, while placed by this spiritual-scientific observation, as it were at the starting point of earth evolution. At the same time, however, we must emphasize that in such conditions which we have to recognize as spiritual, the spiritual is much nearer to material production than the spiritual is today to material production. Today the spiritual uses the counter position, the resistance of the material body, so that it forms the spiritual soul-like in man only to those pictures of the material which we can put before our eyes in our imaginations. We don't accomplish a densification stronger than these pictures.

But Spiritual Science is based on the following idea. (The following lectures will draw your attention yet on the origin of matter.) All material being has been originally a spiritual one; once the spiritual was, when it itself had been creating matter, in a more original state, full of will and force, than it is today in man's spirituality. Therefore we have to imagine that what hovered over the earth as spiritual formative principle was more closely connected in a certain way to the original life substance than the soul hovering over sleeping man is connected today to his physical body. Progressing further, we have to imagine that through the interference of the super-sensible formative principle on substance, all that which is today called lifeless nature is originated. We have really to imagine that through the action of the formative principle such matter, which then becomes lifeless, has isolated itself out of a moving and stirred substance. Once again Spiritual Science is, in this way, closely connected with the investigations of Fechner and Preyer. But such unliving matter is again seized in a certain way by the formative principle, now proceeding in this lifeless matter as a crystallizing principle, so that we have to imagine all minerals issuing, going forth, from an originally spiritual, living matter, becoming lifeless and then seized by the formative principle. Therefore, when we speak about crystals, we can speak today not yet about life, but only recognize a transcendental formative principle. In another way, the formative principle was in force in the matter which remained as a living one. If today we put aside plants, we must imagine that under the influence of those substances which separated gradually as lifeless ones from the living one (and which grouped themselves in various ways)—earth differentiated, grouped itself so that we designate firm earth, liquid water, air, and so on. Further we must imagine that during this time the formative principle worked upon the entire living and lifeless substance, and that thereby the living-formed matter is exposed to the external lifeless. And while previously it was throughout only living, in itself, it now had to permeate itself with lifeless matter, because in the course of earth development the principle of nutrition—the taking in of non-living matter into living matter, became important.

Thus we see the living, so to speak, taking up the nonliving, which it had previously separated from itself in a certain way. Thereby the living on earth comes more and more into those conditions which signify themselves through the lifeless as the elements—earth, water, air, etc. and the formative principle can act in the necessary way only by forming the living, so that the shapes (forms) are adapted to the external elements.

Now we must imagine life on earth in such a way that in the course of time, by means of the formative principle, the living and the lifeless are kept separated in various ways. We must imagine that materials which today are fallen from the heights and are connected with the firm body of the earth, were in a medium earth period still dissolved (diluted), were present in the earth atmosphere as mist. We can absolutely speak about such an earth's age in which such an air veil, as it is today, was non-existent—and we must speak about mists and gasses, which nowadays have been consolidated and united with the earth for a long time. We must imagine the entire distribution of water and air in a middle earth period, in an entirely different way. We must imagine that the formative principle—which we should think of as purely spiritual—by working living substance into the lifeless, formed, matter, had to take from that latter the conditions for breathing, etc. Thus the formative principle had to create in this way the most varied forms adapted to the old earth conditions, which now do not exist at all. However, Spiritual Science now shows that the development progressed in such a way that, in those times, only a part of the living substance, as it were, was really formed and that, when the unformed matter was seized upon immediately by the spiritual principle, a part of the old, moving unformed, living substance was held back. In older times, when the earth was surrounded in quite a different way by layers of matter, which today as it is fall down because of compression, or are present in the inside of the earth in liquid form and literally lead a liquid life—that the formative principle was working, as it were, by crystallizing, into the living, forms which in today's conditions cannot exist any longer. Let us look at such a state, in which our earth did not have at all the planetary shape that it has today. At this time quite obviously other, different forms of living beings must originate, living beings which were adapted to the old conditions, and which nowadays could no longer exist. Now that may easily be accounted for, explained by the fact that many of these life forms had to die out entirely when the earth changed its formation. We find (which is geologically demonstrable and shown by paleontology) that animals have lived which, we have to imagine, were only adjusted, let us say to water, only coming to its present form, but still permeated with quite different substances, and we find other animals, as the saurian species, etc. To be brief: we can meet manifold animal species (forms) which were adapted to the conditions then. Aside from these, other forms originated which were adjusted to the conditions, so to speak, in such a way that they really could no longer be shaped out of the unformed, moving matter by the original formative principle, but which were able to transform themselves through successive generations, and to themselves improve by means of heredity in such a way that they developed the later forms out of the older ones. The new ones were then adapted to the new earth conditions. While those forms which in olden times were so strongly penetrated by the formative principle that they could not be reshaped had to die out, those organizations which had remained more movable in themselves, in which the living was not yet fashioned so strongly, could remodel themselves and thus develop themselves further on in successive generations.

With regard to man, development shows itself as follows: In olden times we cannot see him in such forms which can be seen with outer external eyes, but we find him in matter of such a fine, unfashioned moving kind, that in times where animals were already present, he could have become everything. Man was the last to descend out of the unformed into shape, into form. Whereas the animals, which are today on earth, had already earlier taken up the formative principle so that they had to reshape their earlier figure in adapting to the transformation of the earth, man did not prevail himself to descend in solid form, during old conditions, but waited until earth had approximately the distribution of air and water as it now has. As late as then a condensation of the scarcely-shaped matter into the human figure took place for man. Because man entered out of the unformed and into shaped form so late, he appeared so that he is therefore adapted not only to certain specific earth conditions, but to the whole earth. Going back to the animals, however, we must imagine their origin in such a way that determined forms had adapted themselves to quite determined territories of the earth. These animals then got the form, which by no means is still similar to today's offspring, but which was adapted to conditions then. But because they were adapted only to territorial conditions which in certain regions changed quickly, they could develop only in determined limits. But at the time when earth was liable to quick changes, man had not entered into a form, but only later, when it was possible to put formation into his bodily nature over the whole surface of the earth in such a way that he, as man, was adapted to the earth as a whole. Thus man could populate earth as a being which is adapted least of all to external conditions, and most of all to internal motive powers. Man was, from the outset, thus adapted to the formative powers in such a manner that his inner being corresponded with the spiritual, that the formative powers could work immediately in the soul, making his outer physical form an upright one, making his hands as living tools for the spirit, and his larynx a living instrument for the spirit. But all this could only happen when earth had passed through certain principles of formation (Gestaltungsprinzipien). Thus man had to be adapted no longer immediately to external life, but to that which determined out of his inner being, what was his figure and presentation in life (Sich-Darleben)—so that with man, the formative principle determines his figure indirectly through the spiritual, while with the animal the formative principle had to work much more into the lifeless and inorganic. We can today still perceive in animals how they have connected their entire soul life more closely with their bodily nature, whereas man is able to develop a soul life which can lift itself up beyond the life of the body.

Let us look at the animal, how its soul life is plunged entirely into the bodily life, as it is formed, how the delight of digestion impregnates the body, how the soul life immediately penetrates the body and shows itself connected with its bodily functions. If we compare the way in which man's soul life lifts itself up beyond the bodily nature as something independent, we will see then that man is fashioned as he is because the animal world, adapted to other conditions of our earthly being, is fashioned out of the unformed earlier than man is. In man, such a soul being independent of the bodily life could become active only because man is able, within his being of soul, to keep the formative principle when he passes through the gate of death, and discards, to begin with, his bodily life. Because the formative principle has seized the animal's soul so much earlier that an intense connection with the bodily life was produced and because the animal thereby had to be entirely absorbed by its bodily life—for this reason that which is experienced in the single animal does not get detached (free) from the bodily life. With man, it gets free; it also keeps a formative principle, aside from the organic, physical substance; it can form a new bodily life again after the time between death and a new birth. Only because being seized immediately by the formative principle, can man's spiritual-soul being have that independence which enables him to go from life to life, which enables him to pass his being in repeated lives. On the other hand, we see that the intense connection with the form of being which had to be produced in animal between alternative principles and living matter, brought it about that the formative principle, when the animal dies, is exhausted in the organic, and that animal's soul falls back again into a general, animal soul-life and continues, not individually, but in a general, animal-like way, in a living on of the animal's group soul, not of a single animal soul.

Thus we see that we have to seek the origin of the animal (like) in the fact that that which penetrates into man later and permeates him in a later state, penetrates into the animal earlier. The animal is, as it were, left behind by the continuous principle of development; it is a backward being compared with man, who is an advanced being. We can easily imagine how this formation came to pass through a simple comparison, if we picture to ourselves a liquid in a glass, in which a substance is dissolved in such a manner that we cannot distinguish it from the liquid. If we let this solution stand, then a sediment deposits itself and the finer liquid remains. In this way we have then to imagine the whole progress of earth evolution as the duality of the spiritual forming principle and the living substance below. And in the spiritual principle the formative principle for man is contained likewise. But for man the formlessness in this living substance remains the longest. For the animal, the shaping happens earlier so that in a time when man has, as it were, preserved himself still above in an unformed, thinner, finer substance, the animal being below is already consolidated and lives on in such a way that below it can only get at more and more rigid forms, which change in the course of time. Over against this man, relating to the form, can be traced back only to that which is originally in a formless living, but into which the spirit works as a motive principle and brings it gradually to the present figure. Progressing further on, we also have to imagine the animal forms such that they are not produced from a single animal form; but while here and there certain animals formed themselves, others remained behind that formed themselves later; others again descended still later, etc. And then man descended latest.

It is remarkable (peculiar) that that which now has been said is entirely explained in such books as for instance those by Haeckel if we read them in the correct way. Indeed, it is stated that in his external appearance man is to be traced back to the animal. But if we continue the scale (trace back the scale to its source) we see that man at last is to be traced back to something which cannot refer to the present earthly conditions, but to imaginary living beings. And just so with animals—we find those beings to which Spiritual Science points out as hypothetical beings—also in Haeckel's pedigree—only these trace back not to something formed, but to something formless. It is now not possible to argue this further, but it results from my Occult Science that that which presents itself now as earth has developed downward from earlier spiritual stages. That results in one not being able to say at all that Spiritual Science invents again, after all, only something unknown. No! At last the earth is traced back to earlier planetary stages of being, just as man, relating to his present life is traced back to earlier lives. And going back to earlier stages we find as the starting point of all life and of all matter, not only a living entity, but also a spiritual one. We recognize as the starting point of all life the spirit, which we experience in us ourselves. Thus we trace back foundations to the spirit, which is something we have in ourselves, that means to something known, that is in ourselves, while external science traces itself back to something unknown. Spiritual Science is in another, different position as is the present hypothetical doctrine of evolution. Spiritual Science traces evolution back not to something unknown, but to something which has been there, been present, as spiritual, and that also today can be experienced as spiritual. Only the spiritual living in us discloses itself in the same manner as it does in our glass; the thinner liquid is segregated from the more solid substance. The finer spiritual in man even disclosed itself as separated, secluded, just like the finer substance in the glass is segregated from the more solid one, which has been deposited.

Thus we must trace back the animal world to the fact that man, in order to cultivate his spiritual nature as he has it today, had to begin with to separate from the whole animal world, so that he could develop himself as a finer spiritual being, above the basis of the animal world, just as in our comparison, the finer substance reveals itself when it has separated out the more solid substance below, on the bottom. Today these events can be pointed out only inasmuch as they demonstrate the origin of the animal world. It must be left for another lecture to explain in detail how the spiritual and soul nature (Seelische) developed later. Still it must be mentioned that the facts of immediate sense perception do not at all contradict this principle, and that it will arrive at the knowledge that progress really could not be otherwise than that set forth today—because do animals present themselves to us so that we need to speak about a special spirituality, only present in man? On the contrary! It will reveal itself to closer observation that there is sometimes much more intelligence among the animal world, and that man must first gain his intelligence, and that perhaps man's priority to an animal exists in the fact that he can achieve his little intelligence. Everywhere we look into the animal world—with the structure of the beaver's dam, of the insects, with the wasps, etc., we see intelligence at work, spirit holding sway, which makes use of the animals. We cannot say that this intelligence is in the single animal. We only need to refer to how certain insects take care of their offspring—there we see that we have a super-sensible intelligence, ruling the species of animals, objective for the animal world, like matter itself is objective for the animal world. This we can perceive when the insect deposits its eggs so that the larva must live in quite different circumstances of life; perhaps the insect itself has lived in the air—the larva must live at first in the water. The insect doesn't know at all the conditions in which the larva must live; thus only an instinct, ruling it, can guide it to deposit the eggs there where the larva can live. Or let us observe animals such as the beaver, etc., which form with their organization, form what we can call outer architecture, grown from within themselves—then we are not far from admitting according to the laws of external observation that intelligence works into animal substance itself. When we look at man, we see that after he is present he has to appropriate, at first, those faculties which are already formed into animals. He is not so far advanced that he has within himself that which the animals have already formed in themselves. That is a measure by which we can see that the animals are formed earlier and that the forming of man is still going on after he is already born. Thus it is no proof that man originated from the apes when the natural scientist Emil Selenka found that the ape nature, in its embryo stage, is much nearer to man's figure, than the later ape's figure. On the contrary, we can assume from this fact that the plan for man's figure was a more original one than that for the ape's figure; only that man realizes his figure as late as he enters into earth evolution.

Everywhere natural science shows in its facts that that which Spiritual Science has to say is proved, confirmed, just through the most advanced science. Yes, we could go even farther—I don't shy away from doing so!—and show how natural science today brings to light, as it were, something against their theories, which furnishes full evidence for Spiritual Science. Just if we yield to such results of research as those about propagation of lower animals through the brothers Oscar and Richard Hertwig in 1875 (what later on is confirmed many times) that the principle of fertilization; for instance with the eggs of the sea-hedgehog (echinus)—can be replaced through the influence of acids, that consequently a fertilization can come about out of a seemingly purely inorganic process—it must be said that processes which today are bound to the principle of heredity can only be imagined, and can happen in such a way that they present themselves outwardly, while they have presented themselves quite differently in olden times. Thus we can speak very well about the fertilization of the living nucleus of the earth (which was unformed living matter) by the spiritual formative principle flowing around it, by agreeing with the facts of natural science, so that the living had fashioned (formed) itself out of the formative principle, and that then the lifeless separated from the living which was the uniform substance of the entire earth.

Contemplating the origins of the animal world it becomes clear to us that in truth the entire earthly existence reveals itself in such a way that we can understand it only along the lines of Goethe, who has said, but only by way of a hint, in such a way that results concerning the origin of man and animal, have reality for the spiritual researcher. For if we turn our gaze to the whole world, by what means, in truth, does all that which surrounds us gain its real worth, its value? Only, as Goethe says, through mirroring at last in a human soul. For Spiritual Science the natural earth process shows itself really progressing from the oldest forms to the youngest ones, in such a way that everything is composed towards presenting man as the flower of the earth form—as that which finally must be brought forth out of the earth process, as likewise blossom or fruit is brought forth, finally, out of the plant. Thus from the contemplation of the origin of the animal world as a fundamental conviction of spiritual-scientific knowledge, results what we can consider in the following words, enlightening the human being, awakening the consciousness of the dignity of man, which is built up on the basis of every other being (alles uebrigen Daseins), and at the same time really imposing on us a responsibility: because we could become man only because the whole rest of earth evolution was aimed at us, we must prove ourselves worthy of this earth by endeavoring to progress from one stage of perfection to another: for evolution shows us that it is aiming at the shape of perfection of man. And that imposes on us the obligation that binds us not to stand still, but to move upwards to more and more sublime forming of spiritual life. This spiritual life which man carries in him today could be built up only on the basis of what is lower by pushing off what is material. So we must likewise assume that we must push off and leave to lower elements that which we carry in us today in order to develop a still higher spiritual life in us. Considering this, we can say that it is true for man, but also establishes what follows as his highest duty:

The elements let permeate themselves
By forming spirit,
They must receive
The last impulse of power of the spirit;
To clothe the human being
Into spirit form and soul life!

Dear attendees,

At the invitation of the local Free Student Body, I would like to speak to you today about the nature and task of the anthroposophically oriented worldview. In a few introductory words, I would like to point out, above all, that this anthroposophically oriented worldview seeks to be in full harmony, firstly, with the most essential cultural demands of the present and - as far as one can recognize them - of the near future. Above all, however, this world view also seeks to be in complete harmony with what has emerged over the last three to four centuries for the development of humanity through what is called the scientific world view. It is fair to say that this anthroposophically oriented worldview, which is still viewed by many people today as nothing more than a sect, the quirk of a few unworldly people, seeks to listen very carefully to what is most deeply moving our time, and to grasp very intensely, so to speak, a matter of conscience for our time, and even more so for the near future.

May one not say, esteemed attendees, that for about three to four hundred years, through that which is scientifically oriented world view, many of the old ways of thinking that satisfied the human heart and mind have been has brought man into conflict with man himself, that much that was sacred to centuries, to millennia, has had to be discarded, that science has shown as illusion what older worldviews had counted among their most valuable possessions? And is it not clear from the hardships and catastrophes of our time that the moment has come, the moment in world history, when this scientific world view must now, so to speak, also fulfill what many have expected of it for a long time: that it must once again open up a path to those spiritual heights without which man cannot live after all and from which the old path has taken him? With this question, ladies and gentlemen, the anthroposophical world view would like to be taken very seriously. Now, I am certainly under no illusion that in the short time of a lecture I could convince anyone in this hall of what anthroposophy actually strives for. In a sense, I will only be able to hint at some of the paths that are being taken in this field. And I will be able to suggest a few things regarding the way in which research and questions should be asked in this field of anthroposophically oriented world view.

In its essence, anthroposophy is completely different from all other current scientific knowledge. And because its fundamental nature is different, especially from what is usually regarded as the only scientific knowledge today, it is misunderstood in many circles and, one might say, treated badly. In ordinary science, as in life in general, what can be experienced through the senses and what the mind, the intellect, can gain from this sensory world through observation of natural laws and the like is regarded as the sources of human knowledge. In this way, an attempt is made to gain an overview of what is in man's world environment. In this way, one tries to gain insights into man's own position and task within the world order. In a sense, one looks at the human being as he is born into the world, as he can be educated and taught in the ordinary sense of the word, and how he can then, on the basis of this being born into the world, look around scientifically or otherwise in life, solely on the basis of his abilities and qualities inherited as a human being, on the basis of what ordinary education produces.

Anthroposophy does not take this view. It appeals to something in the human being that is still actually a rarity in human nature today and that, when humanity fulfills its next cultural task, will have to assert itself in human culture in a completely different way than it is present today. Anthroposophy appeals to what I would call intellectual modesty. I often use a comparison to make clear what I mean by this intellectual modesty – this immediately leads us into the essence of what anthroposophy actually wants to be. If we have a five-year-old child and we give this five-year-old child a volume of Goethe's poems, for example, what will he do with this volume of Goethe's poems? It will probably play with it at first and then tear the book apart; in any case, it will have no idea of what this volume of Goethean poems is actually intended for. If we teach the child, if we bring it up, we will bring it to the point where, as an adult of 17, 18, 19 years of age, it will make a completely different use of this volume of Goethean poems. We can say that the five-year-old child had precisely the same relationship to the book as the seventeen- or eighteen-year-old. However, the relationship of the seventeen- or eighteen-year-old to the book is quite different from that of the child, because something has been cultivated in him, something has been drawn out of the depths of his inner being, and this also determines a different relationship to the book than before. Applied to the human being's relationship to nature, to the whole world, what emerges is what I would call intellectual modesty, namely, when the human being decides to say to himself, simply as a human being: however old I get, however I am educated and taught in ordinary life, I stand in relation to the whole of nature and to the whole of the environment in such a way that I relate to it as the five-year-old child relates to the volume of Goethe. And in order to behave differently, I must first bring up from the innermost part of my being something that lies deep within me. Then something will reveal itself to me that cannot be offered to me through ordinary sensory observation, not through the ordinary combining mind, as it is active in conventional life and becoming. That is the essence of anthroposophical world view: that one does not approach the investigation of things as one is, but that one first brings out something that is hidden in the human interior. And only after one has taken one's own development into one's own hands in a certain sense, after one has brought oneself further than one is by being born, by being educated and taught in the usual sense, after one has made oneself a different person, only then does one approach the investigation, the research of things. So, the transformation of the entire human soul life before the exploration of things, that is what initially constitutes the essence of what underlies the striving for an anthroposophically oriented world view.

And here I must say that an anthroposophically oriented world view is based on two cornerstones - namely, of scientific life. One cornerstone is the limits of knowledge of nature. In relation to the knowledge of nature, anthroposophy is based on conscientious research, which sets very definite limits to natural research itself, just as an anthroposophically oriented world view seeks to be in full agreement with everything that science legitimately brings to light. But we do, of course, necessarily come up against limits, not by dabbling in some area of natural science, but by immersing ourselves in it objectively and professionally.

And we must, after all, set ourselves certain concepts at these limits, of which I would like to present the two concepts of the atom or matter and force today, just to cite one example; many other examples could be cited. We then come to work scientifically with such concepts as force and matter, force and substance. Much philosophical thinking has been linked to such concepts as force and substance. In more recent times, people have even gone so far as to want to found a philosophy of “as if”, that is, they said to themselves, one cannot, after all, gain any very clear, luminous concepts of force and matter, and so one should conduct research in the wide sphere of phenomena, of perceptions, “as if” such concepts corresponded to a reality that one does not know, “as if” they had some justification. It may well be said that it is a desperate world view, this philosophy of “as if”, however plausible it may appear to some people today. We have arrived at one of the cornerstones of human knowledge when we come to this concept, to this borderline concept of knowledge of nature. In our knowledge, these concepts, when pursued only intellectually, become a kind of cross, a crux.

The spiritual researcher, the anthroposophist, now tries to deal with this concept in a completely different way than the ordinary philosophers. Ordinary philosophy seeks to continue the intellectual process even at the points where one has arrived at the boundaries of natural science. Spiritual science, as I mean it here, tries to start something completely different in the human soul. Once we have arrived at this borderline concept, one part of the methodology of spiritual science and spiritual research becomes apparent. This part consists not at all of confused or bad mystical meditation, but of systematic, well-structured, thoroughly strict and conscientious meditation. I would like to describe this meditation to you at least in principle. You can find more details about it in the literature, especially in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”. It is about the fact that one must practice again and again - and I emphasize explicitly, patience and energy are needed for these things. To do research in the chemical laboratory or in the observatory may seem difficult to some; it may seem easy to achieve something by systematically transforming the soul. But anyone who adheres to the truly strict method in this field knows that all research in the laboratory, in the clinic, in the observatory is relatively easy compared to those procedures that are imagined to be easier than they are, and that consist in a transformation of our soul life.

It begins with the fact that one initially places strictly comprehensible, simple concepts – let us say, for the time being, those that one has formed oneself, some symbols or the like – at the center of one's mental life. It does not matter, my dear audience, that these concepts, these ideas correspond to a truth, because what matters is what is effected in our soul life by these ideas. What matters is that, to a certain extent, we carry out a strict self-education, a strict self-discipline with these ideas in our intellect. We therefore place such concepts, which we can strictly survey, those that we have formed ourselves or that we have been advised to use by experienced spiritual researchers, at the center of our soul life. We try to shut out everything else from our consciousness and to concentrate solely on these clearly defined concepts. The danger is that at the moment we concentrate on such concepts, our bodily images and memories may indeed fly in from all sides, as if we were in a swarm of bees and the bees were flying towards us, and actually destroy our inner methodology. We have to expend ever greater and greater strength. And what matters is the expenditure of this strength; what matters is that we drive the will, with all our might, into the life of imagination, into the act of imagining, so that we actually grow stronger in this driving of the will into the life of imagination.

That is one side of strictly scientific meditation, or rather of meditation that leads to science: that we drive the will into the life of imagination. Such exercises cannot be completed in a few days. Such exercises require years of effort. One must return to them again and again. It is not a matter of completing these exercises in one day. One might say that a few minutes are enough for a day. But to return to them again and again, that is what it is all about. Then one finally experiences how the soul summons up quite different powers from its lowest regions than are summoned up in ordinary life and also in ordinary science. If one applies it by concentrating all possible volitional effort on such self-made volitional content, then after some time, as I said, I can only hint at the principle, the exact You can read more about this in my books. The possibility of approaching the boundary concepts of natural science, such as matter and force and the like, in a way that is not merely intellectual. I could also mention others.

Then the following happens: one no longer speculates, one no longer philosophizes at these boundaries of natural knowledge, but one experiences something at these concepts. Something takes place in the soul in the face of these concepts that encompasses experiences that we otherwise only experience when we love outwardly or when we are otherwise immersed in the struggles of our external lives. What matters, my dear audience, is that, by disregarding the external world, we undergo something within ourselves that leads us into a reality that is just as intense for us, that presents itself to our consciousness just as intensely as the external reality that we justifiably touch and work with our hands and feet is otherwise. And when we have worked our way through to a consciousness that is inwardly, in the intellect, willfully strengthened, through concentration and meditation, then what one can characterize as follows finally occurs: Just as one otherwise recognizes red as a color through external observation, just as one recognizes blue, just as one hears C-sharp or C, so, when one has worked one's way through in this way, no longer , no longer using the nervous system or the like as a tool, but by experiencing it at the merely mental level, one recognizes that there is a soul in itself - one knows this in direct consciousness.

At this moment, my dear audience, it is where one says the following to oneself through direct experience - I would like to suggest it through a comparison. Let us assume that we are walking along a path that is soaked, we see ruts in the path from carts, we see footprints. If we are reasonable people, it will not occur to us to say: These ruts in the soaked path are caused by forces below the surface that bring the earth into such a configuration that these ruts, these footprints arise. We will say to ourselves: There comes something to the earth's surface that is indifferent to this earth's surface as such, that comes to it from outside; carts, human feet have indeed gone over it, which are indifferent to what the earth forms out of itself. If we really come to know the inner configuration of soul life in the way I have described, then we will see everything that is the physical organization of the brain in such a way that we can say: This is not at all shaped by the inner forces of the bodily constellation, but rather the soul, which we have only just come to know, has worked from the outside in the same way as human footsteps or carts have worked in the softened soil.

In other words, dear attendees, one does not get to know the soul through speculation; one only gets to know it by gradually working one's way up to experiencing the soul, by leaving what ordinary life and ordinary science would like to consider the end — the intellectual, the concepts of perception — by leaving that to be the beginning. Once you have reached the point where you have experienced this soul life in this way in direct perception, then, through this method, through this kind of anthroposophical methodology, you are on the threshold of an experiential, tangible grasp of what I human preexistence, the spiritual-soul preexistence of the human being, because this kind of beholding does not lead to speculation about what is called human immortality, but to an immediate insight into preexistence. In the spiritual vision, one sees inwardly, in the soul, that which works in the body and configures the body. One beholds it, and in beholding it, one can also trace it back to before birth or, let us say, before conception. Thus, in its essence, Anthroposophy pursues the idea of immortality differently than ordinary philosophy. Ordinary philosophy seeks to deduce from what is experienced between birth and death that which extends beyond birth and death. Anthroposophy regards even the work of deduction as only a preparation; it seeks to live completely in the process of deducing the borderline concepts, so that it can experience what figures as the immortal in the human being, what is active in him. What fills the human consciousness becomes more active subjectively than we otherwise have it in consciousness. And that is what is really important – I will have to come back to this in the later part of the lecture – that above all, through this methodology of anthroposophy, the human being becomes more and more active. He actually ceases to passively surrender to the course of events, at most to what he has produced in the course of recent times through the arrangement of the experiment, whereby, however, he again passively surrenders to what the experiment tells him. All of this is certainly justified, and it is the last thing that spiritual science would dispute. But beyond that, anthroposophically oriented methodology elevates itself to active thinking, to a thinking that, in the very act of thinking, directly grasps the immortal essence of the human being. I know how much can be said against this experience, which must take the place of ordinary discursive reasoning, but only to the extent that this can be justified philosophically - I will come back to this briefly. I just wanted to show, on the one hand, how this part of anthroposophical methodology, which is based on an evaluation of thinking and on the will's effect on the intellect, actually leads to a truly essential knowledge of the preexistence of the human being. That which is immortal is grasped, which exists in spiritual worlds before conception, before birth, and which cannot be explained from the physical, because it proves itself to be that which works on the physical, and because precisely the physical, the bodily, results - as I will also show in an example in a moment - as that which is shaped out of this spirit.

The second important part of the anthroposophical method consists in approaching one's own self in a different way than is usually the case. People usually approach their own self through what is called mysticism in the ordinary sense of the word. Just as the anthroposophist must no longer entertain illusions regarding the limits of knowledge of nature, and must see this knowledge of nature in its true form through the experience just described, so anyone who truly wants to become an anthroposophical researcher must also have no illusions about the deceptions and illusions of ordinary mysticism. Anyone who believes that they can look into the human soul in the way that mystics of all times have described it, and as is often hinted at in religion, will not truly come to know the human self. My dear audience, there is no way to get beyond the element of deception in this way.

How much does a person really know of what he has heard here and there, say, in childhood? He needs only to have once lain in a meadow and heard a distant peal of bells. No sooner has this fact entered his consciousness than he has forgotten it again. Decades later, as a man, as an adult, he encounters some event in the world. Something appears quietly within this series of events, something that echoes the almost unnoticed peal of bells. And a whole series of images that one believes to have welled up from within are nothing more than a reminiscence of what we went through in early youth. Anyone who really endeavors to explore the human soul in a more rigorous way than is usual today knows how much human self-knowledge is subject to deception. He knows to what extent what the mystics of all times believed they were drawing from their inner being as some kind of power is nothing other than the transformed, perhaps nebulous, but in any case metamorphosed experience of an earlier age. Just as one must go through what I have just described in order to approach the limits of knowledge of nature without deception, one must not indulge in nebulous mysticism in the usual sense, but one must—again in a different way—systematically train the soul at the other cornerstone of human knowledge. And this can only be done by approaching something that one otherwise pays little attention to in life.

We experience our existence between birth and death from decade to decade, from year to year. We passively surrender to many things. We actively and willingly put ourselves into few things. Anyone who wants to become a spiritual researcher in the sense meant here must consider what I would like to call strictly systematic self-discipline as the second link in the path of knowledge. You have to resolve again and again – that is why the path of knowledge takes years, many years – you have to resolve again and again: You want to incorporate these or those qualities – as Nietzsche called it – “into yourself”. You want to make this or that out of yourself. — If I thus acquire the possibility of building a bridge, as it were, between the present and a point in time that may have been five, ten or fifteen years in the past, if I have incorporated something into my soul through my own activity for five, ten or fifteen years, then I am in a position to see the effect of what I have incorporated over the past five, ten or fifteen years – something that I have made my own through self-discipline. In other words, I then perceive how something has become something else today, how it appears as a new element.

If I succeed, dear readers, in bringing that which otherwise functions only as will into intellect, concept, representation – as I have thus brought the will into the intellect – then I must now bring the intellect into my life, into that volition which otherwise usually flows past me, as I passively surrender to life. I take my life into my own hands. In this way I try, as it were, to walk beside myself, to look at myself - you just have to do it with the necessary naivety, then you won't lose your naivety of life either. Through such processes one thus becomes, as it were, one's own double. And one arrives at making the life of the will something that one observes, as one otherwise merely observes external nature. If you manage to duplicate yourself in this way, to make yourself into a spectator and an actor at the same time, you have achieved something that manifests itself in a very peculiar way. What you previously only saw as memory now becomes clear to you in a new way. The memory images bring what one experienced ten, fifteen, twenty years ago, and so on, into the present. Now one experiences something quite new, which seems like a transformation of memory.

But lest I be misunderstood, I wish to state explicitly: Of course – in all other respects one retains one's ordinary memory; only for spiritual research does one experience the transformation of memory that is to be described. One experiences something like this that one otherwise only experiences in space. In space, let us say, one walks along an avenue. One turns around: you see not only the images of the trees you have passed, no, you see – albeit from a different perspective than before – the trees themselves. In the same way, it rises in consciousness. You look back on your life, but now not just by having the images, the phantasms of the past, but you recognize - just as when you look around in an avenue in space - from the different perspective that you survey life in the immediate present, as if time had become space. What is otherwise memory becomes a completely new mental power, a looking into time. And only now, in a certain sense, do we gain real insight into that mysterious element in our own being, which is just as little known to us as the content of sleep, of dreamless sleep, is known to ordinary consciousness. We gain such insight into the nature of the human will, and we actually gain the opportunity to see this nature of the human will at work in the physical body. And by getting to know the will in this way as transformed memory, one gains an immediate insight into the other end of life, into the post-existence, into that in us which carries us out through the gate of death and into a spiritual world. Again, it is through the development of a very special soul element into an immediate experience that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science wants to penetrate to a comprehensive world view.

Now, my dear audience, by dealing with the two cornerstones of human knowledge in this way, knowledge of nature on the one hand, knowledge of the self on the other, by entering on the one hand into the soul itself through the limits of knowledge of nature – not through speculation, but through direct experience -, into the soul itself, and on the other hand, by entering into the element of one's own will - not by dabbling in mysticism, but by methodically developing one's memory through strict self-discipline - one awakens in the depths of the human being that which is immortal in that person. And that seems to me to be a continuation of what, although it is not the external scientific method of the present, is scientific education.

I may well confess that it seems to me that the one who, out of blind authority or out of complacency, does not stop at what science has to offer today - this admirable science - but who allows himself to be guided by science in the great question that science imposes on the soul, must, as I have described in my “Riddles of Philosophy”, feel impelled not only to speculate, to philosophize, beyond what science provides, but he must seek to further develop what he applies by experimenting, to a more active intellect, to a more active will. Then he attains to that intensity of soul life of which I have just spoken, where immortality is not speculated but directly beheld. And then, my dear audience, what is described in my book “Occult Science” or in some of my other books, and which to people today still seems like a wild fantasy, will gradually come about as a matter of course, I believe, precisely because of the enigmatic nature of science itself. How do we go about understanding natural science? By strict methods! And anyone grounded in anthroposophy will be the very last to fail to recognize these strict scientific methods. But you see, for example, we are faced with the following. We say to ourselves: We are developing certain geological ideas; and we are trying to gain a picture of the geological stratification of the earth in the present day, based on the starting points of Lyell and other geologists. We then try to gain a picture of the past from this picture, using the well-known methods, by going back millions of years – more or less, of course, the time periods are disputed. Other researchers go millions of years forward by prophetically anticipating this or that about the end of the earth from a physical or geological point of view. We do indeed form a picture of the development of our Earth, and with the Earth, the human being has developed. Now, however, I cannot give a complete insight into the results of spiritual scientific research in the short time available in a lecture. If you look through the relevant literature, you will see that certain things are available. I can only suggest and hint at the way in which things are being sought.

Take the example of the human heart examination. We get a picture of how this human heart transforms in the organism over five, ten years and so on. We can then deduce what the human heart was like thirty years ago and can also do this for a person who is forty years old, but not for someone who is only twenty years old. However, we could take the mere deduction further and could proceed similarly, using a very strict mathematical method. We could ask ourselves: What was this heart like thirty years ago? We would not be using a different method from that used by today's geologists if we were to say about this or that layer of rock what it was like millions of years ago, because we forget that the Earth may not have existed before these millions of years, just as man was not there as a physical being at that time. And when we today, according to some laws of physics or geology, assume something prophetic about some end of the earth after millions of years, it is as if we now calculate, according to the degree of change that the human heart has undergone in five years, what that heart was like in a person three hundred years ago.

At first glance, this appears to be something tremendously paradoxical. And yet, my dear audience, there is something quite justified for the one who does not delve into the present-day admirable science with his intellect or with what authority has brought him up to, but with his whole soul and with an unbiased human nature. And this science of the present itself can benefit greatly from the kind of approach I have suggested, for it is indeed still the case today that one has few co-workers in the field of spiritual science. Those who one would wish to have as co-workers are truly not laymen or dilettantes – the matter is much too serious for that. As co-workers I would most like to have those who have immersed themselves for years in some field of science, who have learned to work scientifically and who have retained in this scientific work all the impartiality necessary to then reshape the human powers of knowledge and soul forces in the way I have indicated, so that one can then enter into that which leads to a much more concrete, truly realistic knowledge, for example, of human nature itself. Anthroposophy will be the best foundation for an anthropology that can be used for medicine and also for social science.

That is why it gave me such great satisfaction – and I mention this because it is very relevant to the matters I would like to discuss today – when I was able to hold a week-long course for forty doctors and medical students in Dornach, where we have established the School of Spiritual Science with an anthroposophical orientation in the Goetheanum. The course was about way in which the bridge between pathology and therapy can be built, which so many people, including doctors, long for today: how this bridge can be built through such an insight into the human being, which can be gained when we no longer think in abstract terms about the relationship between body and soul, but when we come to look into the concrete. I would like to give a small example of this, albeit a somewhat more remote example, but it will be able to point to the concreteness with which spiritual science wants to treat specifically scientific problems.

It is now the case that speculation is taking place about the relationship between body and soul; parallelist theories, interactionist theories and so on have been put forward. However, what is missing is a real insight into the soul and spirit on the one hand, which can only be achieved in the way I have described today, and into the physical on the other. The more materialistically oriented worldview suffers from the tragic fate of not being able to master matter. We cannot look into material processes since we have materialism, because the inner workings of material processes are spiritual, and one must first see the spirit in order to recognize material processes.

So I would like to show you, so to speak, more as a result of what one comes to in terms of knowledge of a developmental moment of man when one proceeds in a spirit-scientific way. We see how man grows through birth into physical existence. We then see how there is an important conclusion in a certain respect when the human being undergoes the change of teeth around the sixth, seventh or eighth year. This change of teeth is only understood in the right sense if we take into account the whole bodily, spiritual and soul life of the human being, as it changes in this important epoch of life. And we see – I can only hint at it – when we consider the soul, firstly that which I have already dealt with here in lectures that I have given more for lay people. We see how the child, who develops as an imitator until the change of teeth, becomes the being who likes to educate himself under the influence of the authority of his surroundings, how, with the change of teeth, the principle of imitation passes over into the principle of authority. But leaving that aside, if we are able to really look at this human soul life, if we have learned to deepen our observation of the soul - and one truly learns to deepen when one develops everything within oneself that I mentioned today as will and intellect training today, if we look at everything that happens to a person around the time of the change of teeth, then it is noticeable how what first grows in a person as the ability to remember undergoes a certain change with the change of teeth. It is noticeable how, from this period on, our imagination begins to take shape, how it begins to become continuously memorable ideas. And I could show many examples! But I would have to talk for a long time if I wanted to show how the transformation of the whole intellectual soul element shows itself purely empirically around the period of the change of teeth.

If one then pursues further what can be investigated in this field, pursuing it with that concrete empiricism that arises precisely from having sharpened one's soul eye through the method I have described , then one finds that the ability to push out the second teeth, so to speak, reveals something that works in the human being throughout the first seven years of life, finally pushing itself out and reaching a climax, a culmination, with the change of teeth. Now, as the teeth change, the soul becomes different. Concepts take shape. The entire ability to remember, which is of course present earlier, is transformed, and by extending the concepts of Goethe's metamorphosis theory to such developments, one recognizes how the soul-spiritual life has emancipated itself from the physical-bodily , how the same thing that later works in the realm of imagination, that is, in the intellectual, has worked in the body - has worked in a formative, plastic way - has reached its culmination in the change of teeth and, after the teeth have been pushed out, shows itself spiritually and mentally. In this way, one follows concretely, no longer abstractly, as one otherwise speculates about body and soul, this formative power, which one later looks at, directly at, when the person brings sharply contoured concepts, not phantasms, out of memory. One follows how it forms, how it drives the forces into the change of teeth. By extending the observation over time, one sees how the spiritual-soul works in the bodily-physical.

Then again, when one approaches the human being in the period of life when sexual maturity occurs, one notices how the will element in particular consolidates during this time from the change of teeth to sexual maturity. But it is still active in the body, and one can see from what occurs – in boys it shows in the change of voice, in girls it shows in a different way, but still – namely, how the will takes possession of the human organism between the change of teeth and sexual maturity. While the intellectual emancipates itself, becomes free with the change of teeth, and works independently, the will becomes free by puberty. I would like to say that a purely spiritual element connects with the body, so that this change, which occurs in the boy during the change of voice, clearly shows how the life of the will manifests itself in the body.

From these two elements that I have given, you can see how one approaches the human being through concrete observation with spiritual empiricism. But what I have shown there then leads from the human being out into the cosmos, and one learns to recognize it as one otherwise gets to know the external sensory content through sensory perception. Through this spiritual vision, one learns to recognize a deeper, but also a more essential element of the cosmos. For example, one learns to recognize what consists in the cosmic forces in which the human being is embedded, which is effective up to the change of teeth on the one hand, and up to sexual maturity on the other. In one case, it acts as an intellectual force, shaping the body until the teeth change, then it emancipates itself and acts on the other side as a volitional force, which takes hold of the human body intensely at sexual maturity.

Now one learns to recognize how that which, as it were, drives out the teeth, what works in the human organism so that it then passes over into the sharply contoured concepts of memory, is the same as what one can only call light in representation. But actually it is all that which bears the same relation to sensory perception as light bears to the eye. One learns to recognize how light is that which actually works in the human organism, and how through the power of light, which thus works in looking with the eyes - but actually it is only the representation, we could speak of the same element for all the senses - that which is otherwise experienced as heaviness is overcome. We see light and heaviness, light and gravitation fighting each other. The cosmic light, the cosmic gravitation is effective in the human being until the permanent teeth have come through. And then again one sees how from the permanent teeth coming through until sexual maturity, gravitation gains the upper hand, how the light-filled, which in turn only represents the rest of perception, is the content of sensory perception, but how gravitation achieves a victory , an inner victory, over this light-filled element and thereby forces the will into the human nature and thereby configures the human being inwardly with what then makes him sexually mature, and guides his organization towards his center of gravity.

This insight into human nature, dear attendees, this direct, concrete, empirical connection between the spiritual and the material, is what the anthroposophically oriented worldview offers. It is truly not some nebulous mysticism, but a rigorous method of research, not only as strict as that otherwise usual in science, but much more rigorous, because each individual aspect approached is accompanied by what the soul has made of itself, so that it sees something new in the old. In this way, what is recognized in man in an anthropocentric way is extended into the cosmic, without becoming anthropomorphic. It will be seen that it is a strict scientific method when something like this is developed, as I have been able to sketch out in my “Occult Science”.

It is easy for those of you, dear readers, who laugh at such a book because you do not understand all the effort that has been expended and all the paths that have been taken to achieve something like this. But something like this must be said in the present time. The materialistic orientation has led to the inability to recognize matter, but only to speculate about the connection between spirit or soul and body or matter. Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science should teach us to recognize the human being – to truly grasp him as spirit, soul and body – and from there open up the paths into the cosmos, because the human being is something that encompasses everything else in the cosmos. We can conjure up an event that occurred long ago but which we have experienced and which we carry within us in the form of an image — the event is no longer there — from what is in our soul, as an image in us. Because I was once with my mind, with my intellect and feelings and with my perception at this event in life, I can conjure it up. Man was present in all that has ever happened in the cosmos, and thus, when he grasps his whole being, he can really grasp something cosmic - and in a different way than if he had to achieve it externally. As I have described it, inner knowledge also provides a certain cosmology, so that anthroposophy expands into a true cosmology, as I have tried to present it in my “Occult Science”, which may still seem ridiculous to our contemporaries today, but which is based on a strict scientific method, only it has emerged from the nature of anthroposophical orientation.

Dear attendees, what may be described as the essence of anthroposophy can, in a sense, be justified philosophically. And anyone who has followed my writings from the beginning, as I tried to do in the 1880s, commenting on Goethe, working out an epistemology, as I tried to do in my little book “Truth and Science”, to establish the relationship between what human inner life is and what is outside in the cosmos, as I then tried to do in my Philosophy of Freedom, to extend this to a complete world-view for the human being, will find that a great deal of effort has already been expended, as far as has been possible to date, to philosophically justify what I would call higher, spiritual empiricism as spiritual science, as anthroposophy.

I must say that for decades I had to wage a stubborn battle against Kantianism – a stubborn battle against Kantianism, which, in my opinion, has misunderstood the epistemological problem and thus the fundamental philosophical problem of my conviction. I don't have enough time to go into Kant's philosophy or epistemology, but I can say a few words about what it is philosophically that is at stake when we really want to understand the human being. We can start by looking empirically at how man reaches this limit of knowledge of nature, how he comes to a cornerstone at this limit of knowledge of nature that has not yet been expanded anthroposophically, where he stakes the concepts of matter, force and so on. Yes, the point is that the one who is now able to investigate this limit of knowledge of nature by experiencing it, also comes to why man - and I ask you to forgive me the “why” at this point, it is to be understood as merely rhetorical, not teleological —, why man is organized in such a way that he must, at a certain point, impale concepts that are, as it were, obscure, inscrutable to ordinary consciousness.

If we were always able to look into the things of the world, to make them intellectually transparent, including human beings, we would not be able to develop in our human nature what we absolutely must have and develop for ordinary life, especially for ordinary social existence between birth and death: we would not have what lives in us as the element of love. Anyone who studies the connection between knowledge and love in depth will notice that this separation from things that have become intellectually opaque to us, which presents itself to us through the limitations of knowledge of nature, is necessary. It is necessary so that we can develop the power of love within us, in our entire human organization. Not what Kant raised in the “Critique of Pure Reason” and the like, but what we develop within us as the power of love, that is what prevents us from making things transparent in an intellectualistic way. We only attain intellectualistic transparency through the paths I have described today. The human being is organized in such a way that he must buy the power of love around the limits of knowledge of nature. But the human being is the being who, through the power of love, receives his true value and human dignity between birth and death.

And on the other hand, we have the other cornerstone, which some people so lightly want to overcome through a nebulous mysticism and which can only be methodically overcome through the self-discipline that I have described today: that cornerstone lies in self-knowledge. Yes, my dear audience, if we could always look into ourselves, if we could gain the knowledge that, as it were, turns time into space, that, in a changed time perspective, makes earlier events experienceable in a supernatural way in a spiritual vision, that tore away the veil of memory, as it were, and allowed us to look into the past and thereby also into the future in a certain sense, if we always had that, then we would see through it, but we would not have the power of memory, of recollections. We need this power of memory just as we need love in our ordinary human lives. Those who know what disruption of memory means for the continuity of the self, who know that this self is based on the power of unimpaired memory, will also be able to appreciate how this other cornerstone must be placed. The power that makes us a remembering being between birth and death is the only thing that makes it possible for us to tear this veil of memory using the spiritual-scientific anthroposophical method and to look into our own inner being in self-insight. So anyone who understands this organization, who, with real psychology, compares what occurs in memory with what is self-knowledge, knows that we must also have this other cornerstone in ordinary human knowledge and life. It is therefore due to our organization – in a somewhat different way than Kant described it – that we must first grow beyond what organizes us in ordinary life if we want to penetrate into the depths of nature that can be aspired to and longed for.

But then, my dear attendees, for this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, if it is inwardly alive on this path, something arises that is very daring today, very daring to express. But what use is it to leave such things unspoken when it depends on them? Anyone who looks at how we have to imagine the world today in terms of the thoughts and ideas that have emerged over the last three to four centuries can never bridge the gap between what arises in the soul as an ethical, moral, social and religious ideal and what arises from knowledge of nature.

On the one hand, there are natural phenomena. They lead us, albeit hypothetically or in the philosophy of “as if”, to a beginning, to an earlier state of the physical universe; they then lead us to metamorphoses of this physical universe, showing us how one law, or let us say two laws, but which are actually one, prevails in this physical universe. If these laws prevail in the way that today's knowledge of nature can imagine, then no bridge can be built to the other, to the ethical, to the social, to the religious ideal. And these two laws are the law of the conservation of energy and the indestructibility of matter. If the world in the universe outside, in nature, changes in such a way that matter is indestructible and force, in eternal preservation, only transforms itself, then - then our ethical ideals, our religious ideals, are nothing but smoke that rises, then they are our great illusions. And when the world has long since transformed its substance and its forces in a certain way, then those world experiences that we enclose within our moral ideals, within our religious ideals, and so on, will be carried to the grave, sunk into nothingness. These things are usually not pointed out. But what splits many souls inwardly in the present, what tears many souls inwardly in the present, that is more or less unconsciously present as a result of this complete failure to bridge the gap between knowledge of nature and spiritual grasp of the moral, of the religious, as a mood of the soul.

But, my dear attendees, if we experience our own intellect at the limits of knowledge, as I have described it today, then we see how our intellect also belongs only to a certain part of external existence , and that we cannot grasp the beginning of earthly existence with the intellect that we are only really getting to know in the experience described, because this intellect belongs to that which lies only after this beginning and which lies before the end. If we apply this intellect to the whole process, if we go back millions of years or millions of years forward, as geologists and physicists do, then we do the same as if we thoughtlessly talk, for example, about the transformation of the heart as it appears in humans before or after three hundred years. We must be clear about the nature of this intellect: that it does not come close to the other powers of knowledge that we have to acquire in the way described today.

With anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, no Rickert or Windelband theory of value is established, where values are supposed to assert themselves out of the blue, without reality. Rather, it opens up for us what we survey in the intellect. We feel obliged to somehow integrate value into the currents of being. But this will be completely impossible as long as we do not overcome the crushing law of the conservation of energy and matter. We must come to think of matter and force as transient. It is only an illusory world that has arisen from our intellect and that leads us to believe in the indestructibility of matter and the conservation of force. It is certain that 19th-century science could lead to nothing else. But for those who see through the world as it has been presented today, what substances and forces are, something that perishes like this year's plants, and what lives in us as an ethical ideal, as a religious idea, is something that we experience as a germ, like the germ in the flower of the present plants. We look at this germ, which is perhaps just a mere point at present; we know that it will be a plant next year when what is surrounding it now as a flower or as leaves has vanished. We see this outer world in a spiritual vision when we apply our intellect to it. We do not get to know it under the principle of the indestructibility of matter and the conservation of energy, but we get to know it as a dispersing one, and the germs in it are what prevails in our souls as a moral element, as a religious idea. What surrounds us today in a sensual way will be dispersed! What grows and thrives within us will be the world of the future, the cosmos of the future. In my opinion, only anthroposophically oriented spiritual science can lead to this bridge between spirit and nature, under today's conditions.

Dear attendees, I was allowed to speak these few stimulating sentences here at the request of the “Free Student Body”. I know that they cannot be conclusive or convincing, but they are intended only as a stimulus. However, because I have been given the opportunity to speak on behalf of the student body today, for which I am very grateful, I would like to point out that it is particularly natural for someone who has to look at the world today, who is himself at the end of his sixth decade, to look towards today's youth. In the hearts and souls of today's youth, one really sees the seeds of the future, for one looks back to one's own youth. Four decades ago – and this I would like to say to the esteemed young friends who invited me today – was when people of my age were young. We looked into the world back then, but we were dependent on it, in a sense, we looked into a world of illusions. We were dependent on it back then. It is true that many of the great achievements of external life still awaited people, but the civilized Europe that was present for us at that time also looked different than it does now. Now a man of spirit, Oswald Spengler, is writing about the decline of Western civilization. Back then, three or four decades ago, ladies and gentlemen, was the time when the motto “How did we get it so good?” was perhaps most prevalent – a time, however, when people were very much wrapped up in illusions. The strength of these illusions only dawned on some of those who were of that age when this modern civilization rolled into a terrible catastrophe in 1914. At that time, an infinite pain settled on the souls of the thinking, the waking elders, and they looked back on that time when they were not allowed to say - because the illusions were too great -: We need something that is not just a renaissance, but that is a naissance, that is the birth of a new spiritual life.

Now, after years of pain, now, my dear audience, I believe that life is different in youth. Now the great need is here, and now it is evident in all areas that one cannot indulge in the illusion that we have come so gloriously far. But now, I believe, there is something in every waking person, or in the one who can awaken, that leads him to the inner admonition: Use your will! In the external, objective world, everything points to decline. But the Spenglers, those who only speak of decline and even want to prove this decline, will be wrong if that fire asserts itself in today's youth, if that strength asserts itself in youth that wants to awaken the soul to create and to will, because only through the creativity and will of people who are fully aware of themselves can there be improvement today, not through speculating about forces in which we are supposed to believe. No, it must lie in activating the forces that can be found in our own will, in our own ability.

Therefore, I would like to end this lecture, for which I am very grateful to the esteemed student body for inviting me, with Fichte's words, which read: “Man can do what he should; and when he says, I cannot, he will not.” If we become aware of the spirit that shines towards us from the universe through spiritual vision, that wages its battles with gravity within us, then this spirit will inspire us to create, and then precisely from the present youth will emerge that which every alert person today must hope for, that which every alert person today must long for. Yes, we need not just a renaissance, we need a naissance of the spirit. It will come to us when today's youth understands and honors their task.

Dear attendees! When you look at all the circumstances of the present, at the hardship, misery, and hopelessness, and when you look at the causes from which all this has emerged, then, in my opinion, an unbiased view of life suggests itself that the first riddle of our present time is, so to speak, the most urgent riddle: How can humanity unite the paths of the soul with the paths of life so as to work together constructively on building our social and other relationships in the future?

Since I intend to provide an addition to some of the things that I have said from the point of view of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science here in Stuttgart for years, you will forgive me if I take up one or the other in a historical way today and thus perhaps give the impression that these links are sometimes more personal than what I have presented here over the course of many years. But that will only appear to be the case.

The starting point of my talk today is that I would like to point out how this very question: How can present-day humanity harmonize the paths of the soul with the paths of life? – how this question was in my mind when, at the end of the 1880s and beginning of the 1890s, I was working on my Philosophy of Freedom, published in 1894, as the basis of the world view that emerged for me over many years. For basically, the way it was presented by me at the time, this “Philosophy of Freedom” should already answer the fateful question of humanity posed at the beginning of our deliberations today. I do not intend to talk about the content of this “Philosophy of Freedom” today, but I would like to touch on the intentions underlying this writing with a few introductory words.

The underlying intention was to answer the question: How can a person, placed in the present, come to terms with the most important feeling, the most important longing of modern times, with the feeling of freedom, the longing for freedom, in the face of the great social demands of the present? And it is indeed essential, especially in this consideration of the nature of freedom, that we break with the whole way in which we have always asked about the justification of the idea of freedom, of the impulse for freedom. We have asked: Is man a free being by nature, or is he not? — This way of asking the question seems to me to have been superseded by the whole development of modern humanity for our time. Today, after what humanity has been through in the last three to four centuries, we can really only ask: Is man capable of founding a social order such that, as he develops from childhood to adulthood, he can find in it that which he is justified to call the freedom of his being? The question in the Philosophy of Freedom is not whether man is born free, but rather, in this writing, the question is whether it is possible for man to find something in the depths of his being that he can bring up from subconscious or unconscious depths into full, clear, bright consciousness, and whether he can cultivate a free being within himself through this bringing up. And this consideration led me to the conclusion that this most essential element in the development of humanity in modern times could only be based on two things: firstly, on what I then called intuitive thinking, and secondly, on what I then called social trust. And since I did not use these two words to describe something abstract or theoretical, but rather things of reality, things of life, what was meant in my writing was understood very, very slowly, because we live in a time of abstractions, as I have often stated here. We live in the age of theorizing. And when someone asserts something that comes only from a sense of reality and this assertion is then formulated as an idea, people confuse what has been taken from reality and clearly appears in the form of an idea with what lives in them as abstract ideas that have nothing to do with reality. And then they look at what can actually work in people as a real impulse, as something utopian or the like - especially those people who themselves only have utopian ideas in their heads, they see something like this as utopian.

What was the idea behind this striving for a universal education of humanity in the sense of the “Philosophy of Freedom”? It was this: that man can never become free if he only takes into his consciousness those ideas that have come to him for three to four centuries from the scientific world view, if he only fills himself with what can be learned from nature. Now, ladies and gentlemen, I have often said here that the objection is raised: But how many people today absorb into their consciousness those ideas that are borrowed from the observation of nature? People think that only a few individuals study natural science and that perhaps those who learn something from natural science recruit others who establish a monistic – or as it is otherwise called – world view, but that this still has no decisive influence on the broad masses of humanity today.

It is not so, my dear attendees, it is different. It is the case that, gradually, over the course of the last three to four centuries, we have entered into a spiritual life, into a life in general, which is essentially fed — even now, even in the outermost regions of the country, not only among city dwellers or among the so-called educated — by what flows through our journalistic, newspaper, and book literature: Without being aware of it, people absorb into their imagination what follows from fiction, popular science, and journal and newspaper literature. They fill their souls with it. They may go to church on Sundays and think they are good Catholics or good Protestants, they may indulge in the idea that they honestly believe everything that is proclaimed to them. But in what they are, so to speak, in their everyday lives, the form of their thoughts, the whole configuration of their imaginative life is shaped by what unconsciously flows in from all the sources I have just mentioned. We can determine this by a kind of crucible test:

I believe that a large number of you are of the opinion that a certain community wants to instill ancient religious ideas with very intense forces into the life of the present - ancient religious ideas. Who doubts, for example, that the members of Jesuitism are striving to instill ancient religious ideas into the life of the present? That is certainly the case when the Jesuits write about what they believe should be said on the basis of the confession, when they speak about what people should believe, when they speak about what expresses the relationship of people to the church, and so on. But when today the Jesuits write about natural objects, about objects of human nature as well, and believe they should take science into account, then what are these Jesuits? They are the most pronounced materialists. Anyone who follows what a Jesuit presents to the world as secular literature in addition to his theological and religious writing will find that the sole aim of this secular literature is to establish materialism in the broadest sense. One can even form very clear ideas about the why. From this side, efforts are made to remove everything that concerns the soul, everything that concerns spiritual life, from human research and direct human thought. People should not research these questions of the soul and these questions of life, but should devote themselves to what is traditionally available. Everything that concerns the questions of the soul and the questions of spiritual life is thereby set apart from what research is to cover. One must not look at nature, at the real, true environment of life, from the standpoint of the spirit, from the standpoint of the soul, because such research is unchristian from its point of view, is irreligious. But if one is not allowed to research life from a spiritual point of view, then research becomes materialism, because if one is not allowed to bring the spirit into research about matter, then the spirit remains outside of research about matter, and one has only the most blatant materialism at hand. Therefore, in addition to the assertion of all traditional ideas on religious or theological ground, you see the most blatant materialism when [besides theological literature] secular literature comes out of precisely this circle. Today it is of no use to indulge in delusions about these things, only an unbiased examination of them can help.

And so it can be said that even those who, so to speak, officially represent piety – how could one not believe that Jesuitism officially represents piety, of course – even those are, as a result of what has taken place in modern times, crass materialists. And so we can naturally always see that people go to church on Sundays and cling to what they do not understand, and during the week only understand that which comes from the basis of the materialistic world view. It is this state of affairs, as I have often emphasized here, that has led us into the distress of the most recent times. For it is easy to see that from such circumstances man cannot find those paths of the soul that lead him to the paths of life. From that which, on the one hand, is an uncomprehended spirit, handed down only traditionally and, to make matters worse, traditionally incorrectly, and from that which is mere materialism, the soul cannot build for itself those paths that lead it into a strong, secure movement along the ways of life.

That is why I tried in my “Philosophy of Freedom” to point out, on the one hand, how man must come to not only fill his consciousness with what he overhears from nature, what the newer natural science hands down to him in ideas and images, but it was pointed out that a source of inner life can develop in man himself. And when he grasps this source of the inner soul life, when he grasps that in the soul which does not come from outside through the observation of the senses, but what comes from the soul itself, then he educates himself through this grasping of the intuitive soul content to make free decisions, to will freely, to do freely. And in my Philosophy of Freedom I have endeavored to show that if we follow only what are called the natural impulses, we are always dependent; I have endeavored to show that we can become free only when we are able to follow what develops in the human soul itself as intuitive thinking, as intuitive, pure thinking. This reference to that which man must first conquer in his soul through self-education in order to truly partake of freedom, this reference then led me to the necessity of giving a continuation of what was indicated in The Philosophy of Freedom. I have tried to do this over the past decades through what I call anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. For if one has pointed out that man must draw the impulse of this freedom, intuitive thinking, out of the depths of his soul, then it must also be pointed out what comes out when man turns to this inner source of his soul life. And basically, the explanations in the anthroposophically written works of the following years are only a summary of everything that was pointed out in my Philosophy of Freedom. I have pointed out that there are paths to be followed in the soul to a thinking that does not merely intellectually combine the environment, but that rises from inner vision to the experience of the spirit. And I was compelled to show what one sees when one looks into the spiritual world.

However, this must be emphasized today: the nebulous mysticism that many people mean when they speak of this inner source of the soul, that unclear hovering and rambling that surrenders to inner dreams, was not meant. Therefore, however, two things emerged. One is that those people who did not want to turn to the subject of pursuing clear thinking, which is perceived as uncomfortable today, felt little attracted by precisely what lay in the direction of my “Philosophy of Freedom.” That is one thing that has emerged. The other thing that has happened is that, admittedly, a sufficiently large number of wishy-washers and windbags, who want to find everything through unclear, nebulous paths, have latched onto what should be striven for with clarity through anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. It has turned out that this attaching of themselves has brought about malicious spirits enough who today fight against that which people say with whom I have nothing to do and who, by fighting, attach to me everything that the Schwafler and Schwätzer, the nebulous mystics, pull out as their own making from what was meant as most intensely necessary for the culture of the present.

For that is what we particularly need on the one hand: clarity of inner striving – that clarity of inner striving that distinguishes the true natural scientist today in his outer striving, but a clarity of inner striving. That is what we demand on the one hand. Not darkness and twilight, not dim mysticism, but bright, clear clarity in all that thinking has to do with. That is one thing. The other thing that should be based on and what I wanted to express through my “Philosophy of Freedom” is social trust. We live in an age in which every individual must strive within his or her own consciousness for the direction of his or her own thinking, feeling and will. We no longer live in a time when people will endure being led only by authority; nor do we live in a time when people truly endure having their whole life organized. Organizing has only emerged as a kind of counterpoint.

In 1908, I tried to point out the underlying facts in the following way. I said: On the one hand, there has been a general human force for three to four centuries that people want to be more and more focused on their own individuality, that they want to find within themselves the impulses for all that they actually strive for in life.

But while this is deeply rooted in the unconsciousness of many people, something that they do not want to realize because, at heart, they are still afraid of their own innermost being, something has emerged – I would say like a shadow in a strong light – that is opposed to this striving for freedom, this striving for for the individual to live their life as they see fit, something emerged that actually worked against everything that had developed in human nature over long periods of time; something emerged in the last three to four centuries that worked against all urges of human nature, and it grew ever stronger towards the present. I said: While it is actually natural for people today to strive for individual fulfillment, one can see how, because they do not understand themselves in this most modern of pursuits, they actually set the polar opposite goal externally. I characterized it somewhat grotesquely in 1908, but I am sure that even today people will understand me as many did at the time. I said: It seems as if people were not striving for the development of individuality at all, but for such a state, social, social organization that makes nothing else possible for people than that they move in all ways and means of life in such a way that the doctor is on their left and the police - the doctor, so that he is constantly taking care of health, without the person having the slightest need to trust his own judgment about his health; the police officer, so that he ensures that the person finds the direction of life, without the person giving himself this direction of life.

Just follow what, despite all enlightenment, despite all the alleged sense of freedom, has been done in this direction in recent times, more or less unconsciously. It had to be said: If we continue in this direction, we will descend into a terrible decline. We can only ascend if we strive to cultivate in humanity that which gradually makes possible a social life together that is filled with complete mutual trust. We must regain faith in people; we must regain faith in the fact that, through appropriate education in the truly human sense, through the development of our humanity, it can become possible for us to get along with each other in the affairs of life that demand something more than just being able to pass each other on the street, and to do so in the same way that we get along with each other when we meet on the street. For when people meet on the street, one goes left and the other goes right; they pass each other without jostling. That is a matter of course. If the source in humanity that I speak of as the true intuition in my “Philosophy of Freedom” is opened, then one can found a social community in the higher matters of life on trust, just as one must ultimately found everyday life must be based on trust, because it is not acceptable for a policeman to approach two people who meet on the street and say, “You have to walk this way so that you don't bump into others.” This matter of course of everyday life can also be brought into the higher life, where the seriousness of life is present and cultivated.

Admittedly, two demands were made in that “Philosophy of Freedom” regarding the paths of the soul. One was that we should not be satisfied with the thinking that is popular today, that is popular in everyday life, that is popular in science, but that we should rise to the level of educating that in man which the new time wants: to a thinking that flows from its own source in the soul of man, to a thinking that is full of light and clarity in itself. And here I must again draw attention to the fact that traditional education leads to the opposite of what I have described as a necessary future requirement in my last lecture here.

If a person today is educated only by what comes to him from the traditions of the confessions and from the more recent world of ideas in the natural sciences, if he bases his thought forms of everyday life on nothing but on what he has absorbed from the popularized versions of the natural-scientific world view, from popular literature, from literature in general, from journalism and newspapers, then, ladies and gentlemen, then the human being becomes a materialist. Why does he become a materialist? He becomes a materialist because he does not free his thinking from the body, because he does not strive to find that source in his soul that frees the soul from the body; but by doing so, man falls into the dependency of the body in life.

Why are we materialists today? Not because we interpret life wrongly, but because we live wrongly. We live and educate our children in such a way that they do not think with their soul, but only with their brain, because the brain can become an imprint of thinking. We switch off the soul and think with the brain. No wonder that we then also speak about this thinking as if it were dependent on the brain; for the greater part of people today it is dependent on the brain. People are materialistic because they have become material with their whole life, because they do not strive to gain freedom through a thinking that breaks away from the body, that becomes free of the body - if I may use this expression today, which I have often justified. The one who wants to develop himself in the sense of today's demands must free his thinking from corporeality. He must transform his thinking into a free mobility of the soul that exists in itself. He must know what it means to think in the mere thought within, not to think in such a way that what is thought is only the result of the brain.

The question today is absurd: is thinking only a result of the brain or not? It is a result of the brain if we do not first detach it from that brain. Here I would draw attention to a whole tangle of errors in which present-day humanity is entangled, for we are now in a position, through what humanity has achieved in the course of historical development, to detach our thinking from the body with full, clear clarity. How do you detach it? Not by becoming a spiritual researcher oneself, although everyone can become one to a certain extent if they pay attention to what is written in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds,” in my “Occult Science” and other similar books. But it is not even necessary to do this. One need only accept from the spiritual researcher what he has to say to the world, just as one accepts from the astronomer, the chemist, the physicist what the astronomer, the chemist, the physicist has to say. One need only approach what is to be received with one's common sense. But then one will make a certain discovery. One will make the discovery: No matter how long you follow what the spiritual scientist says with your thinking, which has been trained only on natural science, on today's life, with your material thinking, then it seems to you to be fantasy, enthusiasm, something you have to reject. You only understand what the spiritual researcher says when you realize that thinking can be detached from the body, that you can immerse yourself in the thinking that is drawn in from spiritual worlds at birth or conception, that will be drawn into spiritual worlds when you pass through the gate of death. Detachment of thinking from the body is the first great goal on those paths that must be followed by the soul in today's life.

And another great goal is still necessary: when we train the will as spiritual science methodically describes it - it is presented in the books just mentioned - then this will take the opposite path to thinking. Thinking frees itself from the body, it breaks away from the body. But the will, precisely through the training described in these books, will take hold of the body all the more. For this is the peculiar characteristic of modern man, that he indulges in abstractions through the will, devotes himself to abstract ideals through the will, hears abstract commandments from the pulpits, but that these abstract commandments do not enter into his arm, not into his body, not into his actions. The second link in the chain of the education and development of humanity that is meant here leads to the human becoming one in what he experiences as the impulses of the will in his body itself. The spiritualization of the body with the will, the introduction of the will into everything sensual, everything physical and everything social, is what this spiritual science imparts as a second step.

And what becomes of ideals when they are, as it were, inoculated into the body in this way, according to the method of spiritual scientific thinking? They are seized by that which would otherwise be directed out of this body only towards the ordinary world of the senses. What gradually awakens in our body during childhood, sensual love, becomes, when a person is seized by spiritual science, so that all ideals too do not remain mere abstraction, that they do not remain mere thoughts, but that they are loved, loved with the whole human being. It becomes so that one loves the spiritual that underlies our morality, our ethics, our morals, our religious impulses, as one loves a loved one, so that what would otherwise remain abstract becomes completely concrete like a being of flesh and blood.

Therefore, Kant's categorical imperative, which already disturbed Schiller, had to be overcome by the “Philosophy of Freedom.” Because this categorical imperative intrudes into human life like something to which one submits. And what Kant says, proceeding from a consciousness that must be overcome today if we want to make progress: “Duty! thou exalted, great name, thou that dost not connote anything complaisant, anything that implies ingratiation , but demands submission,” you who ‘lay down a law... before which all inclinations are silent, even if they secretly work against it’ - that must be replaced by the other: Freedom, you wonderful spiritual construct that encompasses everything, to which my humanity would like to surrender in love! Schiller was disturbed by the inhuman categorical imperative of Kant, and he said: “I am happy to serve my friends, but unfortunately I do it with inclination. And so it often bothers me that I am not virtuous.” — “There is no other advice, you must try to despise it, and then, with disgust, do as duty bids you.” Schiller sensitively saw all that was philistine and inhuman in this categorical imperative. He did not yet live in the time when it had to be pointed out — as it has in the present — that what is to be sought in spiritual science combined with the human being, and what makes what is to live spiritually in us an impulse of love, must be sought beyond all natural foundations in spiritual foundations. When such an impulse of love becomes the social driving force among people, then the social community is based on trust. Then the relationship between people is such that what happens between them happens through the experience of each individual person, not because people live like a herd of animals and everything that should be the direction, the path of their lives, is ordered and arranged for them from above by some kind of organization.

And so we can say: In the early nineties, I strongly wanted to raise the call for something with my “Philosophy of Freedom” that today is being counteracted by the terrible, murderous opposite in Eastern Europe, and from there contagiously in many other places, and across a large part of Asia.

We have just entered into social conditions in modern times that — out of perverse human instincts — sought the complete opposite of what should have been striven for out of the knowledge of the true, deeper goal of modern humanity — that is the terrible 'tragedy of the latest times. But it is also the absolute necessity of the latest times for a striving towards the future that we recognize: the social order must be built in such a way that it can only be built on free thinking, on trust, on what Goethe meant when he wanted to define duty and said: “Duty is when I love what I command myself.

Dear attendees, when an education works for the paths of life and the paths of people's souls in such a way that these people, out of a keen interest in their environment, know how they should relate to other people, in that their whole existence is imbued with human dignity, only then can the ideal of modern times be fulfilled. Not through any organization, because it takes away so much of what people today must strive for if they follow their nature, and that must lead not to freedom but to bondage and decline.

And I have never made a secret of the fact that, in advocating the 'Philosophy of Freedom' and then the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science built on it, I never made a secret of the fact that I did not care about this or that content, about this or that detail. I have always spoken with a certain irony of those for whom the main thing is to hear: How many parts does human nature consist of? What can be found in this or that region of the spiritual world? — I have always spoken with a certain irony about such endeavors. On the other hand, it was always important to me to answer the question: What happens to the whole human being, to the human attitude, soul, body and spirit, when this person strives not to think as mere science gives it today, not to will as the organizations inoculate it, but to think and will as it is in the sense of the “Philosophy of Freedom” and anthroposophically oriented spiritual science? I always pointed out that thinking, simply by absorbing this spiritual science, becomes agile, that it opens up interest widely to the affairs of the present, that it provides a free and unbiased view of what is necessary and of what is holding back our progress in human development.

That there is much that holds back our necessary progress in human development - I may say that it came to me early on, a good forty years ago, when I got to know, through a student of Gervinus, such people who, within German intellectual life, and who, under the impressions made on him by the revolutionary years around 1848, wrote his History of German Literature and his History of the German People in the 19th Century. When delving into Gervinus' history of German literature, one still says today: He actually set the guidelines that all later literary historians followed. He set the broad lines according to which German antiquity, the German Middle Ages, Minnesang and Meistersang, the early days of the German classical period are to be judged. But he also set the guidelines for a healthy assessment of the Goethe-Schiller period. Some of his views may be considered pedantic today – but those who followed him are even more pedantic. And some people today who believe themselves to be at the height of a particularly modern, expressionist era really show through their snobbery a pedanticity that is much greater than that of the old traditions, but I do not want to defend their pedanticity. But there was something strange about Gervinus, this Gervinus, who became quite bitter in the 1770s, so that – despite the fact that he was owed so much – he caused much offence to those who under the auspices of these Siebziger Jahre believed they were sailing into the golden age of Germanness and who, in any case, had no inkling of what was to come from the seeds that were already present in that age.

What did Gervinus proclaim as his own well-intentioned conclusion in his history of German literature? He proclaimed the remarkable fact that German poetry ended with Goethe's death. — Just think, my dear audience, the one who first described this German literature with such deep love, he stated at the end of his description that the German people should no longer listen to what comes from all sorts of lyricists and the like, but that they should become aware of what has emerged from the deepest essence of Germanness to the surface until 1832. Beyond that, Gervinus believes, the German people must no longer devote themselves to lyric poetry and drama, to fiction, but to politics, to practical action. The time for practical action has come. In a strange way, the first seed of this came to me; I felt it more than forty years ago, when I received the whole of Gervinus's teachings in this way from Karl Julius Schröer, my dear old friend Schröer, at the Technical University. At that time, I felt something that was a seed of another, which, I would say, is now fully developed.

There were a good number of people like Gervinus who, based on a largely justified insight, said that the time of inward contemplation, the time when one withdrew from practical life and strove for spiritual heights, was over. It was now a matter of devoting oneself to practical life. But by observing this germ one could already feel something: that all these people who spoke in this way pointed to practical life in a very abstract, unrealistic way, that they regarded the old ideals as fulfilled, so to speak, and pointed to a new, practical life, but for this practical life they had no impulsive ideas, no impulsive forces. For if one asked Gervinus, for example: What is the spiritual content of what you described so beautifully until 1832? One was given a vast, grand tableau in the presentation. If one asked: What should live in the hearts, in the souls of those people who are now to move out into practical life, who are to lead this practical life, who are to find the ways of life from the ways of the soul? There was nothing, no new ideals were there! And the thought had to arise in the soul: First of all, the world, the spiritual world, must be found, from which the new ideals for a new practice of life can be found; this spiritual world must first be scientifically fathomed, just as the natural world has been scientifically fathomed for three to four centuries.

And basically, the time has shown that the world has remained without drawing from these spiritual sources, that it wanted to establish practice, but practice without spirituality - and this desire to establish practice without spirituality has led us into today's time of decline, into a time of need, misery and hopelessness. And many a thing has been said that repeatedly points to where we are actually heading. Yes, many things have permeated the lectures that I have been privileged to give here in Stuttgart for two decades, many things that seemed necessary to me to bring to people's consciousness from anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, if there is to be an upward development – an upward development not through cannons and guns, but through a practice of life that is supported by spirituality, but by a spirituality that must first be created anew. And here today I may point out something that I have said from the most diverse points of view as belonging to our spiritual science.

I have said: if someone applies the same approach, which has come to us from natural science and which fills our thought forms with natural scientific formations, if someone applies this to history, then they see only that which leads to decline in history. For in history there are always forces that bring about decline. And if you follow history only with the methods that are common in science, as for example the English cultural historian Buckle did and those who followed him, then you see in history only that which leads to the downfall, then you see only the evening glow of history. In order to see what has brought about the ascents in history, it is necessary to look into the spiritual world. That which brings about the ascents in history are impulses that arise from the spiritual world. I have already pointed out here that, for example, through Gibbon we have an excellent history of the decadence of Romanism written in the age of natural science. But what we still lack today is a historical account of what was the impulse of Christianity in the declining Roman world. One can describe what perished in Romanism with a scientific way of thinking; but one cannot describe what arose in Christianity with a scientific way of thinking. I have pointed this out. And what follows from what I have pointed out? It may seem to follow only in ideas, only in thoughts, but in reality in terms of the ways of life? What follows from this?

This follows: If someone were to appear in our age, in which natural science has taken hold of all circles and minds, right down to the circles of the Jesuits, as I have indicated, if someone were to appear and give a life-historical account from this natural scientific spirit, what would he have to say? He can only see phenomena of decline, because he regards our Western culture from the perspective of natural science. What would such a person write if he were to write about the present from a scientific point of view? He writes: “The Decline of the West”. And have we not - in contrast to all healthy thinking in spiritual science - now also received this terrible literary product: “The Decline of the West” - a morphological historical view by Oswald Spengler. My dear audience, the only way to understand how this could be possible is to realize that those who are saturated with a purely scientific way of thinking can only see the signs of decline, so that they must prophetically predict: the whole culture must perish.

But must it not go under if all people think as this Spengler thinks? Just as one must become a materialist if one does not detach thinking from corporeality, so one must think about Western culture as Oswald Spengler thinks if one looks at this culture of the West only from a natural scientific point of view. But if everyone looks at it that way, if everyone believes that we must perish, then we will perish. That is why I call this book a terrible book. For those who are infected by these ideas, by these impulses, and who take them up in an honest way, must become bearers of decline from the deepest depths of their soul; they must enter soul paths that lead to the life paths into the abyss. From time to time we must look at such phenomena, because only they show us the depths of human life in which the phenomena of decline are present today, and the depths to which the paths of the soul are prepared that rush down into the abysses of the paths of life.

Now, anthroposophically oriented spiritual science faces such things. It keeps its gaze fixed on that which is rooted in the spiritual world by the human being. Of course, this is most attacked in itself, that it asserts that the human being can, if he only develops the powers of the soul present in him, come to the contemplation of a spiritual world. Today this is brusquely rejected from almost all sides as enthusiasm, although one could easily follow that those paths to the spiritual world - which I tried to open in my book “How to Obtain Knowledge of Higher Worlds?” and in my attempt at meditations on self-knowledge and so on - that these paths are just as safe as those that lead into the fields of mathematics with absolutely clear, sharply defined thinking. Only in this spiritual research one does not only think, but also other, more real powers of the soul than in mathematics come into consideration in this research.

There this spiritual research must indeed speak about the spiritual world; it cannot place itself on the foundation on which many traditional creeds are based today. What do these traditional creeds proclaim? One thing they proclaim, for example, is something that has been fully established by spiritual science: the indestructibility of the human soul when the body is returned to the earth, the transition of the human being into the spiritual world when the human being passes through the gate of death. But it is not enough just to come to such conclusions; it is also important how these conclusions are cultivated in the human being. And how is the idea of immortality cultivated today? By appealing to the selfish instincts of the human soul's journey. Read the countless sermons, read the countless reflections on this subject – you will find everywhere speculation that man has an egoistic interest of the most intense kind, that he does not perish with death. Basically, all talk about immortality is a concession to this egoism of the soul. The way in which the idea is presented is characterized by this. And what is sharply denied in the face of this half-immortality is the other half, the part that Origen still had expressed, although he was considered a heretic by the church: the pre-existence of the soul, to which the unbiased spiritual researcher returns. What do today's confessions have to give? The conviction that two people come together in the world, produce a child and that the soul is then newly created from the spiritual world, that every time a sensual process takes place here, a spiritual process is added from the spiritual worlds.

Dear attendees, this idea is not a Christian one. This idea is an Aristotelian one. It was Aristotle who, out of the decadence of Greek thought and out of an uncomprehended Platonism, taught this coming into being of the soul with the body and thus the one-sided immortality only after death. And so the Christian denominations, by denying pre-existence, do not represent something Christian, but rather something Aristotelian, something that in its depths has absolutely nothing to do with Christianity. And when spiritual science, as it is meant here, comes along and reveals the whole state of affairs, then the “Trauben” like the pastor, the professor Traub, come along and declare that spiritual science is merely copying. No, it is not like that. In truth, with regard to certain elementary things, one agrees with old truths just as one agrees today with the old Euclid in geometry. But people like Traub are only too willing to throw mud at anything that existed in older times, because if one studies impartially, one would recognize where their own wisdom comes from. Their wisdom is borrowed from all the things they want to bury so that no one will find out about it. That is why they make people think that anthroposophy draws from gnosticism and the like, so that people think of gnosticism as something dangerous and do not look for themselves how this gnosticism has flowed not into anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, but into the modern content of creeds, by bringing into decadence what lived in gnosticism.

This spiritual science must point out precisely how man descends from the spiritual world, how it is not a whim of the physical world that causes the divine-spiritual world to create a soul for what human beings procreate on earth, but how the soul descends from the spiritual world with experiences that it has had there; it must point out precisely how physical life is a continuation of spiritual life. Spiritual science adds full, complete immortality to half immortality. If one walks this path, one recognizes how the spiritual flows from spiritual worlds into the individual human being. One also recognizes how the spiritual flows from spiritual worlds – but through the human being – into cultural advances, and how these cultural advances have very specific, distinct epochs and periods. Today we are in the period that, in terms of our conception of culture and civilization, must lead to something entirely new. That is how it is.

When you read a book like Oswald Spengler's, which is quite a thick volume, you can see how he looks at individual cultures from his scientific point of view. He says: Cultures are always developing; they have had a childhood, an adolescence, a maturity, a death. This was the case with oriental cultures. They emerged, grew, matured, and died. It was the same with Greek culture. And it is the same with our culture; and our culture is now in the process of dying. Because, he says, we are compelled to look at cultures in the same way that we look at an oak or a pine tree. An oak tree emerges, grows, matures, and dies. We look at cultures in the same way. Yes, we look at them in the same way when we are completely imbued with a purely scientific way of thinking. If we get to know the spiritual world and learn to cultivate it in the right way, then we also know how to look at cultures differently.

Then what I gave here during my last stay in Stuttgart as an outline of the historical life of mankind will come into our souls, in which I pointed out that once upon a time, in primeval times, people had an instinctive knowledge, an instinctive spiritual life, but something higher than we can achieve today with our intellectuality. Compared with what was there at the beginning from the human instincts of wisdom, we are today, however, in an epoch of decline. But if we understand, as spiritual science means, to open the source in our souls for free, enlightened thinking, for freedom, which is love at the same time, for social trust, for spiritual insight at all, then what lives in us, what penetrates through our soul, into this earthly culture, into this earthly civilization, brings about an ascent. But if we were to be satisfied with what contemplation of nature and the scientific world view can give us, if we could only believe in what is there today through this view, then there would be an inevitable decline. There will be no decline if we become aware that within us is the source of a thinking that can detach itself from the body, that within us is the source of a willing that can love the ascent into the spiritual world as much as only sexual love can love something. If we raise in freedom the wisdom that ancient humanity received in instincts and that can only be raised today because physicality no longer gives us anything, if we raise in freedom that, then we insert the impulses of ascent into what wants to descend. So the question that is put to humanity today is: Is the world not in decline? Yes, it is in decline if man wants to follow only what is given to him from outside, if he will only be harnessed in a natural or social organization given from the outside.

Decline will not occur if people build and found a new world from within themselves. The Lenins and Trotskys, who want to build a new world in every respect and only on the basis of natural science, lead most quickly and most intensely to decline. Those who want to build a new world out of the spirit lead to social advancement – but only they. For all those who still believe that the world can be cured by external institutions, by all kinds of external means, by Marxism or the like, Oswald Spengler has spoken the truth. If only these people work on the world with their powers, if only they direct world development, then Spengler's prophecy must be fulfilled. For he only drew the consequences from that, from which they must draw one, who today is only filled with a scientific world view. Today the ways of life are serious, and it is necessary that the greatest seriousness should take hold of the ways of the soul. But one must also take such great matters seriously. And one must be able to judge from symptoms.

I told you that more than forty years ago, when I, as a young man, got to know Gervinus' way of thinking through Schröer and then approached Gervinus myself, it had a profound effect on me how Gervinus demands practice but has no ideas for practice, how he wants the world in which there were still those ideas, of which he alone knows how to speak, to have ended in 1832, to have ended with the death of Goethe. It made a deep impression on me how he called on people to stop writing poetry and drama, to stop writing fiction, but to devote themselves to the practical tasks of life, how he pointed people in the direction of practicality, but had no ideas for these practical tasks of life. And so people behaved accordingly. The lyricists were only there for the school, at most for the concert hall; there they were declaimed. But what flowed from the spiritual life could not intervene in the ways of life. There was a discordance between the ways of the soul and the ways of life. And so we developed. Now people like Oswald Spengler are saying: All that Western culture and civilization have brought is finished, it is doomed! So what do we do? This is now particularly interesting, and let us consider with Spengler's own words why he actually wrote his book, for which minds he actually intended it. He says himself: “If, under the influence of this book, people of the newer generation turn to technology instead of poetry, to the navy instead of painting, to politics instead of epistemology, then they are doing what I want, and one cannot wish them anything better.

Now, my dear audience, I think that in the age in which one believes that one has made such splendid progress in practice, people have turned to technology instead of poetry, to the navy instead of painting, to politics instead of the critique of knowledge, before Spengler wrote his book – all that was truly already there; there have truly never been too few politicians. Now to prophesy the decline of Western civilization, now to have to admit that one wants to call on people to turn away from spirituality, to turn to a practice for which one does not have any ideas, indeed, does not want to have any ideas, in principle, to now prophesy the downfall of the ideas of the West because one believes them to be dying - that is speaking from the heart of the time of decline. And perhaps I may, without being immodest – for I only want to characterize a desire, an attempt, a beginning – perhaps I may point out that what has been presented here as anthroposophically oriented spiritual science and what now, out of this spirituality, wants to take on a practical form here in Stuttgart, the center of the movement, stands on the opposite point of view. We do not say to people: Turn away from all spirituality, because that is in decline, and turn to the coming day. We say to people: New spirituality must be created; we need to delve into new sources of spiritual life. We need to enter into the soul paths of a spiritual vision so that we can find precisely that practical life that is supported by realistic ideas. Without ideas we have ridden ourselves into decline; but with ideas, which cannot now be the traditional, old ones, but must be newly created, with these new ideas alone will we be able to enter the dawn. Admittedly, it seems as if it could not happen so quickly, because what can be seen on a large scale is also evident on a small scale. But I only want to speak of this symptomatically.

The way in which such a desire, as it emanates from here, is judged – it had to be characterized in issue no. 50 of our newspaper “Threefolding of the Social Organism” by Eugen Kolisko under the title “Theologians' Criticism and Conscience”. It had to be characterized once again on the basis of the book by a university professor, Dr. Philipp Bachmann, professor of theology at the University of Erlangen. This book, “Life or Death?” was published here in Stuttgart. Read the article written by Dr. Kolisko and you will see that he rightly summarizes his review at the end with the following sentences, which are a perfect description of a science that today is effective only through diplomas and external positions, but which is inwardly hollow and which always develops precisely those forces that, from the alleged spirit, must only lead into decline. Today we must have the courage to characterize the phenomena of decline not only in general and abstract terms, but to shine a bright light on how we have an alleged intellectual life today, which even in the simplest things works with an unscrupulousness that only parallels its thoughtlessness, its ignorance. This, ladies and gentlemen, must not be ignored if one wants to speak today of the harmonies between the ways of the soul and the ways of life.

Thus Dr. Kolisko had to characterize what is identified with such an insignificant little book:

It would not be necessary to concern oneself so thoroughly with this book if it had not been written by a university professor. Such a person must know what the task of an objective critic is. But the present critique is careless.

In particular, the way the train of thought of my “Secret Science” is reproduced in this book is careless.

One can only proceed in this way without prejudice in the field of theosophy. For here one is not checked when one asserts the most absurd. Anthroposophy, theosophy, spiritualism are all considered equal by many, and according to the saying that at night all cows are gray, one can with impunity combine everything and write derogatory reviews. If a critique were to be written in such a careless manner in any other scientific field, without sufficient knowledge of the criticized field, if only in one case, instead of in many places, the thoughts of a writer, ignoring the relevant literature and mixing up the opinions of different writers, would be held accountable in scientific circles and would lose his reputation and perhaps even his position. Anyone who presents to their readers the content of what is said in the book “The Occult Science” about the human constitutional elements with the words: “The physical body dies, the etheric body sleeps, the astral body forgets, the I (the sentient soul) is the memory.” He is either incapable of reproducing someone else's train of thought, or he does it to maliciously distort it. Either way, he is condemned as a critic. It is an indictment of today's education system that a university professor can produce such a work unhindered. What is to be thought of the Christianity of a theology professor who writes such criticisms is left to those who can still muster some outrage at such a frivolous and unscrupulous procedure.

That is what that Bachmann, in his “Bachmann-like manner,” discovered as the content of what is in my book “Die Geheimwissenschaft.” This is how university professors read today.

Now, my dear attendees, this is what is opposed from all corners to the will for ascent; these are the ones who do not want to let anything approach that could somehow lead to ascent. These people are present in large numbers, they educate our youth. And there are the “Spenglers” and write that we must necessarily fall into decline. Why do the “Spenglers” write like that? Because they are incapable of focusing on anything but the “Bachmanns” with their ignorance and carelessness. These things must be faced in all seriousness today. And I may, after having three lectures preceding, say at the end today: After I in my first two lectures last week tried to show something of the paths that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science wants to take in an epistemological way, in a social way — wants to go scientifically, not as the “Bachmen” and “Trauben” [a play by Max Frisch about the perversion of art for the sake of money] — after I have also spoken of what is to be artistically developed in Dornach, I may say today that those who strive for science and art in such a way can truly be reminded of a beautiful saying that extends from Goethe and will remain eternally true: ‘He who possesses science and art also has religion’. Spiritual science and its art have religion, but a religion that is not built on blind faith, but on a clear, bright, truly spirit-knowing science, on an artistic will striving for spiritual deepening. And after Goethe said, “He who possesses science and art has religion,” he continues, “He who does not possess those two, let him have religion!”

In our time, however, it may perhaps be said of spiritual science, of the representative of the idea of threefold social order, as a special, deepest matter of the heart: Yes, whoever possesses science and art also has religion. But today, religion can only lead to ascent if it draws from a living science in a living way, not from a science of the dead. It can only lead to ascent if it arises out of an artistic volition that is connected with a knowledge of the spirit such that one can say: Whoever today possesses a science rooted in spiritual insight, whoever today attempts, even if only in the weakest beginning, an art that is completely connected with this spiritual insight in its most intense will, should not be reproached for opposing the religious element in the way of life in the present. For he who seeks the spirit, who seeks to embody the spirit artistically, certainly also has the will to introduce into social life that which, connected with human worth and human dignity, truly exercises in the social community the look up to the divine guidance of the world, to the divine primal forces of life - a true look up that does not merely speculate on human egoism, but on the connection of human beings with the great eternal laws of existence. Only a religion that does not want to speculate on egoism, but points to the deepest harmony of the individual human being with the whole world, can lead to ascent.

And to the same extent that such a religion permeates the human soul through the impulse of such science and art, we will advance socially. To the same extent, despite adversity and misery — but perhaps, if the opposing forces are all too strong, through much adversity and much misery — we will not face the decline of Western culture, but the ascent of true human life: a life in which ways of the soul and the ways of life can and will be worked on religiously, scientifically, and artistically, in which the spirit, the spirit-filled art, and the spirit-filled religion will be worked out for the human present and into the human future.

It seemed well yesterday, on the last night of the year, to enter deeply into many of the secrets of existence connected with the great supersensible mysteries, such as the annual passing of one year into another—and of the great cosmic New Year’s Eve and New Year. It seemed good to enter yesterday into those things which speak to the depths of our souls, mysteries far removed from the outer world; so, at the beginning of a New Year, it may perhaps be important to let a few at least of our great and important duties be brought before our souls.

These duties are connected above all with that which is made known to us in the course of human evolution, through Spiritual Science. They are associated with the knowledge of the road humanity must travel as it advances towards its future. A man cannot recognise the duties here mentioned, if he does not, in his own way, keep an open view in many directions. We have again and again endeavoured to do this in the course of our studies. To call up a few only of such duties before our souls may perhaps be fitting at this time, at the opening of a New Year.

It is true, that in view of this material age and all that it brings in its train, we recognise that Spiritual Science must form the basis from which we can work in a higher way for the progress of mankind. It is true, that all that seems to us necessary is so enormous, so incisive—there is (to put it mildly) so much to do at the present time, that we cannot believe that with our feeble powers we should ever be in a position to do much of what has to be done. One thing at least is important, that we should connect our interest with what has to be done, that we should acquire ever more and more interest in those things of which humanity in our time has need.

As a beginning, a group of people, however small, must be interested in that of which humanity has need, and gain a clear insight into those forces which in the evolution of time have a downward tendency, those that are harmful forces. At the opening of a New Year it is specially good to turn the interest of our circle somewhat from our own personal concerns and to direct them to the great objective interests of the whole of humanity.

To do this requires, as I have said, clear insight into that which is moving along the downward path in the human evolution of today. We need only carry those very thoughts which have been ours during the last few days over into the realm of the actual, there to find many of the things of which the men of the present day have need.

Wo have seen how at a certain moment of evolution, a far-reaching wisdom was actually lost to man; how this wisdom of the Gnostics perished; and how it is now necessary to work, so that an understanding of spiritual things may again be established, though of course in accordance with the progress of the time.

During the past autumn we have considered the deeper causes of the flood tide of materialism which took place in the nineteenth century, and I have again and again emphasised that the view of Spiritual Science in regard to this flood of materialism, in no way tends to a lack of appreciation, or want of understanding of the great progress of external, material science. This has always been recognised by us. But what we must keep specially before us is this, that the great progress made in the materialistic realms of natural science during the nineteenth century and on into the present time, has been accomplished with a falling off in the power of thought—of clear, precise thinking.

This decline in the power of thinking has taken place more especially in the domain of science. There—however much people may disbelieve it—the faith in authority has never been so strong as in our day, so that want of confidence as regards the certainty of thinking has spread widely through all the realms of popular thought. We live in an age of the most careless thinking and at the same time it is an age of the blindest trust in authority. People live today entirely under the impression that they must believe in, they must recognise authority, that they must have the sanction of outside powers. They desire a warrant for this or that. For the most part men do not consider today that it is an individual concern, that they will eventually have to take up the matter for themselves I So, they go to whom ‘right and law is bequeathed like a hereditary sickness’ and accept conclusions without weighing how those conclusions were reached; for they consider it right to accept authority blindly.

A man is ill—he takes not the least trouble to learn the simplest thing about the illness. Why should he? We have recognised and certified physicians whose business it is to look after our bodies; we need not trouble in the least about them!

If information on any subject be desired, people go to those who ought to know, to the theologian, to the philosopher, to this one or to that.

Any one following up this line of thought for himself, will find that on numberless points he himself is sunk in blindest belief in authority. If he cannot find them—do not take it ill of me, if I say—that the less he finds of this belief in authority in himself, the larger the dose he must have swallowed!

But I would now like, to show how a narrow, cramped and impoverishing mode of thought has slipped even into the finest domain of spiritual life, all the world over—without distinction of nation, race or colour; that a certain element of cramped thinking is to be found where the life of spiritual culture exists in its finest form. Let us take a philosophical idea and watch how it has developed. Who is not convinced today, on the grounds of a belief in an authority which has come down to him through very many channels—who is not convinced that one cannot by any means arrive at ‘the thing in itself,’ but can only catch the outward phenomena, the impression on the senses, the impression made on the soul by the thing. Man can but arrive at the ‘results’ of things, but not at ‘the thing in itself.’ This is indeed the fundamental type of the thought of the nineteenth century. I have described the whole wretched business in that chapter in my book The Riddles of Philosophy, which is called ‘The World of Illusion.’ Anyone who studies this chapter will find a resume of the whole matter. Man can only perceive ‘effects,’ he cannot attain to ‘the thing in itself;’ this remains unknown.

The most capable thinkers of the nineteenth century, if we can speak of them as capable in this connection, are infected by this necessary ignorance regarding the ‘thing in itself.’

If we now turn to the trend of thought which is at the base of what I have just described, it presents itself thus: It is wrongly insisted on, that the eye can only reflect that which it can evoke within itself by means of its nervous or other activities. When an external impression comes, it responds to it in its own specific way. One only gets as far as the impression—not to that which causes the impression on the eye. Through his ear a man only gets as far as the impression made on the ear—not to the thing that makes the impression, and so on.

It is, therefore, only the impressions of the outer world that act on the senses of the soul. That which was at first established as regards a certain realm, that of colour, tone and the like, has now for a long time been extended to the whole thinking world—that can receive only the impression or effects of what is in the world. Is this incorrect? Certainly it is not incorrect, but the point—as has often been said—is not in the least whether a matter is correct or not, quite other things come into consideration. Is it correct that only pictures, only impressions of things, are called forth by our senses? Certainly it is correct, that cannot be doubted; but something very different is connected with this. This I will explain by means of a comparison.

If someone stands before a mirror and another person also stands there beside him, it cannot be denied that what is seen in the mirror is the image of the one man and also of the other. What is seen in the mirror is without doubt images—merely images. From this point of view all our sense perceptions are in fact mere images: for the object must first make an impression on us and our impression—the reaction as one might say—evokes consciousness. We can quite correctly compare this with the images which we see in the mirror; for the impressions are also images.

Thus in the Lange and Kant train of thought we have a quite correct assertion—that man is concerned with images and that therefore, he cannot come into touch with anything real, with any actual ‘thing in itself.’ Why is this? It is solely because man cannot think things out further than one assumption, he remains at one correct assumption. The thought is not incorrect, but as such it is frozen in—it can go no further—it is really frozen in. Just consider; The images that we see in the mirror are true images, but suppose the other person who stands beside me and looks into the mirror too, gives me a box on the ear, would I then say (as these are but images I see in the mirror) that one reflection has given the other reflection a box on the ear? The action points to something real behind the images I And so it is. When our thoughts are alive and not frozen, when they are connected with realities, we know that the Lange-Kantian hypothesis is correct, that we have everywhere to do with images; but when the images come in touch with living conditions, these living conditions reveal what first leads us to tho thing in itself. It is not so much the case here that certain gentlemen who have thus led thoughts astray, have started from a wrong hypothesis; the whole matter hangs on the fact that we have to reckon with thoughts that were frozen, with thoughts which when at last they are reached, make people say: true, true, true—and get no further. This unworthy thinking of the nineteenth century is wanting in flexibility, in vitality. It is frozen in, truly ice-bound.

Let us take another example. During the past year I have often communicated certain things to you from a celebrated thinker—Mauthner, the great critic of language. Kant occupies himself with Critique of Idea. Mauthner went further, (things that follow must always go further)—he wrote a Critique of Speech. You will remember that during the autumn I gave you examples from the Critique of Speech. Such a man has many followers at the present day. Before he took up philosophy he was a journalist. There is an old saw which says: ‘One crow does not peck out the eyes of another.’ Not only do they not peck out each other’s eyes, but the others even give eyes to the crows that are blind, especially when these are journalists! And thus this critic of language—but as I said I wish in no way to raise any question as regards the honesty of such a thinker, even as regards his solidity and depth, for I must always insist again and again that it is incorrect to say that criticism of natural or of any other science is practised here, its characteristics are only defined. So I say expressly, that Mauthner is an honourable man, ‘so are they all honourable men’—but just let us consider one process of thought which is along the lines of this Critique of Language. For example it is stated there: Human knowledge is limited. Limited—why limited according to Mauthner? Well, because all that man experiences of the world enters his soul by way of his senses. Certainly there is nothing very profound in this thought, but yet it is an undeniable fact. Everything comes to us from the outer world through the senses. But now the thought came to Mauthner that these senses are merely accidental-senses, which means that supposing that we had not our eyes and ears and other senses, we might have other senses instead, then the world around us would appear quite different. An exceedingly popular thought, especially among many philosophers of our day! So it is actually by chance that we have these particular senses, and therewith our conception of the world about us. Had we different senses we should have a different world! Accidental senses!

One of the followers of Fritz Mauthner has said roughly as follows: ‘The world is infinite; but how can man know anything of this infinite world? He can but gain impressions through his accidental senses. Through the door of these chance senses many things enter our souls and group themselves, while without, the infinite world goes on, and man can learn nothing of the laws in accordance with which it progresses. How can man believe, that what he experiences through these chance-senses of his, can have any connection with the great cosmic mysteries beyond? So speaks a follower of Mauthner, who did not, however, look upon himself as an adherent of his, but as a clever man of his day. Yes, so he said. But you can transpose this line of thought into another. I will absolutely retain the form and character of the thought, but translate it into another. I will now state this other thought.

One cannot form any idea of what such a genius as Goethe really has given to mankind, for he has no other means of expressing what he had to say to men, than by the use of twenty-two or twenty-three chance letters of our alphabet which must be grouped in accordance with their own laws and set down on paper. This goes still further. How is it possible to learn anything of the genius of Goethe, through the chance grouping of letters on paper?

Clever such a man might be who believes that because Goethe had to express his whole genius by means of twenty-three letters, A.B.C. and so on—we could learn nothing of his genius or of his ideas,—clever he might be who used such an excuse and still maintained that he had before him nothing but the twenty-three chance letters grouped in various ways! ‘Away with your explanations,’ he would say, ‘they are but fancy, I see nothing before me but letters!’ Clever, in the same way, is he who says: The world beyond is infinite, we cannot learn anything of it, for we know only what comes to us through our chance-senses. The fact is that such inaccurate thinking does not only exist in the domain of which I am speaking, where it comes very crudely into evidence, it is present everywhere. It is active in the profoundly unhappy events of the present day, for these would not be what they are if the thinking of all humanity was not permeated with what has been pointed out in a somewhat crude form.

People will never be able to take the right interest in such things, I mean the things concerned with the true efforts of man for his real progress—true effort in the sense of Spiritual Science—if they have not the will really to enter into such matters, if they have not the desire to recognise the things of which man stands in need. Objections are ever being raised from this side and from that, to the teaching of Spiritual Science, that it is only accessible to those who have clairvoyant perception of the spiritual worlds. People will not believe that this is not true, that what is required is, that by thought they should really be able to attain understanding of that which the seer is able to bring forth out of the spiritual world. It is not to be wondered at that people cannot today grasp with their thought what the seer derives from the spiritual world, when thought is built up in this way I have described. This kind of thought is ‘trumps’ and rules life in every department.

It is not because man is unable to understand with his thoughts all that Spiritual Science teaches, that it fails to be understood, but because he permits himself to be infected with the slip-shod thinking of the present day. Spiritual Science should stimulate us to intensive, courageous thinking; that is what matters: and it is well able to do this.

Of course, as long as we take Spiritual Science in such a way that we only talk about the things with which it is concerned, we shall not advance very much in the establishing of the thought for the future of humanity, which is exactly the mission of our movement to establish. When, however, we take the trouble really to understand—really to grasp the things, the matter taught—we shall certainly make progress.

Even the conceptions of Spiritual Science are affected by the careless thinking of the present day. I have explained to you how this careless thinking acts; I quoted: ‘results only do we have in the external world, so we cannot attain to the thing in itself.’ This thought is as it were immediately frozen in; people do not wish to go any further, the thought is frozen in, they no longer see that the living interchanging activity of the reflected images leads further than to the mere image-character. This method is then applied to the conceptions of Spiritual Science. Because people are fully infected by such kind of thoughts, they say: Yes, what Spiritual Science tells on page a,b,c, are facts of Spiritual Science; these facts we cannot have before us, if we have not acquired the seer’s gift. Therefore, they do not go on to think whether in their present attitude to what Spiritual Science teaches they are not making the same mistake that the whole world makes today. The worst of it is, that this fundamental failing of contemporary thought is so little recognised. It is dreadful how little it is recognised. It enters into our everyday thinking, and makes itself felt there, just as in the more advanced thinking of the philosophers and scientists. It is but seldom that people recognise what a really tremendous duty springs from an insight into this fact, how important it is to be interested in such things, how lacking in responsibility to permit our interest in them to be blunted.

The fact is now apparent, that in the course of the last century purely external sense-observation obtained and gave its tone to science; people laid the greatest value on the results of observation in the laboratory, or in the clinic, in the Zoological Gardens and the like, (the value of which observation must be recognised, as I have often remarked) but they desired to hold to these only and go no further. It is true that extraordinary progress has been made by these methods of natural science, quite extraordinary progress; but it is just through this progress that thought has become quite unreliable. Therefore it becomes a duty not to allow those persons to attain power in the world, who exercise this power from the standpoint of a purely materialistic experimental knowledge,—and it is power that such people want. At the present day we have reached the point, when all that is non-materialistic learning is to be driven out of the world by the brutal language of force which is used in materialistic erudition. It has already become a question of force. Among those who appeal most eagerly to the external powers to gain their external privileges, we have to recognise those who stand on the foundation of material science alone. Therefore, it is our duty to understand that force rules in the world. It is not enough that we should be interested only in what concerns ourselves personally, we must develop interest in the great concerns of the whole of humanity. It is true that as individuals and even as a small society we cannot do much today, but from small germs like these a beginning must be made. What is the use of people saying today that they have no faith in doctors; that they have no confidence in the system, and seek by every other means, something in which they can feel confidence? Nothing is affected by this, all that is but personal effort for their own advantage. We should be interested in establishing, alongside the material medicine of today, something in which we can have confidence. Otherwise things will get worse from day to day. This does not only mean that those who have no faith in the medical science of the day should seek out someone whom they can trust; for this would put the latter in a false position, unless he interests himself in seeing that he too should be suitably qualified to interest himself in the progress of the general condition of humanity. It is true that today and to-morrow we cannot perhaps be more than interested in the matter, but we must bear in our souls such interest for the affairs of humanity if we wish to understand in their true meaning the teaching of Spiritual Science. We still often think that we understand the great interests of humanity, because we frequently interpret our personal interests as if they were the greatest interests of mankind.

We must search deeply, within the profoundest depths of our soul, if we wish to discover in ourselves how dependent we are on the blind faith in authority of the present day—how profoundly we are dependent on it. It is our indolence, our love of ease that withholds us from being inwardly kindled, and set aflame by the great needs of humanity.

The best New Year greeting that we can inscribe in our souls is that we may be enkindled and inspired by the great interests of the progress of mankind—of the true freedom of humanity. So long as we allow ourselves to believe that he who blows his trumpet before the world must also be able to think correctly,—so long as we hold beliefs derived from the carelessly organised thinking of the present day,—we have not developed within ourselves true interests in the great universal cause of mankind.

What I have just said is in no way directed against any great man in particular; I know that when such things are said especially in a public lecture, there are many who say: Natural Science and the authorities of the day were attacked by Spiritual Science; and the like. I specially quote instances from those of whom I can say, on the other hand, that they are great authorities of the present day, that they are great men,—to show that they support things which Spiritual Science has to extirpate, root and branch. Even without being a great man, one can recognise the careless thinking of great men, which has been so greatly enhanced just because of the brilliant advance in the experimental science of the day. One example, one among many,—I choose a book written by one of the best known men of the day and which is translated into German. No one can say that greatness is unrecognised by me. I repeat, I choose a book by a celebrated man of the day, in the domain of experimental Natural Science. I look up a passage in the introduction to the second volume, which deals specially with the question of the cosmology of the day; in which the great man goes into the history of the development of cosmo-conception. It runs somewhat as follows: In the times of the ancient Egyptians, the Greeks and the Romans, men tried to form a picture of the world in such and such a way; then in the last four hundred years there arose the Natural Science of today, which has at last drawn the great prize, which has swept all previous ideas aside and has attained to actual truth, which now has but to be further built up.

I have often laid stress on the fact that it is not so much the individual assertions that people make, it is the Ahrimanic or Luciferic characteristics which at once lay hold on people, so that they become Ahrimanic or Luciferic. Thus at the close of this introduction we read the following, which is in the highest degree noteworthy. Take a special note of what is presented to us by one who is without doubt a great and celebrated man of the day. After remarking how grand the knowledge of Natural Science is today, he says: ‘The time of sad decline endured until the awakening of humanity at the beginning of the new age. The new age placed the art of printing at the service of learning, and contempt of experimental work disappeared from the minds of educated people. Opposition to old opinions as expressed in the writings of various investigators, advanced at first but slowly. These hindering conditions have since disappeared, and immediately the number of workers and the means of furthering Natural Science increased in rapid succession. Hence the extraordinary progress of recent years.’

There then follows the last sentence of this introduction—‘We sometimes hear it said that we live in the best of all possible worlds: there might be some objection raised to this, but we scientists at least can assert with all certainty, that we live in the best of times. And we can look forward with confidence to a still better future...’ Now follows what really is astounding! This author attaches to himself, and to his age, that which great men have discovered and thought, regarding nature and the world. Therefore he says: ‘In the firm hope that the future may be better, we can say with Goethe—the great authority on man and nature:

‘Es ist ein gross Ergötzen
Sich in den Geist der Zeiten zu versetzen,
Zu schauen, wie vor uns ein weiser Mann gedacht,
Und wie wir's dann zuletzt so herrlich weit gebracht.’

[It is a great delight, to enter into the spirit of the age, to see how wise men thought before our time, and how splendidly we have advanced things.]

In all seriousness a great man closes his remarks with these words, the pronouncement of Goethe, the great authority on nature and on man; words to which Faust replies—for it is Wagner who says:

‘By your leave it is a great delight,
To enter into the spirit of the age, etc.’

But Faust answers: (and perhaps we may accept what Faust says as the thought of Goethe, the great authority on nature and on man.)

‘O yes! As far as to the stars!’

This is exactly fitted for a man who can reach as far as to the stars, thus:

‘O yes! As far as to the stars!
The ages that are past, my Friend,
Are for us a book with seven seals;
What we call the spirit of the age,
Is in fact the spirit of ourselves
In which the times are mirrored.
This is in truth, often but a wail!
Men fly from the first glance of it.
A rubbish heap, a lumber room,
At most some act or state of law
With excellent pragmatic maxims
Such as are put in puppets’ mouths!’

And so on...

Thus in 1907 wrote one of the greatest men of the day who had surely got ‘as far as to the stars,’ and who looking back on all those who had worked before him had also got so far as to make use of the saying ‘of Goethe, the great authority on man and nature.’

It is a great delight
To enter into the spirit of the age.

You smile! One could wish that this smile always might be directed against those who are capable at the present day of making such carelessness valid; for the example I have given shows that it is those who are firmly established on the ground of the scientific outlook of the day, and who are associated with progress in this domain, who are able to put forth such negligent thinking. It just proves that what is called Natural Science today by no means excludes the most superficial thinking. A man may be a thoroughly careless thinker today, and yet be held to be a great man in the realm of natural science. This has to be recognised, and in this sense we must approach it. It is a sign of our time. If this were to continue; if any one is labelled as a great man, and given out as a great authority and if people put forward what he says in this or that domain without proof, as of something of great worth—then we should never surmount the great misery of our time. I am fully convinced that countless people pass over the sentence I read out to you today, without a smile, although it shows forth in the most eminent degree, where the greatest faults of our day lie, which are bringing about the decline of the evolution of humanity.

We must see clearly where to make a beginning with those things necessary for man; and also see that in spite of the immense advance in external natural science, the greatest scientists of the nineteenth century, even down to our own day, have shown themselves the worst dilettantists in regard to all questions of world-outlook. The great fault of our day is, that this is not recognised—that people do not recognise that the greatest investigators in natural science in the nineteenth century proved themselves the worst of dilettantists in the question of world-outlook, when they entirely left out that which as spirit rules in the realm of natural science. People blindly followed after these great persons, not only when they gave out the results of investigations in the laboratory, or of clinical research, but also when they asserted things regarding the secrets of the universe.

So, parallel with the popularising of science which is useful and beneficial in the highest degree, we have at the same time a deterioration as regards all questions of wide import and a heedlessness of thought which is infectious and very harmful, because it is founded on the very worst kind of dilettantism of great men.

Here are to be found the tasks with which our interests must be closely associated, even if we ourselves are not able to produce anything. We must at least look things in the face, we must see clearly that it will above all lead to far, far more unhappy times than we are at present passing through, if mankind does not realise what has been here pointed out;—if, in place of careless, inexact thinking, a clear and genuine method of thought be not established again among men. Everything can be traced back to this careless thinking. All those external, often very unhappy phenomena which we encounter would not exist if this inexact, negligent thought were not there.

It seems to me specially necessary to speak of these matters at the beginning of a New Year, for they are connected with the character and attitude of our whole task. For when we accustom ourselves to consider without prejudice the method and nature of modern thought, and see how powerful it is in all the varied conditions of life, we can then form some picture of what we have to do and of what mankind stands in need. We must in the first place overcome all tendency to slackness, all love of sloth and laziness, we must see clearly that a spiritual-scientific movement has duties other than that of merely listening to lectures or reading books.

I must continually remind you to make yourselves acquainted with the necessary ideas. It is clear to all that as a few individuals,—as a small society—we cannot do much. But our own thought must move in the right direction; we must know what is in question, we must not ourselves be exposed to the danger (to put it trivially) of succumbing to the different conceptions of the world, of those who are the great men of the day in the external sciences. Great men, but dilettante thinkers as regards questions of universal import, found numerous associations of monistic or other nature without the opposition that would arise if at least it were realised that, when such societies are founded, it is as if one said: ‘I am letting this man make a coat, because he is a celebrated cobbler!’

This is foolishness, is it not? but it is just as foolish when a great chemist or a great psychologist is accepted as an authority on a conception of the world. We cannot blame them if they claim it for themselves, for naturally they cannot know how inadequate they are; but that they are so accepted is connected with the great evils of the present day. To me it seems as if a thought for New Year’s Eve must ever be associated with our feelings; whereas it seems to me that that which faces us as the more immediate duty of the day, must be directly associated with our reflections on New Year’s Day; I thought therefore, that the tone of what has been said today might, be fitly associated with what was said yesterday.

The position of our cognizing personality in relation to the objective world also gives us our ethical physiognomy. What does the possession of knowledge and science mean to us?

The innermost core of the world is expressed in our knowledge. The lawful harmony that governs the universe manifests itself in human knowledge.

It is therefore part of man's vocation to transfer the basic laws of the world, which otherwise dominate all existence but would never come into existence themselves, into the realm of apparent reality. This is the essence of knowledge, that it extracts from objective reality the essential lawfulness on which it is based. Our cognition is - figuratively speaking - a constant living into the ground of the world. Such a conviction must also shed light on our practical view of life.

The whole character of our way of life is determined by our moral ideals. These are the ideas we have of our tasks in life, or in other words, the ideas we have of what we should accomplish through our actions.

Our actions are part of general world events. It is therefore also subject to the general lawfulness of these events.

If an event occurs somewhere in the universe, a twofold distinction must be made between it: the external course of it in space and time and the internal regularity of it.

The realization of this lawfulness for human action is only a special case of cognition. The views we have derived about the nature of cognition must therefore also be applicable here. To recognize oneself as an acting personality thus means: to possess the corresponding laws for one's actions, that is, the moral concepts and ideals as knowledge. If we have recognized this lawfulness, then our actions are also our work. The lawfulness is then not given as something that lies outside the object on which the action appears, but as the content of the object itself that is conceived in living action. In this case, the object is our own ego. If the latter has really penetrated its action in a recognizing way, then it also feels itself to be the master of it. As long as this does not take place, the laws of action confront us as something alien; they dominate us; what we accomplish is under the compulsion they exert on us. Once they have been transformed from such a foreign entity into the very own action of our ego, this compulsion ceases. The categorical imperative is to human action what the expediency ideas of teleology are to the science of living beings. The ideas of expediency hinder research into the purely natural laws of organic beings; the categorical imperative hinders the living out of purely natural moral impulses. The imperative has become our own nature. Lawfulness no longer rules over us, but in us over the events emanating from our ego. The realization of an event by means of a lawfulness that is external to the realizer is an act of bondage; the realization of an event by the realizer himself is an act of freedom. To recognize the laws of one's actions means to be aware of one's freedom. The process of cognition is, according to our explanations, the process of development towards freedom.

The following circumstance shows how little understanding there is in the present day for Goethe's ethical views and for an ethic of freedom and individualism in general. In 1892, I spoke out in favor of an anti-teleological monistic view of morality in an essay in "Zukunft" (No. 5). Mr. Ferdinand Tönnies in Kiel responded to this essay in a brochure entitled "Ethische Kultur und ihr Geleite. Nietzsche fools in the future and present" (Berlin 1893). He put forward nothing but the main propositions of philistine morality expressed in philosophical formulas. But he says of me that "on the road to Hades I could not have found a worse Hermes" than Friedrich Nietzsche. It seems truly comical to me that Mr. Tönnies, in order to condemn me, brings up some of Goethe's "sayings in prose". He has no idea that if there was a Hermes for me, it was not Nietzsche, but Goethe. I have already explained the relationship between the ethics of freedom and Goethe's ethics in the introduction to the 34th volume of my edition of Goethe's scientific works. I would not have mentioned Tönnies' worthless pamphlet if it were not symptomatic of the misunderstanding of Goethe's world view that prevails in some circles.

Not all human action has this free character. In many cases, we do not possess the laws for our actions as knowledge. This part of our actions is the unfree part of our actions. On the other hand, there is the part where we are fully immersed in these laws. This is the free area. Insofar as our life belongs to it, it can only be described as moral. The transformation of the first area into one with the character of the second is the task of every individual development, as well as that of humanity as a whole.

The most important problem of all human thought is this: to understand man as a free personality based on himself.

Goethe's views do not correspond to the fundamental separation of nature and spirit; he only wants to see a great whole in the world, a unified chain of development of beings, within which man forms a link, albeit the highest. "Nature! We are surrounded and enveloped by it - unable to step out of it and unable to get deeper into it. Uninvited and unwarned, she takes us into the cycle of her dance and carries us along until we are tired and fall from her arms." Compare this with the above-mentioned statement: "If the healthy nature of man acts as a whole, if he feels himself in the world as part of a great, beautiful, worthy and valuable whole, if harmonious pleasure grants him a pure, free delight: then the universe, if it could feel itself as having reached its goal, would rejoice and admire the summit of its own becoming and being." Herein lies Goethe's genuinely far-reaching transcendence of immediate nature, without distancing himself in the slightest from what constitutes the essence of nature. What is foreign to him is what he himself finds in many particularly gifted people: "The peculiarity of feeling a kind of shyness towards real life, of withdrawing into oneself, of creating a world of one's own within oneself and in this way achieving the most excellent inwardly." (Winckelmann: entry.) Goethe does not flee reality in order to create an abstract world of thought that has nothing in common with it; no, he immerses himself in it in order to find its immutable laws in its eternal change, in its becoming and movement; he confronts the individual in order to see the archetype in him. Thus arose in his spirit the primordial plant, thus the primordial animal, which are nothing other than the ideas of the animal and the plant. These are not empty general concepts that belong to a gray 'theory, these are the essential foundations of organisms with a rich, concrete content, full of life and vivid. Vivid for that higher faculty of perception which Goethe discusses in his essay on "Visual Judgment". Ideas in Goethe's sense are just as objective as the colors and forms of things, but they are only perceptible to those whose faculties are equipped for them, just as colors and forms are only there for the sighted and not for the blind. If we do not approach the objective with a receptive spirit, it will not reveal itself to us. Without the instinctive ability to perceive ideas, they will always remain a closed field for us. Here, Schiller looked deeper than anyone else into the structure of Goethe's genius.

On August 23, 1794, he enlightens Goethe about the essence that underlies his spirit with the following words: "You take the whole of nature together in order to shed light on the individual; in the totality of its manifestations you seek the ground of explanation for the individual. From the simple organization you ascend, step by step, to the more complex, in order finally to build the most complex of all, man, genetically from the materials of the whole structure of nature. By recreating him from nature, as it were, you seek to penetrate his hidden technique." In this re-creation lies a key to understanding Goethe's world view. If we really want to ascend to the lawful in eternal change, then we must not look at what has been created, we must listen to nature in its creation. This is the meaning of Goethe's words in the essay "Anschauende Urteilskraft": "If in the moral sphere we are to elevate ourselves to an upper region through faith in God, virtue and immortality and approach the first being, then it should probably be the same case in the intellectual sphere that we make ourselves worthy of spiritual participation in its productions through the contemplation of an ever-creating nature. Had I after all ... had restlessly insisted on that archetypal, typical thing." Goethe's archetypes are therefore not empty schemas, but the driving forces of phenomena.

This is the "higher nature" in nature that Goethe wants to seize. We see from this that in no case is reality, as it lies spread out before our senses, something with which man, having arrived at a higher level of culture, can stop. Only when the human spirit penetrates this reality by thinking does it realize what holds this world together in its innermost being. We can never find satisfaction in individual natural events, only in the laws of nature, never in the individual individual, only in the generality. Goethe presents this fact in the most perfect form imaginable. What also remains with him is the fact that for the modern spirit, reality, mere experience, is reconciled with the needs of the cognizing human spirit through thinking.

Goethe's attitude to nature is intimately connected with his religion. One might say that his concepts of nature were so high that they themselves put him in a religious mood. He did not know the need to draw things down to himself, stripping them of any sacredness, which so many have. But he has the need to look for something worthy of reverence in the real, in the here and now, which puts him in a religious mood. He seeks to gain a side to things themselves that makes them sacred to him. Karl Julius Schröer has shown this mood bordering on the religious in Goethe's behavior in love (cf. his spiritual work "Goethe und die Liebe", Heilbronn 1884). Everything frivolous and frivolous is stripped away, and love for Goethe becomes piety. This fundamental trait of his nature is most beautifully expressed in his words:

"In our pure bosom a striving surges,
To a higher, purer, unknown
To surrender voluntarily out of gratitude.
--------------------------------------
We call it: being pious!"

This side of his nature is now inseparably connected with another. He never seeks to approach this higher side directly; he always seeks to approach it through nature. "The true is God-like; it does not appear directly, we must guess it from its manifestations" (Proverbs in Prose). In addition to the belief in the idea, Goethe also has the other belief that we gain the idea through the contemplation of reality; it does not occur to him to seek the divinity elsewhere than in the works of nature, but he seeks to extract their divine side everywhere. When, in his boyhood, he erected an altar to the great God who "stands in direct connection with nature" (Dichtung und Wahrheit, I. Teil, 1. Buch), this worship arose decisively from the belief that we can attain the highest we can reach by faithfully cultivating our contact with nature. Thus Goethe's way of looking at things, which we have justified in terms of epistemology, is innate. He approaches reality with the conviction that everything is only a manifestation of the idea, which we only gain when we elevate sense experience into a spiritual contemplation of eternal, causal necessity. This conviction lay within him; and from his youth he viewed the world on the basis of this presupposition. No philosopher could give him this conviction. So that is not what Goethe was looking for in the philosophers. It was something else. Even if his way of looking at things lay deep in his being, he still needed a language to express it. His nature was philosophical, that is to say, it could only be expressed in philosophical formulas, could only be justified from philosophical premises. In order to make himself clearly aware of what he was, in order to know what his living activity was, he looked to the philosophers. He looked to them for an explanation and justification of his being. This is his relationship with the philosophers. To this end, he studied Spinoza in his youth and later became involved in scientific negotiations with his philosophical contemporaries. Even in his youth, Spinoza and Giordano Bruno seemed to the poet to express his own nature. It is curious that he first became acquainted with both thinkers through their opposing writings and, despite this, recognized how their teachings related to his nature. His relationship to Giordano Bruno's teachings in particular confirms this. He gets to know him from Bayle's dictionary, where Bruno is fiercely attacked. And he received such a deep impression from him that we find linguistic echoes of Bruno's sentences in those parts of "Faust" which, according to their conception, date from around 1770, when he was reading Bayle (see Goethe Yearbook, Volume VII, 1886). In the "Tag- und Jahreshefte", the poet tells us that he studied Giordano Bruno again in 1812. This time, too, the impression is a powerful one, and in many of the poems written after this year we recognize echoes of the philosopher of Nola. But all this is not to be taken as if Goethe had borrowed or learned anything from Bruno, he merely found in him the formula for expressing what had long been in his nature. He found that he expressed his own inner self most clearly when he did so in the words of this thinker. Bruno regarded the universal world soul as the creator and director of the universe. He calls it the inner artist that forms matter and shapes it from within. It is the cause of everything that exists; and there is no being in whose existence it would not take a loving interest. "Be the thing ever so small and tiny, it has in itself a part of spiritual substance" (see Giordano Bruno, "Von der Ursache etc.", published by Adolf Lasson, Heidelberg 1882). This was also Goethe's view that we only know how to judge a thing when we see how it has been placed in its place by the eternal harmony of the laws of nature - and nothing other than this is the world soul for him - and how it has become precisely what it appears to us as. If we perceive with the senses, that is not enough; for the senses do not tell us how a thing is connected with the general world-idea, what it has to mean for the great whole. We must look in such a way that our reason creates for us an ideal ground on which then appears to us what the senses deliver to us; we must, as Goethe expresses it, look with the eyes of the spirit. He also found a formula for expressing this conviction in Bruno: "For just as we do not recognize colors and sounds with one and the same sense, so we also do not see the substrate of the arts and the substrate of nature with one and the same eye", because we "see that with the sensual eyes and this with the eye of reason" (see Lasson, p. 77). And it is no different with Spinoza. Spinoza's teaching is based on the fact that the Godhead has merged into the world. Human knowledge can therefore only aim to immerse itself in the world in order to recognize God. Any other way of reaching God must appear impossible to a person who thinks consistently in the sense of Spinozism.

The idea of a God who led a separate existence outside of the world and directed his creation according to externally imposed laws was alien to him. Throughout his life, he was dominated by the thought:

"What would a god be who only pushed from the outside,
Run the universe in circles on his finger?
It befits him to move the world within,
Nature in itself, to nurture itself in nature,
So that what lives and weaves and is in him,
Never misses its power, never misses its spirit."

What did Goethe have to look for in the science of organic nature in accordance with this attitude? Firstly, a law that explains what makes a plant a plant and an animal an animal; secondly, another that makes it comprehensible why the common underlying principle of all plants and animals appears in such a diversity of forms. The basic essence that expresses itself in every plant, the animality that can be found in all animals, that is what he sought first. The artificial dividing walls between the individual genera and species had to be torn down, it had to be shown that all plants are only modifications of an original plant, all animals of an original animal.

Ernst Haeckel, who perfected Darwin's ideas on the origin of organisms in a manner appropriate to German thoroughness, attaches the greatest importance to recognizing the harmony of his basic convictions with Goethe's. Haeckel's view of nature also becomes the basis of religion. The knowledge of nature communicates itself to feeling and lives itself out as a religious mood. For Haeckel, Darwin's question about the origin of organic forms immediately became the highest task that the science of organic life can ever set itself, that of the origin of man. And he was compelled to take the place of the dead matter of the physicists in assuming such principles of nature with which one need not stop at man. In his essay "Monism as a Bond between Religion and Science", and in his "Welträtseln", which appeared recently and which I believe to be the most significant manifestation of the latest natural philosophy, Haeckel expressly emphasized that he could no more conceive of an "immaterial living spirit" than of a "dead spiritless matter". And Goethe's words that "matter can never exist and be effective without spirit, spirit never without matter" are entirely consistent with this.

* One of the most interesting facts in German intellectual history is how Schiller, under the influence of Goethe, formed an ethic from Goethe's world view. These ethics arise from an artistic and liberal view of nature. But these letters are often not taken as sufficiently scientific by systematizing philosophers, and yet they are among the most important things that aesthetics and ethics have ever produced. Schiller takes Kant as his starting point. This philosopher defined the nature of beauty in several ways. First, he examines the reason for the pleasure we feel in beautiful works of art. He finds this feeling of pleasure to be quite different from any other. Let us compare it with the pleasure we feel when we are dealing with an object to which we owe something useful. This pleasure is quite different. It is intimately connected with the desire for the existence of this object. The desire for the useful disappears when the useful itself no longer exists. It is different with the pleasure we feel towards the beautiful. This pleasure has nothing to do with the possession, with the existence of the object. It is therefore not attached to the object at all, but only to the idea of it. Whereas in the case of the practical, the useful, the need immediately arises to transform the idea into reality, in the case of the beautiful we are satisfied with the mere image. This is why Kant calls the pleasure in beauty a "disinterested pleasure" that is uninfluenced by any real interest. It would be quite wrong, however, to think that this excludes expediency from the beautiful. This only happens with the external purpose. And from this flows the second explanation of beauty: "It is a thing formed purposively in itself, but without serving an external purpose." If we perceive another thing of nature or a product of human technology, our mind comes and asks about its use and purpose, and it is not satisfied until its question about the why is answered. In the case of beauty, the why lies in the thing itself; and the intellect does not need to go beyond it. This is where Schiller comes in. And he does this by weaving the idea of freedom into the line of thought in a way that does the highest honor to human nature. First, Schiller contrasts two incessantly asserting human drives. The first is the so-called material instinct or the need to keep our senses open to the inflowing outside world. A rich content penetrates us, but without us being able to exert a determining influence on its nature. "Everything happens here with absolute necessity. What we perceive is determined from outside; here we are unfree, subjugated, we must simply obey the dictates of natural necessity. The second is the form instinct. This is nothing other than reason, which brings order and law into the confused chaos of perceptual content. Through its work, system comes into experience. But even here we are not free, Schiller finds. For in this work, reason is subject to the immutable laws of logic. As there under the power of natural necessity, so here we are under that of the necessity of reason. Freedom seeks a refuge from both. Schiller assigns it the realm of art by emphasizing the analogy of art with a child's play. What is the essence of play? Things from reality are taken and changed in their relationships in any way. This transformation of reality is not governed by a law of logical necessity, such as when we build a machine, for example, where we have to strictly submit to the laws of reason, but rather serves a subjective need. The player puts things into a context that gives him pleasure, he does not impose any constraints on himself. He does not respect the necessity of nature, for he overcomes its constraint by using the things handed down to him entirely at will; but he does not feel dependent on the necessity of reason either, for the order he brings to things is his invention. In this way, the player imprints his subjectivity on reality; and in turn, he lends objective validity to the latter. The separate action of the two drives has ceased; they have merged into one and thus become free: the natural is spiritual, the spiritual is natural. Schiller, the poet of freedom, thus sees in art only a free play of man on a higher level and exclaims enthusiastically: "Man is only fully man where he plays, ... and he only plays where he is human in the full meaning of the word." Schiller calls the instinct underlying art the play instinct. This produces works in the artist that satisfy our reason in their sensual existence and whose rational content is simultaneously present as sensual existence. And the nature of man works at this stage in such a way that his nature is at once spiritual and his spirit natural. Nature is elevated to the spirit, the spirit immerses itself in nature. The latter is thereby ennobled, the former is moved from its inconceivable height into the visible world.

In Schiller's "Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man" - in this gospel of humanity liberated from the barriers of both natural compulsion and the logical necessity of reason - we read Goethe's ethical and religious physiognomy. These letters can be described as Goethe's psychology drawn from all-round personal observation. "I have long watched the course of your mind, albeit from quite a distance, and have noted with ever renewed admiration the path you have marked out for yourself." This is what Schiller wrote to Goethe on August 23, 1794. Schiller was best able to observe how Goethe achieved harmony in his mental powers. These letters were written under the impression of these observations. We may say that Goethe sat as a model for the "whole man who reaches perfection through play". Now Schiller writes in the letter containing the words quoted: "If you had been born a Greek, indeed only an Italian, and had been surrounded from the cradle by an exquisite nature and an idealizing art, your path would have been infinitely shortened, perhaps made entirely superfluous. Already in your first view of things you would then have absorbed the form of the necessary, and with your first experiences the great style would have developed in you. Now, since you were born a German, since your Greek spirit was thrown into this Nordic creation, you had no choice but either to become a Nordic artist yourself or to replace your imagination with what reality withheld from it through the help of the power of thought, in order to give birth to a Greece, as it were, from within and in a rational way." Since this is true of Goethe, it is understandable that he felt the deepest satisfaction of his being when, in front of the Greek works of art, on his Italian journey, he could say to himself that he felt that the Greeks, in producing their works of art, proceeded according to the same laws that nature itself follows and that he is on the trail of. And that he found in these works of art what he called the "higher nature" in nature. He says to these creatures of the human spirit: "There is necessity, there is God."

Nature service is Goethe's service to God. He cannot find traces of God anywhere other than where nature reigns in creation. He is therefore unable to speak about his relationship to Christianity in any other way than by sharply emphasizing his way of thinking that merges with his view of nature. "If I am asked whether it is in my nature to show adoring reverence to Christ, I say: Absolutely! I bow before him as the divine revelation of the highest principle of morality. If I am asked whether it is in my nature to worship the sun, I say again: Absolutely! For it is also a revelation of the Highest, and indeed the most powerful that we children of the earth are granted to perceive. I worship in it the light and the generative power of God, through which alone we live, weave and are, and all plants and animals with us. But if I am asked whether I am inclined to stoop before a thumb bone of the Apostle Peter or Paul, I say: spare me and stay away from me with your absurdities."

Everything has been said about Goethe's position on Christianity. It is a long way from the church historian Nippold's assertion that he resolutely upheld the "Christian idea of God" to that of the Jesuit priest Alexander Baumgartner, who speaks of Goethe's "insolently anti-Christian spirit". There will hardly be a station on this path where some observer of Goethe's religious views has not settled down. And statements by Goethe that support one or the other assertion will always be available to the gentlemen. But when referring to such sayings of Goethe, one should always bear in mind what Goethe said of himself. "I for myself, with the manifold directions of my nature, cannot have enough of one way of thinking; as a poet and artist I am a polytheist, but as a naturalist I am a pantheist, and one as decidedly as the other. If I need a god for my personality, as a moral man, then that is already taken care of." Since Goethe himself said this, can we still be surprised when we are told from one side that Goethe is a confessor of a personal God? An interpreter of Goethe need only quote the following statement by Goethe, and he has constructed Goethe the believer in the personality of God: "Now Blumenbach gained the highest and ultimate expression, he anthropomorphized the word of the riddle and called what was being spoken of a nisus formativus, a drive, a violent activity, through which the formation - of living beings - should be brought about... This monstrosity personified confronts us as a god, as creator and sustainer, whom we are called upon to worship, adore and praise in every way."

If I liked sleight-of-hand tricks of the mind, I would be able to prove one after the other that Goethe was a polytheist, theist, atheist, Christian and - what else do I know? But it seems to me that it is not important to interpret Goethe according to a single statement, but according to the whole spirit of his world view. He imbued his entire emotional life with this spirit; it was in this spirit that he proceeded when he sought to investigate the laws of nature and made important discoveries in this field; it was out of this spirit that he organized his entire attitude towards art. In art he saw a "manifestation of secret natural laws"; and nature was for him the revelation of the only God he sought. It is in this sense that a word like this should be understood: "I believe in one God!" This is a beautiful, praiseworthy word; but to acknowledge God, where and how he reveals himself, that is actually bliss on earth" (Proverbs in prose). And this is also significant: "The true, identical with the divine, can never be recognized by us directly, we see it only in reflection, in example, symbol, in individual and related phenomena; we become aware of it as incomprehensible life and cannot renounce the desire to comprehend it nevertheless." But Goethe was not one of those who saw the great, otherworldly unknown in the true, the divine. He does not call the essence of things incomprehensible because human knowledge does not reach this essence, but because it is basically absurd to speak of an essence in itself. "Actually, we undertake to express the essence of a thing in vain. We become aware of effects, and a complete history of these effects would at best encompass the essence of that thing. In vain do we endeavor to portray the character of a man; but put together his actions, his deeds, and a picture of his character will present itself to us." We are probably speaking entirely in Goethe's spirit when we add: In vain do we endeavor to portray the essence of God; put together, on the other hand, the phenomena of nature and its laws, and an image of God will confront us.

I have described Goethe's way of conceiving the world from these points of view in my book "Goethe's Weltanschauung". I described the starting points that such an examination must take with the words: "If one wants to understand Goethe's world view, one must not content oneself with listening to what he himself says about it in individual statements. It was not in his nature to express the core of his being in crystal-clear sentences... He is always anxious when it comes to deciding between two views. He does not want to rob himself of his impartiality by giving his thoughts a sharp direction... Nevertheless, if you want to see the unity of his views, you have to listen less to his words than to his way of life. One must listen to his relationship to things when he investigates their essence, and add to what he himself does not say. We must look into the innermost part of his personality, which is largely concealed behind his utterances. What he says may often contradict itself; what he lives always belongs to a consistent whole."

If you delve into Goethe's personality, then you can evaluate his statements in the right sense. This becomes most necessary when talking about his relationship to Christianity. Where Christianity confronts him with all its dark sides, as for example in the person of Lavater, he speaks out openly. He writes to him (August 9, 1782): "You hold the Gospel, as it stands, to be the most divine truth; I would not be convinced by an audible voice from heaven that the water burns and the fire is quenched, that a woman gives birth without a man and that a dead man rises from the dead; rather, I consider these to be blasphemies against the great God and his revelation in nature... I am as serious about my faith as you are about yours." And when he speaks out in favor of Christianity, he reinterprets it in his own way. Nothing is more indicative of his way of reinterpreting than the sentence in which he turns Spinoza, who was decried as an atheist, into a Christian: "Spinoza does not prove the existence of God, existence is God. And if others scold him for this, I would like to call him thesssimum, indeed christianissimum and praise him." We must not forget that he calls himself "not an anti-Christian or unchristian, but a decided non-Christian".

And if he wants to make the full truth clear to himself in a decisive manner, then he does so with such distiches as those found in the diary of the Silesian journey (1790), which are what caused the Jesuit priest Baumgartner such horror at the "insolent anti-Christian spirit":

"To endure it is good to be a Christian, not to waver:
And that's how this teaching first came about."

"What is true of Christianity is true of the Stoics, free
It is not fitting for people to be Christians or Stoics."

These verses are sharply illustrated when put together with the religious sentiments that Goethe found in himself:

"What more can man gain in life,
than that God-nature reveals itself to him,"

or:

"There is also a universe within,
Hence the peoples' laudable use,
That each one the best he knows,
He names God, even his God,
Surrender heaven and earth to him,
fears him and perhaps loves him."

[Ladies and gentlemen present!

The last time I drew attention to the fact that I wanted to talk about Pythagorean teaching. Pythagoras had founded a school in Lower Italy. It was not so much a school, but rather a discipleship whose spiritual leader was Pythagoras. He formed a doctrine. We can no longer say how much of it belonged to Pythagoras and how much to his disciples.

The world view of the Pythagoreans emerges before us, and this shows itself to be one of the most profound world views we have. Since it is very important for us to really introduce the things we are dealing with, I would like to introduce a modern Pythagorean before I mention Pythagoras himself, a Pythagorean who lived in Germany himself and whose world view always seems to me like a forecourt to Pythagoras.

You can understand this world view much better if you are familiar with the works and views of Baron von Hardenberg - Novalis, a poet of a thoroughly mystical nature. No one who knows his writings will doubt this.

Take his "Apprentices at Sais". This is something that can only be understood in its esoteric meaning. But anyone who knows the personality of Novalis - he was born in 1772 and died in 1801, so he was 29 years old - will understand this. This Novalis seems to have remained the most innocent youth throughout his life. He seems to us more like the revelation of an unearthly individuality than an earthly personality. It is quite impossible to understand that this immersion, this contemplation, could have been acquired in his immense youth.

When we read his "Heinrich von Ofterdingen", we find that he drew from direct sources, from the sources of mysticism. He then incorporated these into his novel "Heinrich von Ofterdingen" and thus showed that he understood the mysticism of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. If we look at his basic ideas, we will find a certain similarity with other mystics.

He searched for the "Blue Flower. People have often mocked this "Blue Flower. We will understand each other better if we remember Goethe's "Prophecies of Bakis", where he speaks of the serpent's thread and the flower, where he says that man can walk the path that is long and narrow. When man then walks this path, he sees knots before him. He also sees the knot in which lives are tied together. Behind him, he trails a snake. The snake disappears and the knot transforms into a flower in front of him.

This image, which Goethe repeatedly refers to, is egoism, the approach to the highest spirituality or deepest knowledge. The symbol for this is the "blue flower. It is also a symbol of that which arises for man as an entanglement of life when he progresses along the path of knowledge. It is this "Blue Flower" that Novalis has in mind for his Heinrich von Ofterdingen.

We also find this flower in Master Klingsohr, who can prophesy. The future lies open before him. Goethe says: The future also lies open before him who really has a complete overview of the past. [...] - Master Klingsohr reveals the future to Heinrich von Ofterdingen. This satisfies him to such an extent that he is able to see the individualized Blue Flower in the daughter, as he has progressed so far that he can see the highest in the female being.

Matilda dies away from Henry of Ofterdingen. He decides to die after his beloved. For him, reality turns into a dream. What he was previously inclined to regard as a dream, the higher spiritual world, is now reality. He no longer finds this highest in the individual being, but he

finds it in other beings as well. He finds a second girl. It is the same for him. He finds Mathilde again in Cyane. She is like a new embodiment of him. He lives a life of the afterlife.

We find the idea of this in his "Apprentices of Sais". A beautiful fairy tale is woven into it about the boy Hyacinth, who loves the girl Rosenblüthe. Only the trees and birds of the forest know of this love. Then we find Hyacinth changed. He is overcome by a longing to seek something deeper. He leaves Rosenblüthe without sufficient reason. Then he comes to the evil old man, who plants in him the longing to seek the mother of all things, or the veiled maiden. He sets off on his journey to the temple of Isis, comes upon an image, and when he unveils it, he finds nothing but roses. [He finds the beloved as the solution to the riddle, as the veiled image of Sais.

This is reminiscent of the higher concept of "Know thyself", as he expressed it in an epigram. He stands before the veiled image at Sais. He lifts the veil and - wonder of wonders - he finds himself. A magical individualism consists in the fact that one can find the infinite in the finite, [that one can turn the spirit into immediate reality].

So in Novalis we undoubtedly find a mystical personality. So if we assume that in Novalis we are dealing with a deep-seated, mystical nature, and if we then get to know him, he does not appear to us as a mystic, as he has just been described, but as a resurgent old Pythagorean disciple.

When we let Novalis pass us by, when he seems more like a memory, and when we then see how this touch of the earthly, how this personality nevertheless stands firmly in life, has tendencies that we would least expect to find in such romantically inclined natures, then we are referred to the Pythagoreans as to fleeting ghosts.

We must by no means equate this view and philosophical contemplation, as we have it of Romanticism in him, with the view of the other Romantics, with contemporaries of his who lack any depth. Friedrich Wilhelm Schlegel or Tieck, [E-T.A.] Hoffmann and so on must not be confused [with him]. But anyone who allows Novalis to have an effect on them will not be tempted to make such a confusion. What is astonishing about Novalis - despite his [poetic] nature - is that he is one of the most enthusiastic admirers of everything mathematical. He has a thoroughly educated, mathematical psyche, an immediate revelation of what he calls the magical in nature. In this he finds the law of the spirit. That which he who wishes to enter the higher regions would like to leave behind, we find in Novalis as the main thing, as that which led him to emphasize the magical in his [idealism]. In the concatenation of basic mathematical concepts he sees the most intriguing revelation of the mystery of the world. He sees free matter at the bottom of things. Mathematics is the foundation on which existence rests, it is therefore nothing other than the highest form, the purest form of spirituality.

If we find this as the basis of his view, then he appears to us as a representative of Pythagoreanism. We can understand Pythagoreanism much better if we imagine it like Novalis. The Pythagorean soul must be imagined in this way, then we arrive at where Novalis stands; [just as] Pythagoras was able to arrive at the view that the basic structure, the basic essence, the basic spirit of the universe is actually given in the connection between numerical quantities and spatial quantities in this harmony.

If we want to gain an insight into a Pythagorean soul from the first elementary beginnings, we must imagine it in the following way. The pupil was led up step by step to the knowledge to which he was to come. He was guided in a very careful way. The first was mathematical knowledge, the second astronomical. Astronomy was preferably mathematical. The regularity resulted from the numerical relationship in the universe. He was first introduced to these numerical relationships. Then he was gradually led on to the knowledge of man himself. The fulfillment of the desire "Know thyself" [came] last. First he was introduced to mathematics.

How can one imagine that man can actually come to the idea that mathematics is the spiritual foundation of the entire universe? How can this be imagined in the form of harmony, formed in space and time? If we immerse ourselves in those areas of space and time which outwardly already show a regular grouping, such as the movement of the celestial bodies, if we immerse ourselves in that, then we have basically given nothing other than an embodied mathematics, an embodied arithmetic, in this construction of the celestial vault that we perform in our minds.

No human being can actually find anything of a mathematical structure, of a spatial structure of geometric figures in the world and in reality, if he has not first formed these mathematical figures in his mind. If someone described a circle or an ellipse, we would not know what it is that he is describing as an object. We would be able to trace the line in the various places in space and connect these places. But we would not be able to connect a concept with the whole line that describes the object if we had not already formed the concept. We can draw a star and then think about what kind of line the star describes. But only then can we find the figure if we already have it in our minds. The same is also the case with other things, even if we take the numerical relationships. We will only recognize the objects outside in space in their certain mutual numerical relationships, in their numerical diversity, if we have formed these relationships in our minds. If we know that 2 x 2 = 4, then we can also recognize it outside in space. We would not be able to connect any concepts with reality, we would not be able to grasp them at all, they would pass us by like nothing, they would not be there for us at all, if we had not formed the images in a purely spiritual way in our psyche.

So it is that the Pythagoreans could say: That which I see outside must also be contained in a certain way in my mind. What emerges from the source point of my soul is the same as what I perceive outside as the primordial ground of the world itself. The Pythagoreans thought about this more deeply and said to themselves: "It is impossible that two things that are completely separate from each other, spirit outside and world inside, [merely] exist side by side [and do not agree]. The coincidence would only have meaning if what is in the spirit is exactly the same as what is outside in space. If the circle, the ellipse that I perceive within me, the numerical relationships, are the same as those outside, which I see in the outer world, then it makes no sense at all if [the Pythagorean] does not have something that he forms within himself. If he sees the spirit of things and has it within him, then it has only one meaning.

Therefore the Pythagorean did not initially think like the philosophers of the nineteenth century under the influence of Kant. He did not ask: How is it that my imagination inside me corresponds to the things outside? My experience is quite different. That is the unquestionable unity of what is outside and what is in my mind. This is how the Pythagorean thinks.

It makes no difference whether I take the ideas of the Pythagoreans' astronomy or apply the new ones. It doesn't matter at all. So when the Pythagorean sees the celestial body describing an orbit in the form of an ellipse, it is a direct experience for the Pythagorean that the ellipse that he perceives within himself and the ellipse that exists outside as the orbit of a star are not two ellipses, but only one. And that is experience.

Schelling also expressed this, and this makes the matter clear in the simplest way. He has taken up the "power of attraction that physicists have always [known]. They imagined that objects exert a force of attraction on each other. The earth attracts the moon, the sun attracts the earth. When the sun attracts the earth, it acts on the earth. It is difficult to attribute an effect to a body where it does not exist. But the fact is that when a body acts on the earth, it is on the earth. A body is where it acts. The boundary of light is not the boundary of the real sun. The sun is in the entire space where it exerts its gravitational pull. The space that the earth fills is also part of solar space.

Imagine this Schellingian idea as [already] underlying the Pythagorean doctrine. The human spirit fills the entire world space. It is not enclosed in a single organism. The spirit is where it perceives.

For the philosophers of the nineteenth century who followed Kant, the question is this: How is it that the mind perceives what is outside it? - The Pythagorean does not say this at all: How is it that the mind perceives that which is apart from it? The Pythagorean says: If the mind perceives an ellipse in the sky, then it is a fact that the mind is not enclosed in the organism, that it is not there where it perceives with the senses, but that it is there where it perceives [mentally]. The limit of the spirit is not the sense, but the spirit is where it perceives. - There is a separation between the numerical relationships in space and what exists in our head as numerical relationships, which does not exist for the Pythagoreans. The Pythagoreans do not recognize the idea that man is initially a sensual, finite being, enclosed with the psyche in a fabric that connects the senses with the outside world. This gives people today the impression that the mind is also enclosed in [a] housing.

When other philosophers take this for reality and ask: "How is it that we perceive external things?", the Pythagoreans take the opposite view. They do not ask: How is it that the mind is enclosed in such an organism? - It is perhaps better that I do not say "individual", but "individual being". This then leads to an understanding of a world view such as the Pythagorean one. It leads to an understanding that can only be grasped if one sees in the mathematical that which constitutes the basic structure in the universe, and which, if one thinks of the whole world as filled with spirit, constitutes the basic structure of the spirit itself.

So we actually have in the basis of the thing that can be perceived with the senses deep down, on a lower level, in the spatial-temporal of the universe, commonalities that can be expressed through spatial sizes and numerical ratios, that which appears to the spirit on a higher level. The spirit has a numerical, geometrical basis. The spirit has its origin where things are regular. The spirit grows out of the mathematically constructed world. Therefore [the Pythagorean] seeks the primordial grounds of existence in the mathematically constructed world.

I have pointed out that there is a difference between the Greek worldview, as represented by Heraclitus, and the Pythagorean one. At the time, I constructed my remarks in such a way that they came back to Goethe's basic view. I said then that Goethe says that the seed and the plant are one and the same being. The material seed contains everything that is still in it in complete concealment. It is the same as the fully developed plant. The plant is not in it, but it has the sense that in a spiritual way the plant is the same in every form as in another form, so that the plant with its foliage and petals, with its whole fruit and with all that is in it, is to be regarded as that which has become material, materially, which is in the seed in an ideal way. Goethe therefore says that the seed is the whole plant, except that the spirit is still concealed behind it. That which is ideal in the seed becomes material reality in the whole plant.

The same image can be applied to the whole world. One can understand the world by observing it in its highest state, by immersing oneself in its blossom and fruit, in the human soul, by studying the "Know thyself" and going to the human being. There, where the purely spiritual-soul then appears directly, i.e. in the deepening, in the direct immersion into the self, one can first look for a world view, a world view. But you can also examine a seed. You can find ways and means to examine the seed. One can assume that what lies in the seed is already indicated and that the world view that is gained from the human being is the highest. The Pythagoreans do not seek man where he is soul, nor where he appears as spirit, but where he is apparently not spirit at all, where he apparently is not at all. The Pythagorean seeks certain reality through indifferent numbers. And that is why he seeks the spirit where he already knows the spirit. That is why he also finds the primal source, the basic structure of existence, in mathematics.

I just wanted to say that this world view of the Pythagoreans can only be understood if one understands the immersion of Novalis, which must be understood mathematically - of Novalis, who was of a thoroughly poetic nature and as such was what literary history calls a "Romantic", yet was rooted in such laws that he could see strict mathematics as the primal source of existence. That is why the Pythagoreans, because their spirit was powerful enough, were able to find spirit in the relationships of numbers. They started from the lowest level of the spiritual. Just as the seed is not yet a plant, but can become a plant, so they ascended from the seemingly unspiritual to the spiritual.

This is what can make us understand the whole world view of the Pythagoreans. The Pythagorean worldview is usually presented as if it were the numerical aspect of the world that led the Pythagoreans to regard number as the origin of things. And one cannot quite imagine what they meant by that. I must confess that if we follow what is written in the textbooks and read that the Pythagoreans regarded number as the origin of all things, it would seem meaningless to me. Only if I imagine how it is in reality, if I assume that they grew up in a completely different theory of knowledge, can I understand what they meant. Their view is simply described by the word: the Pythagorean did not look for the spirit where it appears to be a sensual entity, but where he perceives it as something that fills the whole of space.

That is one side of the Pythagorean world view, that is the reason why they descended to numbers and geometric shapes. On the other hand, the reason is also because they found something in these numbers and geometric figures that they could address as spirit.

What do geometric or mathematical ratios mean? Anyone who can only imagine a circle or an ellipse when they are drawn on the blackboard cannot be said to have any idea of the real geometric or mathematical relationships. If he has to put five peas or beans on the table when he wants to imagine the number <>, we cannot say that he has an idea of the real numbers.

On the contrary, we are aware that what we call a circle, what we call an ellipse, can only be represented approximately in material reality. We know that the material circle we draw is only an approximation of what we can create in our minds. We also know that what the celestial bodies in outer space describe is only an approximation of a circle. However, it is the same law that governs the creation of the world as the law that governs us when we imagine a circle in our minds, when we no longer need to deduce the spiritual from the sensual. That is why mathematics would be the best thing to introduce us to the spiritual. This is also why the Pythagoreans placed the highest value on mathematics. So if you really want to recognize the spirit, you have to be able to disregard everything sensual. You must be able to realize that it is not what you draw on the blackboard with chalk that is a real circle, but what remains for the spirit without the chalk drawing on the blackboard. Using the salt cube, it was possible to show that the cube is something completely different from the [salt] cube. In this way, the pupils could be shown that the spiritual - also of other things - can only be understood if the sensual remains absent. This is easy to show with the salt cube. The spiritual content is not the same as the outer cube.

But if we understand this for the whole sum of world phenomena, if we understand that the spiritual can be detached from the material, then this leads us up to higher levels. Everyone admits that mathematics has nothing to do with the things of the world, but with the spiritual. But if this goes further up, people confuse the spirit with reality

A strange document on the confusion of the spirit with reality has just come out these days. A book has been published entitled "Kritik der Sprache" (Critique of Language) by Fritz Mauthner, which aims to show how all our knowledge floats in the air, how nothing is given to us but the sensory world, and if we disregard the sensory world, we have nothing more in our imaginary world than empty words.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, this is something that someone who is unable to detach the spirit of things at a higher level of reality, as he can do with mathematical entities, can very easily come to. He who has no intuition, who does not really have from the source point of his spirit what he has to hold up to things, who is sterile and barren, who cannot fill his soul with spiritual realities, believes that he has nothing more when he goes beyond [the sense world] than words. Instead of a "critique of knowledge, he writes a "critique of language.

The book comprises two volumes. It seems to me as if someone wanted to write a critique and had not mastered what he wanted to criticize. He confuses what the mind adds to the formations. What Mauthner gives would be - compared to what spiritual content can and should give - a critique of pencil drawing. It shows how much the pencil is capable of depicting circles. Thus sterile views cling to those who are unable to feel the true content. He does not know that the spirit gradually acquires the ability to ascend to the higher realms of existence and is aware of its difference from material things at every stage of spiritual life, just as the mathematician is able to detach the spiritual, the spiritual from things, i.e. to advance from what is not yet spirit to the immediate God in the world.

This was something that the Pythagoreans sought to achieve step by step by trying to lead the student from the lower to the higher. They were convinced that by ascending from the lower to the higher, man was not merely having an experience within himself, but was fulfilling a task in the universe itself. They were convinced that he was doing something in the world, they were so convinced that they only compared the ascent with the numerical relationships themselves. They said to themselves: The individual human being who perceives is apparently a duality. The perceiver and the perceived. These two great opposites stood for the Pythagoreans at the basic level of their table of knowledge.

But they said to themselves: All this is only apparent because man does not stand on the highest level of perfection, but on the lower levels. The perceiving and the perceived must be overcome if they are to become one. Thus the Pythagorean imagines that, just as now in human cognition, unity triumphs over duality, over what is separate in the world, the Pythagorean must imagine everything according to numerical relationships and specifically again in such a way that what is separately a duality presents itself to him as unity.

Now the Pythagorean is convinced that the whole multiplicity of the world, the fact that there are many things in the world, derives only from the fact that man first sees the appearance, not the thing, that he does not see things as they are, but that he sees them as they are not, because of the limitations of his own existence. He sees that this multiplicity, when he overcomes appearance, then presents itself in reality, in truth, as unity. What man ultimately achieves is the primordial unity, the primordial One of the world, and the Pythagorean also sees this as the foundation from which everything springs.

This is what makes it possible for man to perceive something in space. This is the general unity of the world, but man can only gradually ascend to it. What is revealed last is there first, and that is because it is a member of this multiplicity. After it has been placed in a corner for a while, it integrates itself into the world structure and becomes one with the world harmony. The numerical harmony, the geometric regularity of the world view embraces the human being. And so he finds it by integrating himself into the structure of numbers. Therefore, the Pythagorean can say that all good, all virtue consists in man overcoming appearances and finding numerical, geometric regularity, whereby he integrates himself into the great world existence.

Thus man appears to himself like a tone in harmony, and because he appears to himself like a tone in harmony, he has to give himself the right tone and the right proportion. He does not fulfill a task for himself, but fulfills a moral task. If he does not fulfill it, then he is not in the right numerical proportion. He has something to [contribute] not to himself, but to the whole structure of the world. Through every transgression, man brings upon himself an unlimited responsibility, and, recognizing this, he should strive more and more to attain the mood that he has to fulfill in the great music of the world.

So to the Pythagorean, what is spread outside in space and time appears as a moral task itself. For the Pythagoreans, the moral task is not to be understood as a mathematical one on a higher level. The mathematical task is that he discovers the world space, but in such a way that he is thereby integrated, that he is thereby integrated like a tone in the world music, like a number in the law of numbers. He then discovers that when he does something - because he is not just his own redeemer - it is not just important for himself, but something that concerns the whole universe. The spirit is not only in me, but also where it works. He then sees that the spirit not only has to work on its own moral perfection, but also on the harmonization of the whole universe. When the Pythagorean imagines the harmony of the universe in such a way that he thinks of the world as permeated by musical tones, by music of the spheres analogous to music itself, this happens because music is based on tonal relationships.

The Pythagorean translates this by saying: Just as the tonal relationships become perceptible to our senses as a harmony of tones, there is also a harmony of tones, a music of the spheres in the world, which acts like the numerical relationships in the world. But if it does not find the right numerical relationship, the right tonal relationship to the world within itself, then it disturbs the harmony of the world.

This is why the insights of the Pythagoreans had to lead to the strictest educational system. The Pythagorean is aware, when he teaches the individual this or that, that he is taking upon himself a responsibility, not only towards that person, but towards the whole universe.

Answer to the question:

Everyone's special disposition enables them to gain knowledge of the spirit. The Pythagoreans endeavored to create this possibility for everyone.

[Mathematical ideas are only easy to prove because they are simple, almost without content.

For those, however, who are not at all suited from the outset to immerse themselves in the content of the world, the best and safest school will be to go through mathematics. Plato therefore demanded a thorough knowledge of mathematics from his students. Otherwise it might not have worked for everyone. I would like to explain this to someone who has gone through the Pythagorean school: Let's imagine a person who can only feel. Such an organism would be able to perceive geometric shapes and also be able to conceive of numbers. In fact, blind and deaf people have been taught these relationships and turned into accomplished mathematicians. Such an organism can also arrive at music in a mathematical way. The numerical relationships only appear to him in a shadowy way. Now let us imagine that such a person suddenly hears. He will then perceive the same thing that he had previously understood. He now perceives it with his ears. It is the same with the blind. Through an explanation of the vibrations of the world, he can get an idea of the colors through the numerical relationships. The Pythagorean should now also bring the higher senses to rise. It is the same thing as when a mathematician comes to a musician who is constructing his work himself and calculates it for him. Then the musician can say: "Stay away from that. If you have the necessary receptivity, you can have perceptions even without mathematical representation.

I have contrasted two currents. One current within Hellenism, which starts from Heraclitus, and the other, which starts from Pythagoras. Heraclitus and Pythagoras stand before us as two who have the same object. Heraclitus, as it were, as the composer, Pythagoras as the one who mathematically calculates his subject. It is the same with us as with Pythagoreanism. You first have to teach the blind and the deaf and then you can lead them to higher levels.

Mathematical concepts devised by humans are often confirmed in the outside world. In the case of electricity, people calculate that this or that must be one way or the other. If you then carry it out in reality as an experiment, it must agree [with the calculation].

I would like to cite a famous conversation between Schiller and Goethe. Goethe and Schiller left a scientific lecture together and got into a conversation about what they had heard. In the course of the conversation, Goethe took a piece of paper and drew a symbolic plant, an ideal plant, saying: "This plant is actually in every plant. Every plant is actually an individual embodiment of this general plant. To which Schiller replied: Yes, but that's just an idea! To which Goethe replied: But then I see my ideas with my eyes.

[Or let's take a] triangle [it is presumably drawn]: The angles add up to 180 degrees. Because we have seen a triangle, we can form a quadrilateral by connecting the blue one with the green one. This can be extended in the mind. We can move from the triangle to the square. But we cannot go from one shade of color to another. We can only perceive sensually what belongs to the world of the senses. In mathematics, the spiritual is the easiest to grasp. The mathematical is the most spiritual.

You don't know how to perceive sounds from numerical relationships? Sounds are not perceived [with the ears], only thought. Composers who become deaf therefore only have a surrogate. It is the same as when we deduce one mathematical entity from another. It is not [sensory] perception, but a mental experience.

The sensual is transformed [into the spiritual], it is elevated.

Studying mathematics makes no difference, but recognizing the essence of mathematics does. The most superficial person just splashes and splashes around in the primordial being. Someone can also have studied mathematics. Goethe studied little mathematics. But no one understood the essence of mathematics more than he did. Goethe arrived at his magnificent world of metamorphoses precisely because he had such a great idea of the nature of mathematics, even though he was only able to arrive at the [gap in the transcript] theorem.

He who can make razors may not be able to shave, and he who can shave usually cannot make razors. Thus the mathematician who knows mathematics [only] in form need not know its meaning and its application to the primal being.

It seemed well yesterday, on the last night of the year, to enter deeply into many of the secrets of existence connected with the great super-sensible mysteries, such as the annual passing of one year into another—and of the great cosmic New Year's Eve and New Year. It seemed good to enter yesterday into those things which speak to the depths of our souls, mysteries far removed from the outer world; so, at the beginning of a New Year, it may perhaps be important to let a few at least of our great and important duties be brought before our souls.

These duties are connected above all with that which is made known to us in the course of human evolution, through Spiritual Science. They are associated with the knowledge of the road humanity must travel as it advances towards its future. A man cannot recognise the duties here mentioned, if he does not, in his own way, keep an open view in many directions. We have again and again endeavoured to do this in the course of our studies. To call up a few only of such duties before our souls may perhaps be fitting at this time, at the opening of a New Year.

It is true, that in view of this material age and all that it brings in its train, we recognise that Spiritual Science must form the basis from which we can work in a higher way for the progress of mankind. It is true, that all that seems to us necessary is so enormous, so incisive—there is (to put it mildly) so much to do at the present time, that we cannot believe that with our feeble powers we should ever be in a position to do much of what has to be done. One thing at least is important, that we should connect our interest with what has to be done, that we should acquire ever more and more interest in those things of which humanity in our time has need.

As a beginning, a group of people, however small, must be interested in that of which humanity has need, and gain a clear insight into those forces which in the evolution of time have a downward tendency, those that are harmful forces. At the opening of a New Year it is specially good to turn the interest of our circle somewhat from our own personal concerns and to direct them to the great objective interests of the whole of humanity.

To do this requires, as I have said, clear insight into that which is moving along the downward path in the human evolution of to-day. We need only carry those very thoughts which have been ours during the last few days over into the realm of the actual, there to find many of the things of which the men of the present day have need.

We have seen how at a certain moment of evolution, a far-reaching wisdom was actually lost to man; how this wisdom of the Gnostics perished; and how it is now necessary to work, so that an understanding of spiritual things may again be established, though of course in accordance with the progress of the time.

During the past autumn we have considered the deeper causes of the flood tide of materialism which took place in the nineteenth century, and I have again and again emphasised that the view of Spiritual Science in regard to this flood of materialism, in no way tends to a lack of appreciation, or want of understanding of the great progress of external, material science. This has always been recognised by us. But what we must keep specially before us is this, that the great progress made in the materialistic realms of natural science during the nineteenth century and on into the present time, has been accomplished with a falling off in the power of thought—of clear, precise thinking.

This decline in the power of thinking has taken place more especially in the domain of science. There—however much people may disbelieve it—the faith in authority has never been so strong as in our day, so that want of confidence as regards the certainty of thinking has spread widely through all the realms of popular thought. We live in an age of the most careless thinking and at the same time it is an age of the blindest trust in authority. People live to-day entirely under the impression that they must believe in, they must recognise authority, that they must have the sanction of outside powers. They desire a warrant for this or that. For the most part men do not consider to-day that it is an individual concern, that they will eventually have to take up the matter for themselves! So, they go to whom ‘right and law is bequeathed like a hereditary sickness’ and accept conclusions without weighing how those conclusions were reached; for they consider it right to accept authority blindly.

A man is ill—he takes not the least trouble to learn the simplest thing about the illness. Why should he? We have recognised and certified physicians whose business it is to look after our bodies; we need not trouble in the least about them!

If information on any subject be desired, people go to those who ought to know, to the theologian, to the philosopher, to this one or to that.

Any one following up this line of thought for himself, will find that on numberless points he himself is sunk in blindest belief in authority. If he cannot find them—do not take it ill of me, if I say—that the less he finds of this belief in authority in himself, the larger the dose he must have swallowed!

But I would now like to show how a narrow, cramped and impoverishing mode of thought has slipped even into the finest domain of spiritual life, all the world over—without distinction of nation, race or colour; that a certain element of cramped thinking is to be found where the life of spiritual culture exists in its finest form. Let us take a philosophical idea and watch how it has developed. Who is not convinced to-day, on the grounds of a belief in an authority which has come down to him through very many channels—who is not convinced that one cannot by any means arrive at the ‘thing in itself,’ but can only catch the outward phenomena, the impression on the senses, the impression made on the soul by the thing. Man can but arrive at the ‘results’ of things, but not at the ‘thing in itself.’ This is indeed the fundamental type of the thought of the nineteenth century. I have described the whole wretched business in that chapter in my book Riddles of Philosophy, which is called ‘The World of Illusion.’ Anyone who studies this chapter will find a résumé of the whole matter. Man can only perceive ‘effects,’ he cannot attain to ‘the thing in itself;’ this remains unknown.

The most capable thinkers of the nineteenth century, if we can speak of them as capable in this connection, are infected by this necessary ignorance regarding ‘the thing in itself.’

If we now turn to the trend of thought which is at the base of what I have just described, it presents itself thus: It is wrongly insisted on, that the eye can only reflect that which it can evoke within itself by means of its nervous or other activities. When an external impression comes, it responds to it in its own specific way. One only gets as far as the impression—not to that which causes the impression on the eye. Through his ear a man only gets as far as the impression made on the ear—not to the thing that makes the impression, and so on.

It is, therefore, only the impressions of the outer world that act on the senses of the soul. That which was at first established as regards a certain realm, that of colour, tone and the like, has now for a long time been extended to the whole thinking world—that can receive only the impression or effects of what is in the world. Is this incorrect? Certainly it is not incorrect, but the point—as has often been said—is not in the least whether a matter is correct or not, quite other things come into consideration. Is it correct that only pictures, only impressions of things, are called forth by our senses? Certainly it is correct, that cannot be doubted; but something very different is connected with this. This I will explain by means of a comparison.

If someone stands before a mirror and another person also stands there beside him, it cannot be denied that what is seen in the mirror is the image of the one man and also of the other. What is seen in the mirror is without doubt images—merely images. From this point of view all our sense perceptions are in fact mere images: for the object must first make an impression on us and our impression—the reaction as one might say—evokes consciousness. We can quite correctly compare this with the images which we see in the mirror; for the impressions are also images.

Thus in the Lange and Kant train of thought we have a quite correct assertion—that man is concerned with images and that therefore, he cannot come into touch with anything real, with any actual ‘thing in itself.’ Why is this? It is solely because man cannot think things out further than one assumption, he remains at one correct assumption. The thought is not incorrect, but as such it is frozen in—it can go no further—it is really frozen in. Just consider: The images that we see in the mirror are true images, but suppose the other person who stands beside me and looks into the mirror too, gives me a box on the ear, would I then say (as these are but images I see in the mirror) that one reflection has given the other reflection a box on the ear? The action points to something real behind the images! And so it is. When our thoughts are alive and not frozen, when they are connected with realities, we know that the Lange-Kantian hypothesis is correct, that we have everywhere to do with images; but when the images come in touch with living conditions, these living conditions reveal what first leads us to the thing in itself. It is not so much the case here that certain gentlemen who have thus led thoughts astray, have started from a wrong hypothesis; the whole matter hangs on the fact that we have to reckon with thoughts that were frozen, with thoughts which when at last they are reached, make people say: true, true, true—and get no further. This unworthy thinking of the nineteenth century is wanting in flexibility, in vitality. It is frozen in, truly ice-bound.

Let us take another example. During the past year I have often communicated certain things to you from a celebrated thinker—Mauthner, the great critic of language. Kant occupies himself with Critique of Idea. Mauthner went further, (things that follow must always go further)—he wrote a Critique of Speech. You will remember that during the autumn I gave you examples from the Critique of Speech. Such a man has many followers at the present day. Before he took up philosophy he was a journalist. There is an old saw which says: ‘One crow does not peck out the eyes of another.’ Not only do they not peck out each other's eyes, but the others even give eyes to the crows that are blind, especially when these are journalists! And thus this critic of language—but as I said I wish in no way to raise any question as regards the honesty of such a thinker, even as regards his solidity and depth, for I must always insist again and again that it is incorrect to say that criticism of natural or of any other science is practised here, its characteristics are only defined. So I say expressly, that Mauthner is an honourable man, ‘so are they all honourable men’—but just let us consider one process of thought which is along the lines of this Critique of Language. For example it is stated there: Human knowledge is limited. Limited—why limited according to Mauthner? Well, because all that man experiences of the world enters his soul by way of his senses. Certainly there is nothing very profound in this thought, but yet it is an undeniable fact. Everything comes to us from the outer world through the senses. But now the thought came to Mauthner that these senses are merely accidental-senses, which means that supposing that we had not our eyes and ears and other senses, we might have other senses instead, then the world around us would appear quite different. An exceedingly popular thought, especially among many philosophers of our day! So it is actually by chance that we have these particular senses, and therewith our conception of the world about us. Had we different senses we should have a different world! Accidental senses!

One of the followers of Fritz Mauthner has said roughly as follows: ‘The world is infinite; but how can man know anything of this infinite world? He can but gain impressions through his accidental senses. Through the door of these chance-senses many things enter our souls and group themselves, while without, the infinite world goes on, and man can learn nothing of the laws in accordance with which it progresses. How can man believe, that what he experiences through these chance-senses of his, can have any connection with the great cosmic mysteries beyond?’ So speaks a follower of Mauthner, who did not, however, look upon himself as an adherent of his, but as a clever man of his day. Yes, so he said. But you can transpose this line of thought into another. I will absolutely retain the form and character of the thought, but translate it into another. I will now state this other thought.

One cannot form any idea of what such a genius as Goethe really has given to mankind, for he has no other means of expressing what he had to say to men, than by the use of twenty-two or twenty-three chance letters of our alphabet which must be grouped in accordance with their own laws and set down on paper. This goes still further. How is it possible to learn anything of the genius of Goethe, through the chance grouping of letters on paper?

Clever such a man might be who believes that because Goethe had to express his whole genius by means of twenty-three letters, A.B.C. and so on,—we could learn nothing of his genius or of his ideas,—clever he might be who used such an excuse and still maintained that he had before him nothing but the twenty-three chance letters grouped in various ways! ‘Away with your explanations,’ he would say, ‘they are but fancy, I see nothing before me but letters!’ Clever, in the same way, is he who says: The world beyond is infinite, we cannot learn anything of it, for we know only what comes to us through our chance-senses.

The fact is that such inaccurate thinking does not only exist in the domain of which I am speaking, where it comes very crudely into evidence, it is present everywhere. It is active in the profoundly unhappy events of the present day, for these would not be what they are if the thinking of all humanity was not permeated with what has been pointed out in a somewhat crude form.

People will never be able to take the right interest in such things, I mean the things concerned with the true efforts of man for his real progress—true effort in the, sense of Spiritual Science—if they have not the will really to enter into such matters, if they have not the desire to recognise the things of which man stands in need. Objections are ever being raised from this side and from that, to the teaching of Spiritual Science, that it is only accessible to those who have clairvoyant perception of the spiritual worlds. People will not believe that this is not true, that what is required is, that by thought they should really be able to attain understanding of that which the seer is able to bring forth out of the spiritual world. It is not to be wondered at that people cannot to-day grasp with their thought what the seer derives from the spiritual world, when thought is built up in this way I have described. This kind of thought is ‘trumps’ and rules life in every department.

It is not because man is unable to understand with his thoughts all that Spiritual Science teaches, that it fails to be understood, but because he permits himself to be infected with the slip-shod thinking of the present day. Spiritual Science should stimulate us to intensive, courageous thinking; that is what matters: and it is well able to do this.

Of course, as long as we take Spiritual Science in such a way that we only talk about the things with which it is concerned, we shall not advance very much in the establishing of the thought for the future of humanity, which is exactly the mission of our movement to establish. When, however, we take the trouble really to understand—really to grasp the things, the matter taught,—we shall certainly make progress.

Even the conceptions of Spiritual Science are affected by the careless thinking of the present day. I have explained to you how this careless thinking acts; I quoted: ‘results only do we have in the external world, so we cannot attain to the thing in itself.’ This thought is as it were immediately frozen in; people do not wish to go any further, the thought is frozen in, they no longer see that the living interchanging activity of the reflected images leads further than to the mere image-character. This method is then applied to the conceptions of Spiritual Science. Because people are fully infected by such kind of thoughts, they say: Yes, what Spiritual Science tells on page a,b,c, are facts of Spiritual Science; these facts we cannot have before us, if we have not acquired the seer's gift. Therefore, they do not go on to think whether in their present attitude to what Spiritual Science teaches they are not making the same mistake that the whole world makes to-day. The worst of it is, that this fundamental failing of contemporary thought is so little recognised. It is dreadful how little it is recognised. It enters into our everyday thinking, and makes itself felt there, just as in the more advanced thinking of the philosophers and scientists. It is but seldom that people recognise what a really tremendous duty springs from an insight into this fact, how important it is to be interested in such things, how lacking in responsibility to permit our interest in them to be blunted.

The fact is now apparent, that in the course of the last century purely external sense-observation obtained and gave its tone to science; people laid the greatest value on the results of observation in the laboratory, or in the clinic, in the Zoological Gardens and the like, (the value of which observation must be recognised, as I have often remarked) but they desired to hold to these only and go no further. It is true that extraordinary progress has been made by these methods of natural science, quite extraordinary progress; but it is just through this progress that thought has become quite unreliable. Therefore it becomes a duty not to allow those persons to attain power in the world, who exercise this power from the standpoint of a purely materialistic experimental knowledge,—and it is power that such people want. At the present day we have reached the point, when all that is non-materialistic learning is to be driven out of the world by the brutal language of force which is used in materialistic erudition. It has already become a question of force. Among those who appeal most eagerly to the external powers to gain their external privileges, we have to recognise those who stand on the foundation of material science alone. Therefore, it is our duty to understand that force rules in the world. It is not enough that we should be interested only in what concerns ourselves personally, we must develop interest in the great concerns of the whole of humanity. It is true that as individuals and even as a small society we cannot do much to-day, but from small germs like these a beginning must be made. What is the use of people saying to-day that they have no faith in doctors; that they have no confidence in the system, and seek by every other means, something in which they can feel confidence? Nothing is affected by this, all that is but personal effort for their own advantage. We should be interested in establishing, alongside the material medicine of to-day, something in which we can have confidence. Otherwise things will get worse from day to day. This does not only mean that those who have no faith in the medical science of the day should seek out someone whom they can trust; for this would put the latter in a false position, unless he interests himself in seeing that he too should be suitably qualified to interest himself in the progress of the general condition, of humanity. It is true that to-day and tomorrow we cannot perhaps be more than interested in the matter, but we must bear in our souls such interest for the affairs of humanity if we wish to understand in their true meaning the teaching of Spiritual Science. We still often think that we understand the great interests of humanity, because we frequently interpret our personal interests as if they were the greatest interests of mankind.

We must search deeply, within the profoundest depths of our soul, if we wish to discover in ourselves how dependent we are on the blind faith in authority of the present day—how profoundly we are dependent on it. It is our indolence, our love of ease that withholds us from being inwardly kindled, and set aflame by the great needs of humanity.

The best New Year greeting that we can inscribe in our souls is that we may be enkindled and inspired by the great interests of the progress of mankind—of the true freedom of humanity. So long as we allow ourselves to believe that he who blows his trumpet before the world must also be able to think correctly,—so long as we hold beliefs derived from the carelessly organised thinking of the present day,—we have not developed within ourselves true interests in the great universal cause of mankind.

What I have just said is in no way directed against any great man in particular; I know that when such things are said especially in a public lecture, there are many who say: Natural Science and the authorities of the day were attacked by Spiritual Science; and the like. I specially quote instances from those of whom I can say, on the other hand, that they are great authorities of the present day, that they are great men,—to show that they support things which Spiritual Science has to extirpate, root and branch. Even without being a great man, one can recognise the careless thinking of great men, which has been so greatly enhanced just because of the brilliant advance in the experimental science of the day. One example, one among many,—I choose a book written by one of the best known men of the day and which is translated into German. No one can say that greatness is unrecognised by me. I repeat, I choose a book by a celebrated man of the day, in the domain of experimental Natural Science. I look up a passage in the introduction to the second volume, which deals specially with the question of the cosmology of the day; in which the great man goes into the history of the development of cosmo-conception. It runs somewhat as follows: In the times of the ancient Egyptians, the Greeks and the Romans, men tried to form a picture of the world in such and such a way; then in the last four hundred years there arose the Natural Science of to-day, which has at last drawn the great prize, which has swept all previous ideas aside and has attained to actual truth, which now has but to be further built up.

I have often laid stress on the fact that it is not so much the individual assertions that people make, it is the Ahrimanic or Luciferic characteristics which at once lay hold on people, so that they become Ahrimanic or Luciferic. Thus at the close of this introduction we read the following, which is in the highest degree noteworthy. Take a special note of what is presented to us by one who is without doubt a great and celebrated man of the day. After remarking how grand the knowledge of Natural Science is to-day, he says: ‘The time of sad decline endured until the awakening of humanity at the beginning of the new age. The new age placed the art of printing at the service of learning, and contempt of experimental work disappeared from the minds of educated people. Opposition to old opinions as expressed in the writings of various investigators, advanced at first but slowly. These hindering conditions have since disappeared, and immediately the number of workers and the means of furthering Natural Science increased in rapid succession. Hence the extraordinary progress of recent years.’

There then follows the last sentence of this introduction—‘We sometimes hear it said that we live in the best of all possible worlds: there might be some objection raised to this, but we scientists at least can assert with all certainty, that we live in the best of times. And we can look forward with confidence to a still better future. ...’ Now follows what really is astounding! This author attaches to himself, and to his age, that which great men have discovered and thought, regarding nature and the world. Therefore he says: In the firm hope that the future may be better, we can say with Goethe,—the great authority on man and nature:

‘Es ist ein gross Ergotzen
Sich in den Geist der Zeiten zu versetzen,
Zu schauen, wie vor uns ein weiser Mann gedacht,
Und wie wir's dann zuletzt so herrlich weit gebracht.’

[‘It is a great delight, to enter into the spirit of the age, to see how wise men thought before our time, and how splendidly we have advanced things.’]

In all seriousness a great man closes his remarks with these words, the pronouncement of Goethe, the great authority on nature and on man; words to which Faust replies,—for it is Wagner who says:

‘By your leave it is a great delight,
To enter into the spirit of the age, etc.—’

But Faust answers: (and perhaps we may accept what Faust says as the thought of Goethe, the great authority on nature and on man.)

‘O yes! As far as to the stars!’

This is exactly fitted for a man who can reach as far as to the stars, thus:

‘O yes! As far as to the stars!
The ages that are past, my Friend,
Are for us a book with seven seals;
What we call the spirit of the age,
Is in fact the spirit of ourselves
In which the times are mirrored.
This is in truth, often but a wail!
Men fly from the first glance of it.
A rubbish heap, a lumber room,
At most some act or state of law
With excellent pragmatic maxims
Such as are put in puppets' mouths!’

And so on. ...

Thus in 1907 wrote one of the greatest men of the day who had surely got ‘as far as to the stars,’ and who looking back on all those who had worked before him had also got so far as to make use of the saying ‘of Goethe, the great authority on man and nature.’

It is a great delight
To enter into the spirit of the age.

You smile! One could wish that this smile always might be directed against those who are capable at the present day of making such carelessness valid; for the example I have given shows that it is those who are firmly established on the ground of the scientific outlook of the day, and who are associated with progress in this domain, who are able to put forth such negligent thinking. It just proves that what is called Natural Science to-day by no means excludes the most superficial thinking. A man may be a thoroughly careless thinker to-day, and yet be held to be a great man in the realm of natural science. This has to be recognised, and in this sense we must approach it. It is a sign of our time. If this were to continue; if any one is labeled as a great man, and given out as a great authority and if people put forward what he says in this or that domain without proof, as of something of great worth—then we should never surmount the great misery of our time. I am fully convinced that countless people pass over the sentence I read out to you to-day, without a smile, although it shows forth in the most eminent degree, where the greatest faults of our day lie, which are bringing about the decline of the evolution of humanity.

We must see clearly where to make a beginning with those things necessary for man; and also see that in spite of the immense advance in external natural science, the greatest scientists of the nineteenth century, even down to our own day, have shown themselves the worst dilettantists in regard to all questions of world-outlook. The great fault of our day is, that this is not recognised—that people do not recognise that the greatest investigators in natural science in the nineteenth century proved themselves the worst of dilettantists in the question of world-outlook, when they entirely left out that which as spirit rules in the realm of natural science. People blindly followed after these great persons, not only when they gave out the results of investigations in the laboratory, or of clinical research, but also when they asserted things regarding the secrets of the universe.

So, parallel with the popularising of science which is useful and beneficial in the highest degree, we have at the same time a deterioration as regards all questions of wide import and a heedlessness of thought which is infectious and very harmful, because it is founded on the very worst kind of dilettantism of great men.

Here are to be found the tasks with which our interests must be closely associated, even if we ourselves are not able to produce anything. We must at least look things in the face, we must see clearly that it will above all lead to far, far more unhappy times than we are at present passing through, if mankind does not realise what has been here pointed out;—if, in place of careless, inexact thinking, a clear and genuine method of thought be not established again among men. Everything can be traced back to this careless thinking. All those external, often very unhappy phenomena which we encounter would not exist if this inexact, negligent thought were not there.

It seems to me specially necessary to speak of these matters at the beginning of a New Year, for they are connected with the character and attitude of our whole task. For when we accustom ourselves to consider without prejudice the method and nature of modern thought, and see how powerful it is in all the varied conditions of life, we can then form some picture of what we have to do and of what mankind stands in need. We must in the first place overcome all tendency to slackness, all love of sloth and laziness, we must see clearly that a spiritual-scientific movement has duties other than that of merely listening to lectures or reading books.

I must continually remind you to make yourselves acquainted with the necessary ideas. It is clear to all that as a few individuals,—as a small society—we cannot do much. But our own thought must move in the right direction; we must know what is in question, we must not ourselves be exposed to the danger (to put it trivially) of succumbing to the different conceptions of the world, of those who are the great men of the day in the external sciences. Great men, but dilettante thinkers as regards questions of universal import, found numerous associations of monistic or other nature without the opposition that would arise if at least it were realised that, when such societies are founded, it is as if one said: ‘I am letting this man make a coat, because he is a celebrated cobbler!’

This is foolishness, is it not? But it is just as foolish when a great chemist or a great psychologist is accepted as an authority on a conception of the world. We cannot blame them if they claim it for themselves, for naturally they cannot know how inadequate they are; but that they are so accepted is connected with the great evils of the present day. To me it seems as if a thought for New Year's Eve must ever be associated with our feelings; whereas it seems to me that that which faces us as the more immediate duty of the day, must be directly associated with our reflections on New Year's Day; I thought therefore, that the tone of what has been said to-day might be fitly associated with what was said yesterday.

To-day I wish to speak to you of some fundamental pieces of knowledge of the science of initiation, which will then supply to us a kind of foundation for that which we shall consider tomorrow and the day after tomorrow. To-day we shall first speak of something which lies in the consciousness of every human being, but is not grasped clearly enough in the ordinary course of life. When we speak of such things, we always speak of them from the standpoint of our present time, in the sense and meaning which I have often explained to you: namely, that knowledge is not in any way valid for all time and for every place, but that it is only valid for a certain definite time, indeed, only for a definite region of the earth. Thus, certain standpoints of knowledge would be valid, for instance, for the European civilisation, and other standpoints would be valid—let us say—for the knowledge of the East.

Everybody knows that we live, as it were, between two poles of our knowledge. Everyone feels that, on the one hand, we have the knowledge gained through our senses. A plain, unprejudiced person learns to know the world through his senses, and is even able to sum up what he sees and hears, and, in general, what he perceives through his senses. After all, that which science supplies to us, in the form in which science now exists in the Occident, is merely a summary of that which the senses convey to us.

But everyone can feel that there is also another kind of knowledge, and that it is not possible to be in the full sense of the word a real human being living in the ordinary world, unless another kind of knowledge is added to the one which has just been characterized. And this kind of knowledge is connected with our moral life. We do not only speak of ideas pertaining to the knowledge of Nature, and explaining this or that thing in Nature, we also speak of ethical ideas, ethical ideals. We feel that they are the motives of our actions, and that we allow them to guide us when we ourselves wish to be active in the ordinary world. And every man will undoubtedly feel that this knowledge of the senses, with the resulting intellectual knowledge (for, the intellectual knowledge is merely a result, an appendix of the knowledge transmitted by the senses) is a pole of our cognitive life which cannot reach as far as the ethical ideas. The ethical ideas are there, but when we pursue, for instance, natural science, we cannot find these ethical ideas by contemplating the plant-world, the mineral world, or by following any other branch of modern natural sciences. The tragic element of our time consists, for instance, in trying to discover, upon a natural-scientific basis, ideas which are to be applied to the social sphere. If sound common sense were adopted, this would never be possible. The ethical ideas exist as if on another side of life. And our life is indeed under the influence of these two streams: on the one hand, the knowledge of Nature, and on the other hand, the ethical knowledge.

From my The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity you will know that the highest ethical ideas required by us as human beings are given to us when we grasp moral intuitions, and that when we begin to gain possession of these ethical ideas, they are the foundation of our human freedom. On the other hand, you may perhaps also know that for certain thinkers there has always been a kind of abyss between that which is given, on the one hand, by the knowledge of Nature, and on the other hand, by ethical knowledge. The philosophy of Kant is based upon this abyss, which he is unable to bridge completely. For this reason, Kant has written a Critique of Theoretical Reason, of Pure Reason, as he calls it, where he grapples with natural science, and where he says all that he has to say about natural science, or the knowledge of Nature. On the other hand, he has also written a Critique of Practical Reason, where he speaks of ethical ideas. We might say: The whole human life is born for him out of two roots which are completely severed from one another, which he describes in his two chief critical studies.

Of course, it would be unfortunate for the human being if there were no connecting bridge between these two poles of our soul-life. Those who earnestly pursue, on the one hand, spiritual science, and on the other hand, earnestly consider the tasks of our present time, must eagerly ask themselves: Where is the bridge connecting ethical ideas and the ideas of Nature?

To-day we shall adopt the standpoint which I would like to characterize as a historical standpoint, in order to come to a knowledge of this bridge. You already know from the explanations which have recently been given here, that in past times man's soul-constitution was essentially different from that of a later time. The origin of Christianity really forms a deep incision in the whole evolution of humanity. And only if we understand what has really arisen in the evolution of humanity through the birth of Christianity we shall understand human reason.

That which lies behind the rise of Christianity—not to mention Jewish history—is the whole extent of pagan culture. Jewish culture was, after all, a preparation for Christianity. This whole extent of pagan culture is essentially different from our modern Christian culture. The more we go back into time, the more we shall find that this pagan culture had a uniform character. It was principally based upon human wisdom. I know that it is almost offending for a modern man to hear that, as far as wisdom is concerned, the ancients were far more advanced than modern man; nevertheless it was so. In ancient pagan times a wisdom extended over the earth, which was far nearer to the origin of things than our modern knowledge, particularly our modern natural sciences. This ancient, this primeval knowledge, was very concrete, it was a knowledge intensively connected with the spiritual reality of things. Something entered the human soul through man's knowledge of the reality of things. But the special characteristic of this ancient pagan wisdom was the fact that the human beings obtained it in such a way (you know that they obtained it from the Mysteries of the Initiates) that this wisdom contained both a knowledge of Nature, and an ethical knowledge. This extraordinarily significant truth in the history of human evolution, this truth which I have just explained to you, is ignored to-day only because people cannot go back to the truly characteristic times of the ancient pagan wisdom. A historical knowledge does not reach back so far as to enable us to grasp the times when the human beings who looked up to the stars really received from the stars, on the one hand, a wisdom explaining to them in their own way the course of the stars, but on the other hand, it also told them how they were to behave and act here upon the earth. Metaphorically speaking, (yet it is not entirely metaphorical, but quite objective up to a certain degree), we might say, that the ancient Egyptians and the ancient Chaldean civilisations were, for instance, of such a kind that men could read the laws of Nature in the course of the stars, but in the star's course they could also read the rules governing that which they were to do upon the earth.

The codices of the ancient Egyptian Pharaohs contain, for instance, rules concerning that which was to become law. It was so that for centuries ahead that which would later on become law was foretold prophetically. Everything contained in these codices was read from the course of the stars. In those ancient times there was no astronomy such as we have it now, merely containing mathematical laws of the movements of the stars or of the earth, but there was a knowledge of the cosmos which was at the same time moral knowledge, ethics.

The doubtful element of modern astrology, which does not go beyond the stage of dilettantism, is that people no longer feel that its contents can only be a complete whole if the laws discovered in it are at the same time moral laws for the human beings. This is something extraordinarily significant.

In the course of human evolution, the essence of that primeval science was lost. This lies at the foundation of the fact that certain Secret Schools—but the schools of an earnest character have really ceased to exist at the end of the 18th century—and even certain Secret Schools of the Occident, have again and again pointed back to this lost science, to the lost Word. As a rule, those who came later no longer knew what was meant by the expression “Word”. Nevertheless, this conceals a certain fact. In Saint-Martin's books we may still find an echo showing that up to the end of the 18th century it was very clearly felt that in ancient times men possessed a spiritual wisdom which they obtained simultaneously with their knowledge of Nature. Their spiritual wisdom also contained their moral and ethical wisdom; this had already disappeared in the eight centuries preceding the rise of Christianity. We may even say: Ancient Greek history is, essentially, the gradual loss of primeval wisdom.

If we study the philosophers before Socrates, namely Heraclitus, Thales, Anaximenes, Anaxagoras, the philosophers of the tragic epoch, as Nietzsche called them—I have dealt with them in my book Riddles of Philosophy, and have tried to give as good as possible a picture, from an external standpoint—if we study these philosophers (but the external writings tell us very little about them), we shall find again and again that the passages which have remained like oases in a desert, re-echo a great, encompassing wisdom and knowledge which existed in the remote past of human evolution. The words of Heraclitus, of Thales, Anaxagoras and Anaximenes, appear to us as if humanity had, as it were, forgotten its primeval wisdom and only remembered occasionally some fragmentary passages. The few passages of Thales, Anaxagoras, of the seven Greek sages, etc., which have been handed down to us traditionally, appear to us like fragmentary recollections.

In Plato we still encounter a kind of clear consciousness of this primeval wisdom; in Aristotle everything has been transformed into human wisdom.

And among the Stoics and Epicureans this gradually disappears. The ancient primeval knowledge only remains like an old legend. This is how matters stood with the Greeks.

The Romans—and they were by Nature a prosaic, matter-of-fact nation—even denied that this primeval knowledge had any meaning at all, and they transformed everything into abstractions. The course which I have just described to you in regard to the primeval knowledge, was necessary for the evolution of humanity. Man would never have reached freedom in the course of his development, had the primeval wisdom, which came to him indirectly through atavistic clairvoyance, remained in its original intensity and significance. Nevertheless, this primeval knowledge was connected with everything which could reach man from divine heights in the form, I might say, of moral impulses. This had to be rescued. The moral impulse had to be rescued for man.

Among the many things which we have already explained in regard to the Mystery of Golgotha we have also explained that the divine principle which descended to the earth trough the man, Jesus of Nazareth, contained the moral power which was little by little dispersed and cleft through the waning and gradual dying out of the ancient primeval wisdom. It is indeed so—although this may seem paradoxical to a modern man—that we can say: Once upon a time there was an old primeval wisdom. Man's moral power and moral wisdom were connected with primeval knowledge; this was contained in it as an integrant. The ancient primeval wisdom then lost its power, it could no longer be the bearer of a moral impulse

This moral impulse had, as it were, to be taken under the wing of the Mystery of Golgotha. And for the civilisation of the Occident, the further continuation was the Christ Impulse which has arisen from the Mystery of Golgotha containing that which had remained as a kind of moral extract from the ancient primeval wisdom.

It is very strange to follow, for instance, that which Occidental civilisation contains in the form of true science, true wisdom, up to the 8th or 9th century after Christ. Try to read the description of Occidental wisdom up to the 8th and 9th century, as contained in my book, Riddles of Philosophy, and you will see that, after all, this course of development contains nothing of what may be designated as knowledge, in our modern meaning. For this arises towards the middle of the 15th century, at the time of Galilei. Until that time, knowledge has really been handed down traditionally from the primeval wisdom of the past. It is no longer a wisdom gained through inner intuition, no longer a primeval wisdom experienced inwardly, but an external wisdom handed down traditionally. I have often told you the story of Galilei, the story which is not an anecdote, namely, how Galilei had to make a great effort in order to convince a friend of the truth of his statements. Like all the other people of the Middle Ages who pursued wisdom, this friend was accustomed to accept what was contained in the books of Aristotle, or in the other traditional works. Everything which was taught at that time was traditional. That which was contained in the books of Aristotle was handed down traditionally. And the learned friend of Galilei agreed with Aristotle that the nerves go out from the heart. Galilei endeavoured to explain to him that according to the knowledge he had gained by studying a corpse, he was obliged to say something else: namely, that in the human being the nerves go out from the head, or the brain. This Aristotelian thinker could not believe it. Galilei then led him to the corpse, showed him that the nerves in fact go out from the brain and not from the heart, and felt sure that his friend would now have to believe what he saw with his own eyes. But his friend said: “Indeed, this appears to be true; I can see with my own eyes that the nerves proceed from the brain. But Aristotle says the opposite, namely that the nerves proceed from the heart. If I have to choose between the evidence of the senses in Nature and Aristotle's statements, I prefer to believe in Aristotle, and not in Nature!” This is not an anecdote, but a true occurrence. After all, in our time we simply experience the same thing, only the other way round.

You see, at that time all knowledge was traditional. A new knowledge only began with the time of Galilei, Copernicus, and so forth. But throughout these centuries the moral impulse was borne by the Christian impulse. It was essentially connected with the religious element. This was not the case in pagan times. The pagans realised that when they obtained cosmic wisdom, they obtained at the same time a moral impulse.

A new impulse arose towards the middle of the 15th century, an impulse which completely severed the connection with everything that existed in the form of ancient wisdom, even though this merely existed traditionally. It is very interesting to see the passion with which those who brought to the surface this new science—for instance, Giordano Bruno—abuse everything which existed in the form of old traditional wisdom. Bruno almost begins to rave when he rails against the recollections of ancient wisdom. Something entirely new arises. In fact, we shall be far from understanding human evolution if we are unable to look upon this new element which thus arises, as a beginning.

We may say (a drawing is made on the blackboard): If we indicate, here, the Mystery of Golgotha ... the moral impulse will continue from there, but what was that which the Mystery of Golgotha carried from an older into a more recent time? What was it, in reality, while it was being borne in that direction? It was an end. The more we progress, the more the ancient wisdom disappears, even in its traditional form. We may say that it continues to drip like water, in the form of traditional knowledge; but a new element, a beginning, arises with the 15th century.

Indeed, we have not advanced very far in this new direction. The few centuries which have elapsed since the middle of the 15th century have brought us some natural science, but we have not progressed far since that beginning.

What is this new wisdom? You see, it is a wisdom which, to begin with, in the form in which it has appeared, has this peculiarity: Contrary to the ancient pagan wisdom, it does not contain a moral impulse. You may study as much as possible of this new wisdom, of this Galilei wisdom—mineralogy, geology, physics, chemistry, biology, etc. etc.,—but you will never be able to draw a moral impulse out of this knowledge of Nature.

If modern people think that they can establish sociology upon the foundation of natural sciences, this is a tremendous illusion. For it is impossible to squeeze out of natural science, such as it exists to-day, that kind of knowledge which can be an ideal for human actions. For natural science is altogether in an elementary stage, and we can only hope that by developing more and more, it will again come to the point of containing, as natural science, moral impulses.

If the knowledge of Nature were to continue only in accordance with its own form, it would not be able to produce moral impulses out of its own nature. A new super-sensible knowledge will have to develop by the side of this knowledge of Nature. This super-sensible knowledge will then contain once more the rays of a moral will. And when the beginning which was made towards the middle of the 15th century will have reached its end at the conclusion of the evolution of the earth, then super-sensible knowledge will flow together with the knowledge of the senses, and a unity will arise out of this.

When the old pagan sage, or the follower of pagan wisdom received pagan wisdom from his initiate in the Mysteries, he received at one and the same time a knowledge of Nature, a cosmic knowledge, an anthropogenesis and a moral science, and this was simultaneously a moral impulse. All this was one.

To-day it is necessary to admit that we obtain on the one hand, a knowledge of Nature, and on the other hand, super-sensible knowledge. This knowledge of Nature is, as such, devoid of moral impulses. Moral impulses must be gained through a super-sensible knowledge. Since the social impulses must, after all, be moral impulses, no true social knowledge, and not even a sum of social impulses can be imagined, unless man rises to super-sensible knowledge.

It is important that modern man should realise that he must strike out a new course in regard to social science; he must tread a different path than that of natural science. But I am at the same time obliged to draw your attention to a strange paradox:—I have often explained to you here that the deepest truths of the science of initiation appear strange to the ordinary every-day consciousness, may even appear crazy to an extreme materialist, but in our time it is necessary to grow acquainted with this wisdom which appears so paradoxical to-day. For in our time many things which appear foolish to men are wisdom before God. It would be a good thing if this bible passage were to be considered a little by those who brush aside Anthroposophy with a supercilious smile, or who criticize it in a vile way. They should consider that what they look upon as foolishness may be “wisdom before the Gods”. It would be a very good thing if several people—and by “several” I mean many—particularly those who go to church with their prayer book and revile Anthroposophy, were to insist less upon their proud faith and look more closely into that which is really contained in the Christian faith. In our time it is necessary to become acquainted with several things which appear paradoxical. You see, two things are possible to-day. Someone may become acquainted with the natural science of to-day (I shall now characterize these two things rather sharply), he may, for instance, take up the facts supplied by the science of chemistry, physics, biology, etc. He may study diligently and eagerly the Theory of Evolution which has arisen from the so-called Darwinism. If he studies all this he may become a materialist, as far as his world conception based on knowledge is concerned. Indeed, he will become a materialist; this cannot be denied. Since men, as it were, so quickly arrive at an opinion, they become materialists if they give themselves up wholly to the external knowledge of Nature, according to the intentions of some of their contemporaries. But it is also possible to do something else. In addition to that which physics, chemistry, mineralogy, botany, geology, biology, offer, in addition to that which these sciences teach, we may also direct our attention to what we do in the physical laboratory, to our behaviour during an experiment; we may watch carefully how we behave in the chemical laboratory and what we do there; we may watch the way in which we investigate plants, animals, and their evolution.

Goethe's knowledge of Nature is chiefly based upon the fact that he has deeply studied the way in which others have come to their knowledge. The greatness of Goethe depends upon this very fact, namely, that he has deeply occupied himself with the way in which others have attained to their knowledge. And it is very, very significant to penetrate really into the essence and spirit of an essay by Goethe, such as “The Experiment as Mediator between Object and Subject”. Here we may see how Goethe carefully follows the way in which phenomena of Nature are handled. What we may call the method of investigation, this is something which he has studied with the greatest attention. If you read my Introduction to Goethe's Natural-Scientific Writings you will find what great results Goethe has reached by thus pursuing the natural-scientific method.

In a certain way, that which Goethe has done can be developed further for the achievements of the 19th century and up to the 20th century ... but Goethe was no longer able to do this.

I therefore state: Two things are possible. Let us keep to this, to begin with. We remain by the results which natural science supplies, or else we investigate the attitude needed in order to arrive at these natural scientific results. Let us keep to what we have said in regard to the knowledge of Nature; let us now observe the human striving after knowledge from another standpoint.

You know that beside natural science there is also a spiritual knowledge; in the form of Anthroposophy, the knowledge of man, we may pursue cosmology, anthropology, etc., in such a way that they lead to the kind of results described, for instance, in my Occult Science. There, we may find positive knowledge pointing to the spiritual world. Just as we obtain positive knowledge in natural science, in mineralogy, geology, etc., so we have, here, a positive knowledge referring to the spiritual world. In our anthroposophical movement it was particularly important for me to spread also this kind of positive knowledge concerning the spiritual world in the various books which I have written. Now we may also tackle things in such a way that we observe chiefly the way in which these things are done, and do not merely aim at obtaining knowledge. We observe how a person describes something, how he rises from external observation to inner observation; how he arrives to a higher spiritual conception, not through scientific investigations in the laboratory, in the clinic, in the astronomical observatory, but through his inner soul-development, along a mystical path. This would be parallel to the observation of the natural-scientific method, of the handling, of the way in which things are done. Also here we have this twofold element: to watch the results, and to watch the way in which our soul comes to these results.

Let us take hypothetically something which may seem rather paradoxical. Let us suppose that someone were to pursue the natural-scientific methods, like Goethe: he will certainly not become a materialist, but will undoubtedly accept a spiritual world-conception. An infallible way of overcoming materialism in our modern time is to have in insight into the natural-scientific methods of investigation. In the natural-scientific sphere, men become materialists only because they do not observe, because they insufficiently observe the way in which they carry on their investigations. They are satisfied with results, with what the clinic, the laboratory, the observatory supply. They do not progress as far as Goetheanism, i.e. the observation of their manner of research; for those who allow themselves to be influenced by the natural-scientific manner of contemplating the world and of handling things in order to reach knowledge, will at least become idealists, and probably spiritualists, if they only proceed far enough.

If we now try to avoid reaching the positive results of spiritual science, if we find it boring to enter into the details of spiritual science, and only like to hear again and again how man's soul becomes mystical, if we concentrate our chief attention upon the methods leading to the spiritual sphere, this will be the greatest temptation for really becoming materialists. The greatest temptation for becoming materialists is to ignore the concrete results of spiritual science and to emphasize continually the importance of mystical research, mystical soul-concentration, and the methods of entering the spiritual world.

You see this is a paradox. Those who observe natural science, natural research, become spiritualists; those who disdain to reach a real spiritual knowledge and who always speak of mysticism and of how spiritual knowledge is gained, are exposed to the great temptation of becoming more than ever materialistic. This should be known to-day. We cannot do without the knowledge of such things.

To-day we have monistic societies. Those who give themselves the air of leaders in these monistic societies spread a very superficial world-conception. They condense the external materialistic results of natural science to a superficial world-conception. This is so easy for modern men who do not wish to make a great effort, who prefer to go to the “movies” rather than to other places, and consequently prefer to accept a kind of cinema-science—for materialism is nothing else—they prefer this to something which must be worked out inwardly. These leaders of monistic societies therefore supply a superficial materialism. Undoubtedly they are, at least for a time, temporarily noxious creatures, for they spread errors. It is not good if they flourish, for of course they turn the heads of people in a materialistic way. Nevertheless they are the less dangerous elements, for to begin with they are generally honest people, but this honesty does not protect them against this spreading of errors; however, they are for the most part frankly honest and their errors will be overcome. They will only have a temporary significance.

But there are other people who systematically, knowingly, refuse to lead man towards the concrete positive results of spiritual-science. Indeed, they nourish the aversion which exists to-day through a certain love of ease, the aversion of penetrating into the positive concrete results of spiritual science. You know that the things described in my Occult Science must be studied several years if we wish to understand them, they are not comfortable for a modern man, who may indeed send his son to the university, if he is to become a chemical scientist; nevertheless, if he is to recognize and grasp heaven and earth in a spiritual way, he expects him to do this in a twinkle, at least in one evening, and from every lecture on the super-sensible worlds he expects to have the whole sum of cosmic wisdom. Concrete results of a positive spiritual research are uncomfortable for most men, and this aversion is made use of by certain personalities of the present time who persuade men that they do not need these things, that it is not necessary to pursue the positive concrete details of spiritual facts. “What is this talk of the higher hierarchies which must first be known? What is this talk of Saturn, Sun, Moon, Earth, Jupiter, Venus, Vulcan etc.? All this is unnecessary.” They will tell you: “If you concentrate deeply, if your soul becomes quite mystical, you shall reach the God within you”. They will tell you these things, give general indications on the connection of the material and the super-sensible world. They nourish man's aversion to penetrate into the concrete spiritual world. Why do they do this? Because apparently, apparently they wish to spread a spiritual mentality, but in reality they aim at something else: Along this path, more than ever, they seek to produce materialism. For this reason the leaders of the monistic societies are less harmful. But the others who so often spread mysticism to-day, and who always speak of all kinds of mystical things, they are those who truly foster materialism, who foster it in a most refined way. They put into the heads of men that one or the other way leads into the spiritual world, and they avoid speaking about it concretely. They chiefly speak in general phrases and if they remain victorious they will undoubtedly succeed in making the third generation entirely materialistic. To-day, the more certain and also more refined way leading into materialism is to transmit mysticism traditionally, a mysticism which despises to penetrate into positive spiritual-scientific results. Many things which appear to form part of the spiritual literature of to-day foster materialism far more strongly than, for instance, the books of Ernst Häckel.

You see, these things are uncomfortable to hear, because in setting them before men we strongly appeal to their power of discernment, but men do not wish to listen to this appeal to their power of discernment. They are much more satisfied if every kind of mystical nonsense stimulates an inner lust of the soul. This is why there are so many opponents, particularly of those efforts which to-day honestly pursue spiritual life by disdaining to approach men with a shallow mysticism of a general nature. True spiritual science arouses opposition. In the present time there are numerous people and communities who do not in any way wish that a true spiritual regeneration and elevation should take hold of humanity, and who make use of the fact that materialism is undoubtedly festered if they speak to men of mysticism in general terms. They make use of this fact. For this reason they wage war to the knife where they encounter honest paths which are meant to lead into spiritual science.

I have thus characterized an extensive literature which exists to-day. In reality everyone who takes up a mystical book, no matter of what kind, should appeal strongly to his own judgment. This is strictly necessary. For this reason we should not be led astray by the fact that the many pseudo-mystical scribbles of our present time seem to be so easily accessible. Of course, people will easily understand us if we tell them, for instance: “You only need to penetrate deeply into your inner being and God will be within you; your God whom you only find by treading your own path; no one can show you this path because every other man speaks of another God”, or similar stuff. To-day you will find this in many books, and it is described in a most tempting and misleading manner.

I would like you to take to heart these things very deeply. For that which is to be reached through our anthroposophical movement can only be reached through the fact that you are at least a small number of people who strive to cultivate the characterized power of discernment; it would be fatal for humanity if no effort were made to develop this power of discernment. To-day we must try to stand firmly on our feet, if we do not wish to lose our foothold in the midst of the confusion and chaos of the present. We may often ask to-day after the cause of so much confusion in humanity. But we can almost touch these causes. We may find them in insignificant facts, but we must be able to judge these little facts on the right way.

It is uncomfortable to see this immediately, in the many forms in which it exists on all sides. Many grotesque paradoxes can be found not only in rather loathsome places, but also in the modern life of humanity. They undoubtedly exist also in the modern life of humanity. And it is necessary to-day to strive to obtain a clear understanding, an understanding as sharp as a blade, if we wish to gain a firm foothold. This is the essential thing.

The turning-point, between the fourth and fifth post-Atlantean periods,¹ which falls in the fifteenth century, is very much more significant for human evolution than is recognized by external history, even today. There is no awareness of the tremendous change which took place at that time in the condition of human souls. We can say that profound traces of what took place at that time for mankind as a whole became deeply embedded in the consciousness of the best spirits. These traces remained for a long time and are indeed still there today. That something so important can take place without at first being much noticed externally is shown by another example—that of Christianity itself.

During the course of almost two thousand years, Christianity has wrought tremendous transformation on the civilized world. Yet, a century after the Mystery of Golgotha, it meant little, even to the greatest spirits of the leading culture of the time—that of Rome. It was still seen as a minor event of little significance that had taken place out there in Asia, on the periphery of the Empire. Similarly, what took place in the civilized world around the first third of the fifteenth century has been little noted in external, recorded history. Yet it has left deep traces in human striving and endeavour.

We spoke about some aspects recently. For instance, we saw that Calderón's² drama about the magician Cyprianus shows how this spiritual change was experienced in Spain. Now it is becoming obvious—though it is not expressed in the way Anthroposophy has to express it—that in all sorts of places at this point in human evolution there is a more vital sense for the need to gain greater clarity of soul about this change. I have also pointed out that Goethe's Faust is one of the endeavours, one of the human struggles, to gain clarity about it. More light can perhaps be thrown on this Faust of Goethe when it is seen in a wider cultural context. But first let us look at Faust himself as an isolated individual.

First of all in his youthful endeavours, stimulated of course by the cultural situation in Europe at that time, Goethe came to depict in dramatic form the striving of human beings in the newly dawning age of the intellect. From the way in which he came across the medieval Faust figure in a popular play or something similar, he came to see him as a representative of all those seeking personalities who lived at that time. Faust belongs to the sixteenth, not the fifteenth century,³ but of course the spiritual change did not take place in the space of only a year or even a century. It came about gradually over centuries. So the Faust figure came towards Goethe like a personality living in the midst of this seeking and striving that had come from earlier times and would go on into later centuries. We can see that the special nature of this seeking and striving, as it changed from the fourth to the fifth post-Atlantean period, is perfectly clear to Goethe. First he presents Faust as the scholar who is familiar with all four academic faculties. All four faculties have worked on his soul, so that he has taken into his soul the impulses which derive from intellectualism, from intellectualistic science. At the same time he senses how unsatisfying it is for human beings to remain stuck in one-sided intellectualism. As you know, Faust turns away from this intellectualism and, in his own way, towards the practice of magic. Let us be clear about what is meant in this case. What he has gone through by way of ‘Philosophy and Jurisprudence, Medicine and even, alas, Theology,’⁴ is what anyone can go through by studying the intellectualized sciences. It leaves a feeling of dissatisfaction. It leaves behind this feeling of dissatisfaction because anything abstract—and abstraction is the language of these sciences—makes demands only on a part of the human being, the head part, while all the rest is left out of account.

Compare this with what it was like in earlier times. The fact that things were different in earlier times is habitually overlooked. In those earlier times the people who wanted to push forward to a knowledge of life and the world did not turn to intellectual concepts. All their efforts were concentrated on seeing spiritual realities, spiritual beings, behind the sense-perceptible objects of their environment. This is what people find so difficult to understand. In the tenth, eleventh, twelfth centuries those who strove for knowledge did not only seek intellectual concepts, they sought spiritual beings and realities, in accordance with what can be perceived behind sense-perceptible phenomena and not in accordance with what can be merely thought about sense-perceptible phenomena.

This is what constitutes that great spiritual change. What people sought in earlier times was banished to the realm of superstition, and the inclination to seek for real spiritual beings was lost. Instead, intellectual concepts came to be the only acceptable thing, the only really scientific knowledge. But no matter how logically people told themselves that the only concepts and ideas free of any superstition are those which the intellect forms on the basis of sense-perceptible reality, nevertheless these concepts and ideas failed, in the long run, to satisfy the human being as a whole, and especially the human heart and soul. In this way Goethe's Faust finds himself to be so dissatisfied with the intellectual knowledge he possesses that he turns back to what he remembers of the realm of magic.

This was a true and genuine mood of soul in Goethe. He, too, had explored the sciences at the University of Leipzig. Turning away from the intellectualism he met in Leipzig, he started to explore what in Faust he later called ‘magic’, for instance, together with Susanne von Klettenberg and also by studying the relevant books. Not until he met Herder⁵ in Strasbourg did he discover a real deepening of vision. In him he found a spirit who was equally averse to intellectualism. Herder was certainly not an intellectual; hence his anti-Kant attitude. He led Goethe beyond what—in a genuinely Faustian mood—he had been endeavouring to discover in connection with ancient magic.

Thus Goethe looked at this Faust of the sixteenth century, or rather at that scholar of the fifteenth century who was growing beyond magic, even though he was still half-immersed in it. Goethe wanted to depict his own deepest inner search, a search which was in him because the traces of the spiritual change from the fourth to the fifth post-Atlantean period were still working in him.

It is one of the most interesting phenomena of recent cultural evolution that Goethe, who wanted to give expression to his own youthful striving, should turn to that professor from the fifteenth and sixteenth century. In the figure of this professor he depicted his own inner soul life and experience. Du Bois-Reymond,⁶ of course, totally misunderstood both what lived in Goethe and what lived in the great change that took place in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when he said: Goethe made a big mistake in depicting Faust as he did; he should have done it quite differently. It is right that Faust should be dissatisfied with what tradition had to offer him; but if Goethe had depicted him properly he would have shown, after the early scenes, how he first made an honest woman of Gretchen by marrying her, and then became a well-known professor who went on to invent the electro-static machine and the air pump. This is what Du Bois-Reymond thought should have become of Faust.

Well, Goethe did not let this happen to Faust, and I am not sure whether it would have been any more interesting if he had done what Du Bois-Reymond thought he should have done. But as it is, Goethe's Faust is one of the most interesting phenomena of recent cultural history because Goethe felt the urge to let this professor from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries stand as the representative of what still vibrated in his own being as an echo of that spiritual change which came about during the transition from the fourth to the fifth post-Atlantean period.

The sixteenth century Faust—that is the legendary Faust, not the one who ought to have become the inventor of the electro-static machine and the air pump—takes up magic and perishes, goes to the devil. We know that this sixteenth century Faust could not be seen by either Lessing or Goethe as the Faust of the eighteenth century. Now it was necessary to endeavour to show that once again there was a striving for the spirit and that man ought to find his way to salvation, if I may use this expression.

Here, to begin with, is Faust, the professor in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Goethe has depicted him strikingly well, for this is just what such personalities were like at the universities of that time. Of course, the Faust of legend would not have been suitable, for he would have been more like a roaming vagabond gipsy. Goethe is describing not the legendary Faust but the figure of a professor. Of course, at the profoundest soul level he is an individual, a unique personality. But Goethe does also depict him as a type, as a typical professor of philosophy, or perhaps of medicine, of the fourteenth or fifteenth century. On the one hand he stands in the midst of the culture of his day, occupying himself with the intellectual sciences, but on the other he is not unfamiliar with occult things, which in Goethe's own day were considered nothing more than superstition.

Let us now look at Goethe's Faust in a wider world context. We do make the acquaintance of his famulus and Goethe shows us the relationship between the two. We also meet a student—though judging by his later development he does not seem to have been much influenced by his professor. But apart from this, Goethe does not show us much of the real influence exercised by Faust, in his deeper soul aspects, as he might have taught as a professor in, say, Wittenberg. However, there does exist a pupil of Faust who can lead us more profoundly into this wider world context. There is a pupil of Faust who occupies a place in the cultural history of mankind which is almost equal to that of Professor Faust himself—I am speaking only of Faust as Goethe portrayed him. And this pupil is none other than Hamlet.

Hamlet can indeed be seen as a genuine pupil of Faust. It is not a question of the historical aspect of Faust as depicted by Goethe. The whole action of the drama shows that although the cultural attitudes are those of the eighteenth century, nevertheless Goethe's endeavour was to place Faust in an earlier age. But from a certain point of view it is definitely possible to say: Hamlet, who has studied at Wittenberg and has brought home with him a certain mood of spirit—Hamlet as depicted by Shakespeare,⁷ can be seen in the context of world spiritual history as a pupil of Faust. It may even be true to say that Hamlet is a far more genuine pupil of Faust than are the students depicted in Goethe's drama.

Consider the whole character of Hamlet and combine this with the fact that he studied in Wittenberg where he could easily have heard a professor such as Faust. Consider the manner in which he is given his task. His father's ghost appears to him. He is in contact with the real spiritual world. He is really within it. But he has studied in Wittenberg where he was such a good student that he has come to regard the human brain as a book. You remember the scene when Hamlet speaks of the ‘book and volume’ of his brain.⁸ He has studied human sciences so thoroughly that he speaks of writing what he wants to remember on the table of his memory, almost as though he had known the phrase which Goethe would use later when composing his Faust drama: ‘For what one has, in black and white, one carries home and then goes through it.’⁹ Hamlet is on the one hand an excellent student of the intellectualism taught him at Wittenberg, but on the other hand he is immersed in a spiritual reality. Both impulses work in his soul. The whole of the Hamlet drama stands under the influence of these two impulses. Hamlet—both the drama and the character—stands under the influence of these impulses because, when it comes down to it, the writer of Hamlet does not really know how to combine the spiritual world with the intellectual mood of soul. Poetic works which contain characteristics that are so deeply rooted in life provide rich opportunities for discussion. That is why so many books are written about such works, books which do not really make much sense because there is no need for them to make sense. The commentators are constantly concerned with what they consider to be a most important question: Is the ghost in Hamlet merely a picture, or does it have objective significance? What can be concluded from the fact that only Hamlet, and not the others characters present on the stage, can see the ghost? Think of all the learned and interesting things that have been written about this! But of course none of it is connected with what concerned the poet who wrote Hamlet. He belonged to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. And writing out of the life of that time he could do no other than approach these things in a way which cannot be fixed in abstract concepts. That is why I say that it is not necessary to make any sense of all the various commentaries. We are talking about a time of transition. Earlier, it was quite clear that spiritual beings were as real as tables and chairs, or as a dog or a cat. Although Calderon lived even later than Shakespeare, he still held to this older view. It would not have occurred to him even to hint that the spiritual beings in his works might be merely subjective in character. Because his whole soul was still open to spiritual insight, he portrayed anything spiritual as something just as concrete as dogs and cats.

Shakespeare, whose mood of soul belonged fully to the time of transition, did not feel the need to handle the matter in any other way than that which stated: It might be like this or it might be like that. There is no longer a clear distinction between whether the spiritual beings are subjective or objective. This is a question which is just as irrelevant for a higher world view as it would be to ask in real life—not in astronomy, of course—where to draw the line between day and night. The question as to whether one is subjective and the other objective becomes irrelevant as soon as we recognize the objectivity of the inner world of man and the subjectivity of the external world. In Hamlet and also, say, in Macbeth, Shakespeare maintains a living suspension between the two. So we see that Shakespeare's dramas are drawn from the transition between the fourth and fifth post-Atlantean periods.

The expression of this is clearest in Hamlet. It may not be historical but it is none the less true to suggest that perhaps Hamlet was at Wittenberg just at the time when Faust was lecturing not so much about the occult as about the intellectual sciences—from what we said earlier you now know what I mean. Perhaps he was at Wittenberg before Faust admitted to himself that, ‘straight or crosswise, wrong or right’, he had been leading his scholars by the nose these ten years long. Perhaps Hamlet had been at Wittenberg during those very ten years, among those whom Faust had been leading by the nose. We can be sure that during those ten years Faust was not sure of where he stood. So having taken all this in from a soul that was itself uncertain, Hamlet returns and is faced on the one hand with what remains from an earlier age and what he himself can still perceive, and on the other with a human attitude which simply drives the spirits away. Just as ghosts flee before the light, so does the perception of spiritual beings flee before intellectualism. Spiritual vision cannot tolerate intellectualism because the outcome of it is a mood of soul in which the human being is inwardly torn right away from any connection with the spirit. The pallor of thoughts makes him ill in his inner being, and the consequence of this is the soul mood characteristic of the time from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries and on into even later times. Goethe, who was sensitive to all these things, also had a mood of soul that reached back into this period. We ought to be clear about this.

Take Greek drama. It is unthinkable without the spiritual beings who stand behind it. It is they who determine human destinies. Human beings are woven into the fabric of destiny by the spiritual forces. This fabric brings into ordinary life what human beings would otherwise only experience if they were able consciously to go into the state of sleep. The will impulses which human beings sleep through in their daytime consciousness are brought into ordinary life. Greek destiny is an insight into what man otherwise sleeps through. When the ancient Greek brings his will to bear, when he acts, he is aware that this is not only the working of his daytime consciousness with its insipid thoughts. Because his whole being is at work, he knows that what pulses through him when he sleeps is also at work. And out of this awareness he gains a certain definite attitude to the question of death, the question of immortality.

Now we come to the period I have been describing, in which human beings no longer had any awareness that something spiritual played in—also in their will—while they slept. We come to the period in which human beings thought their sleep was their own, though at the same time they knew from tradition that they have some connection with the spiritual world. Abstract concepts such as ‘Philosophy, Jurisprudence, Medicine, and even, alas! Theology’ begin to take on a shadowy outline of what they will become in modern times. They begin to appear, but at the same time the earlier vision still plays in. This brings about a twilight consciousness. People really did live in this twilight consciousness. Such figures as Faust are, indeed, born out of a twilight consciousness, out of a glance into the spiritual world which resembles a looking over one's shoulder in a dream. Think of the mood behind such words as ‘sleep’, or ‘dream’, in Hamlet. We can well say that when Hamlet speaks his monologues he is simply speaking about what he senses to be the riddle of his age; he is speaking not theoretically but out of what he actually senses.

So, spanning the centuries and yet connected in spirit, we see that Shakespeare depicts the student and Goethe the professor. Goethe depicted the professor simply because a few more centuries had passed and it was therefore necessary in his time to go further back to the source of what it was all about. Something lived in the consciousness of human beings, something that made the outstanding spirits say: I must bring to expression this state of transition that exists in human evolution.

It is extremely interesting to expand on this world situation still further, because out of it there arise a multitude of all-embracing questions and riddles about life and the world. It is interesting to note, for instance, that amongst the works of Shakespeare Hamlet is the one which depicts in its purest form a personality belonging to the whole twilight condition of the transition—especially in the monologues. The way Hamlet was understood in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries could have led to the question: Where was the stimulus for what exists in Hamlet's soul? The answer points to Wittenberg, the Faust source. Similar questions arise in connection with Macbeth. But in King Lear we move into the human realm. The question of the spiritual world is not so much concerned with the earth as with the human being—it enters into the human being and becomes a subjective state of mind which leads to madness.

Then Shakespeare's other dramas could also be considered. We could say: What the poet learnt by taking these human characters and leading them to the spiritual realm lives on in the historical dramas about the kings. He does not follow this specific theme in the historical dramas, but the indeterminate forces work on. Taking Shakespeare's dramas all together, one gains the impression that they all culminate in the age of Queen Elizabeth. Shakespeare wanted to depict something that leads from the subconscious, bubbling forces of his people to the intellectual clarity that has especially shone forth from that corner of the civilized world since the age of Elizabeth. From this point of view the whole world of Shakespeare's dramas appears—not perhaps quite like a play with a satisfactory ending, but at least like a drama which does lead to a fairly satisfying conclusion. That is, it leads to a world which then continues to evolve. After the transition had been going on for some time, the dramas lead toShakespeare's immediate present, which is a world with which it is possible to come to terms. This is the remarkable thing: The world of Shakespeare's dramas culminates in the age in which Shakespeare lived; this is an age with which it is possible to come to terms, because from then on history takes a satisfactory course and runs on into intellectualism. Intellectualism came from the part of the earth out of which Shakespeare wrote; and he depicted this by ending up at this point.

The questions with which I am concerned find their answers when we follow the lines which lead from the pupil Hamlet to the professor Faust, and then ask how it was with Goethe at the time when, out of his inner struggles, he came to the figure of Faust. You see, he also wrote Götz von Berlichingen. In Götz von Berlichingen, again taken from folk myth, there is a similar confrontation. On the one side you have the old forces of the pre-intellectual age, the old German empire, which cannot be compared with what became the later German empire. You have the knights and the peasants belonging to the pre-intellectual age when the pallor of thoughts did not make human beings ill; when indeed very little was guided from the head, but when the hands were used to such an extent that even an iron hand was needed. Goethe refers back to something that once lived in more recent civilization but which, by its very nature, had its roots in the fourth post-Atlantean period. Over against all this you have in the figure of Weislingen the new element which is developing, the age of intellectualism, which is intimately linked to the way the German princes and their principalities evolved, a development which led eventually to the later situation in Central Europe right up to the present catastrophe.

We see that in Götz von Berlichingen Goethe is attacking this system of princes and looking back to times which preceded the age of intellectualism. He takes the side of the old and rebels against what has taken its place, especially in Central Europe. It is as though Goethe were saying in Götz von Berlichingen that intellectualism has seized hold of Central Europe too. But here it appears as something that is out of place. It would not have occurred to Goethe to negate Shakespeare. We know how positive was Goethe's attitude to Shakespeare. It would not have occurred to him to find fault with Shakespeare, because his work led to a satisfying culmination which could be allowed to stand. On the contrary, he found this extraordinarily satisfying.

But the way in which intellectualism developed in his own environment made Goethe depict its existence as something unjustified, whereas he spiritually embraced the political element of what was expressed in the French Revolution. In Götz von Berlichingen Goethe is the spiritual revolutionary who denies the spirit in the same way as the French Revolution denies the political element. Goethe turns back in a certain way to something that has once been, though he certainly cannot wish that it should return in its old form. He wants it to develop in a different direction. It is most interesting to observe this mood in Goethe, this mood of revolt against what has come to replace the world of Götz.

So it is extremely interesting to find that Shakespeare has been so deeply grasped by Lessing and by Goethe and that they really followed on from Shakespeare in seeking what they wanted to find through their mood of spiritual revolt. Yet where intellectualism has become particularly deeply entrenched, for instance in Voltaire,¹⁰ it mounts a most virulent attack on Shakespeare. We know that Voltaire called Shakespeare a wild drunkard. All these things have to be taken into account.

Now add something else to the great question which is so important for an understanding of the spiritual revolution which took place in the transition from the fourth to the fifth post-Atlantean period. Add to all this the extraordinary part which Schiller played in this spiritual revolution which in Goethe is expressed in a Goethean way in Götz von Berlichingen. In the circle closest of all to Schiller he first met what he had to revolt against. It came out of the most one-sided, unhealthy intellectualism. There was of course as yet no Waldorf school¹¹ to do battle against one-sided intellectualism. So Schiller could not be sent to the Waldorf school in Wurttemberg but had to go to the Karlsschule instead. All the protest which Schiller built up during his youth grew out of his protest against the education he received at the Karlsschule. This kind of education—Schiller wrote his drama Die Räuber (The Robbers) against it—is now universally accepted, and no positive, really productive opposition to it has ever been mounted until the recent foundation of the Waldorf school.

So what is the position of Schiller—who later stood beside Goethe in all this? He writes Die Räuber (The Robbers). It is perfectly obvious to those who can judge such things that in Spiegelberg and the other characters he has portrayed his fellow pupils. Franz Moor himself could not so easily be derived from his schoolmates, but in Franz Moor he has shown in an ahrimanic form¹² everything that his genius can grasp of what lives in his time. If you know how to look at these things, you can see how Schiller does not depict spiritual beings externally, in the way they appear in Hamlet or Macbeth, but that he allows the ahrimanic principle to work in Franz Moor. And opposite this is the luciferic principle in Karl Moor. In Franz Moor we see a representative of all that Schiller is rebelling against. It is the same world against which Goethe is rebelling in Götz von Berlichingen, only Schiller sets about it in a different way. We see this too in the later drama Kabale and Liebe (Love and Intrigue).

So you see that here in Central Europe these spirits, Goethe and Schiller, do not depict something in the way Shakespeare does. They do not allow events to lead to something with which one can come to terms. They depict something which is there but which in their opinion ought to have developed quite differently. What they really want does not exist, and what is there on the physical plane is something which they oppose in a spiritual revolution. So we have a strange interplay between what exists on the physical plane and what lives in these spirits.

In a rather bold way I could draw it like this: In Shakespeare the events he depicts carry on in keeping with the way things are on earth

(blue). What he takes in from earlier times, in which the spirit still worked, goes over (red) into a present time which then becomes a factual world evolution.

Then we see in Goethe and Schiller that they had inklings of an earlier time (red) when the spiritual world was still powerful, in the fourth post-Atlantean period, and that they bring this only as far as their spiritual intentions, whereas they see what is taking place on earth (blue) as being in conflict with it. One thing plays into the other in the human struggle for the spirit. This is why here in Central Europe the question became a purely human one. In the time of Goethe and Schiller a tremendous revolution occurred in the concept of man as a being who stands within a social context. I shall be able to expand on this in the coming lectures.

Let us now look towards the eastern part of Europe. But we cannot look in that direction in the same way. Those who only describe external facts and have no understanding for what lives in the souls of Goethe and Schiller—and also of course many others—may describe these facts very well, but they will fail to include what plays in from a spiritual world—which is certainly also there, although it may be present only in the heads of human beings. In France the battle takes place on the physical earth, in a political revolution. In Germany the battle does not come down as far as the physical plane. It comes down as far as human souls and trembles and vibrates there. But we cannot continue this consideration in the same way with regard to the East, for things are different there. If we want to pursue the matter with regard to the East we need to call on the assistance of Anthroposophy. For what takes place in the souls of Goethe and Schiller, which are, after all, here on the earth—what, in them, blows through earthly souls is, in the East, still in the spiritual world and finds no expression whatsoever down on the earth.

If you want to describe what took place between Goethe's and Schiller's spirits in the physical world—if you want to describe this with regard to the East, then you will have to employ a different view, such as that used in the days of Attila when battles were fought by spirits in the air above the heads of human beings.

What you find being carried out in Europe by Goethe and Schiller—Schiller by writing Die Räuber (The Robbers) and Goethe by writing Götz von Berlichingen—you will find in the East to be taking place as a spiritual fact in the spiritual world above the physical plane. If you want to seek deeds which parallel the writing of Die Räuber (The Robbers) and the writing of Götz, you will have to seek them among the spiritual beings of the super-sensible world. There is no point in searching for them on the physical plane. In a diagram depicting what happens in the East you would have to draw the element in question like a cloud floating above the physical plane, while down below, untouched by it, would be what shows externally on the physical plane.

Now we know that, because we have Hamlet, we can tell how a western human being who had been a pupil of Faust would have behaved, and could have behaved. But there can be no such thing as a Russian Hamlet. Or can there? We could see a Russian Hamlet with our spiritual eyes if we were to imagine the following: Faust lectures at Wittenberg—I mean not the historical Faust but Goethe's Faust who is actually more true than historical fact. Faust lectures at Wittenberg—and Hamlet listens, writing everything down, just as he does even what the ghost says to him about the villains who live in Denmark. He writes everything down in the book and volume of his brain—Shakespeare created a true pupil of Faust out of what he found in the work of Saxo Grammaticus,¹³ which depicts things quite differently. Now imagine that an angel being also listened to Faust as he lectured—Hamlet sat on the university bench, Faust stood on the platform, and at the back of the lecture hall an angel listened. And this angel then flew to the East and there brought about what could have taken place as a parallel to the deeds of Hamlet in the West.

I do not believe that it is possible to reach a truly penetrating comprehension of these things by solely taking account of external facts. One cannot ignore the very profound impression made, by these external facts, particularly on the greatest personalities of the time, when what is taking place is something as incisive as the spiritual revolution which took place between the fourth and fifth post-Atlantean periods.

• 1 . Lecture Three, Note 1
• 2 . Lecture Nine, Note 2
• 3 . The first mention of Faust appeared in 1506. In 1587 the first Faustbuch, a popular chapbook, was published in Frankfurt-am-Main.
• 4 . Faust Part One. The Study.
• 5 . Johann Gottfried Herder, 1744-1803. Called Kant's system ‘a kingdom of never-ending whims, blind alleys, fancies, chimeras and vacant expressions.’
• 6 . Emil Du Bois-Reymond, 1818-1896: In ‘Goethe und kein Ende’ (No end to Goethe), address of 15 October 1882 in Reden (Speeches), Leipzig 1886.
• 7 . William Shakespeare, 1564-1616. Hamlet is one of his later plays.
• 8 . Hamlet, Act One, Scene 5.
• 9 . ‘what one has in black and white’: Faust Part One, The Study.
• 10. Francois-Marie Arouet Voltaire, 1694-1778. One of the greatest French authors.
• 11. Lecture Four, Note 3
• 12. Lecture One, Note 3
• 13. Saxo Grammaticus, d.1204. Danish historian who wrote the Gesta Danorum.

Yesterday I gave you a description of the starry sky nearest to us. If you think back to this description, you will have to say to yourselves above all: if we draw such a picture of the starry heavens from spiritual knowledge, it looks quite different from what is otherwise said in this field today. Yesterday, precisely in order to make this emerge clearly, I spoke in the way I have just done. I had to speak in a way that must seem absurd, perhaps even ridiculous, to anyone who acquires knowledge about these subjects today through contemporary education. And yet, the fact of the matter is that a kind of healing of our sick spiritual life can only take place if this total change of perspective — especially of such things as we discussed yesterday — can take place.

And one would like to say: Wherever thinking takes place today, but thinking takes place in such a way that it runs into the old, conventional ideas, one sees on the one hand how thinking everywhere points to this new kind of spiritual knowledge. But one also sees how people are not able to keep up with such spiritual insight, and how they therefore actually remain at a loss everywhere and - which is perhaps the worst thing in the present moment of history - are not aware of their helplessness, indeed do not want to be aware of it.

Let us imagine how what I described yesterday from a completely different point of view is described today. Yesterday I spoke about the moon, Saturn, Jupiter and so on, and I presented the individualities, the spiritual individualities that can be associated with these words. I showed you, as it were, our planetary system as a gathering of spiritual beings that work out of different impulses, but in such a way that these impulses also have something to do with earthly events. We saw living beings appearing in the universe with a certain character. We could speak of living beings in Saturn, the Moon and so on. But the whole way of speaking differs from what is said about such things today. There is the assumption – I repeat it again – of a primeval nebula that existed once, which was in a rotating, circling motion and from which the individual planets split off, which today one looks at with complete indifference as more or less luminous physical bodies that rush along in space.

This view that the heavenly bodies are such indifferent bodies, to which nothing else can be applied than physics, especially mathematics, to calculate their orbits, to possibly explore whether the substances found on Earth are also present there, this indifferent view of the heavenly bodies, is something that has actually only become common among mankind in the last three to four centuries. And it has become customary in a very definite way. Today things are just not understood. Because man has lost the possibility of looking into the spiritual, or, as it was only the case in the later Middle Ages, at least to have a presentiment of it, it has also become possible to completely lose the spiritual. Then the physical concepts that arose on earth, the mathematical and computational concepts, were regarded as something certain, and now that was revealed out there in the celestial space was also calculated. A certain assumption was made here – I must already present these theoretical considerations today – we have learned how to calculate something on earth, how to do physical science on earth, and have now extended this calculation on earth, this physical science, to the whole of the heavens and believed that the calculation results that apply on earth also apply to the heavens.

On earth, we speak of time, of matter, of motion; for physicists, one could say, of mass, also of speed and so on: all concepts that have been gained on earth. Since the time of Newton, these have also been extended to the heavens. And the whole conception that one has of what is going on in the world is nothing more than a mathematical result obtained on earth and then projected into the heavens. The whole of Kant-Laplace's theory is indeed an absurdity the moment one realizes that it is valid only on the assumption that the same laws of calculation apply out there in space as on earth, that the concepts of space, time and so on are just as applicable out there as on earth.

But now there is a strange fact, a fact that is causing people a lot of headaches today. We live in a very strange time, which is announced by manifold symptoms. In all popular gatherings held by monists and other bundlers, people are presented with the fact that the stars shine out there through the known processes. The whole beautiful doctrine of spiral nebulae and so on, as presented to the outer eye, is presented to a believing audience by popularizing speakers and writers. And today's man has his education from these popular speakers and popular writers. But this education is actually, basically, only the result of what physicists and other so-called learned people thought and devised decades ago. In such popular gatherings, everything that was considered important by experts decades ago is reheated. But today the experts are being shaken up by something completely different. That which is shaking them up is, for example, the so-called theory of relativity.

This theory of relativity, Einstein's theory of relativity, is what concerns the thinking physicists today. Now, the details of this theory of relativity can be discussed, as I have already done here and there; but today we are not concerned with its inner validity, but with the fact that it exists and that physicists are talking about it. Of course there are physicists who are opposed to it, but there are many physicists who simply talk about the theory of relativity. But what does that mean?

Yes, it means that this theory of relativity destroys all the concepts on which our view of the movements and nature of celestial bodies in space is based. For decades, what is written in astronomy books today, what is still presented to a lay audience in popular lectures and books, has been valid; it has been valid. But physicists are working to dismantle and destroy the most popular concepts – time, movement, space – and declaring: none of it is as we thought it was. — You see, at least for physicists today it is already something of a matter of conscience to say, for example: I point my telescope at a distant star. But I have calculated that it takes so much time for the light from that star to reach the Earth. So when I look through my telescope, the light that enters my telescope has taken so many light-years. The light that enters the telescope must therefore have started out up there so many light-years ago. The star is no longer there, it is no longer there at all. I get the beam of light into my telescope, but what is in the extension of the telescope is not the star at all. And if I look at a star next to it, from which the light now takes much fewer light-years, it still arrives at the same time. I turn my telescope: the star comes to a point of light that was perhaps there so-and-so many years ago. Now I turn my telescope again: a star falls into my telescope that is not there at all, but was there a completely different number of years ago. And so I form views of my starry sky! Everything is there from the time when it was there, but actually it is not there at all. Actually nothing is there: everything is thrown over and under.

This is exactly how it is with space. We perceive a distant sound somewhere. When we approach it, it appears to us at a different 'pitch' than when we move away from it. Space becomes decisive for the way we perceive things. And of course that makes people scratch their heads. Time, which plays a role in all calculations, has suddenly become something quite uncertain, something merely relative. And of all that is so popularly drawn out into space, the modern physicist – and he is aware of this – can only say: There is something that was once there, is still there, will once be there. Well, there is something there. And that something that is there causes its light emissions to coincide with the crosshairs of my telescope at a certain point in time. — That is the only wisdom that remains, the coincidence of two events. So, what once happened somewhere, sometime, coincides with what is happening today in the crosshairs of my telescope. Only of such coincidences can one speak – says today's physicist – it is all relative; the concepts from which the world building has been theoretically constructed are actually of a merely relative, not at all absolute value. That is why physicists today are talking about a radical revolution in all the concepts of physics. And if you went straight from a popular lecture for laypeople to a lecture by a relativity theorist today, you would find that the popularizer is handing down to people something that is built on the ideas that the experts say: “It's all melted like snow in the sun!”

You see, we cannot just say that a physical world view has been built up out of certain concepts over the past three to four hundred years; rather, we have to say that today there are already enough people who have dissolved these concepts out of these concepts, who have destroyed them. After all, this world view, which is considered certain, no longer exists for a large number of thinkers. So the matter is not quite so simple that what is said from a completely new point of view may be ridiculed. Because what is said from the other point of view melts away in the present like snow in the sun. It is actually no longer there for those who understand something of the matter, or at least want to understand something. So that one actually stands before the fact that people say: What is described here from the point of view of spiritual science is absurd because it does not agree with what we consider to be right. But if they now take the relativity point of view, then these people must say: That is absurd, what we have considered to be right! That is how things stand today. But actually the majority of humanity is asleep, watching as if asleep as these things unfold and letting them happen. But it is important to realize that the worldview that has celebrated such great triumphs as such is actually in ruins today.

The facts of the spiritual world will only become clear to a wider public when people at least begin to loosen the pointy cap they sleep under. So, one does not just have the option of thinking that what speaks out of such a tone as I did yesterday is absurd in the face of today's science, because this science is, for example, quite negative in its theory of relativity; it actually says everywhere what is, and humanity will have to steer towards an understanding of that which is.

These things should be explained by such representations, as I tried to give them yesterday with regard to individual stars in our planetary system. But what do we see there? We see that, to a certain extent, it is precisely following the course of world development. What would an old-fashioned physicist, not a newcomer to physics (because most newcomers are relativists), what would an old-fashioned physicist say if he heard something as outrageous as what I said yesterday? If he did not immediately say that it is all crazy and twisted, and that is perhaps what he would say at first, he would still claim: That contradicts the firm foundations of science. But what are the firm foundations of science? They are the concepts of space, time and so on that have been gained on earth. Now the relativity theorists are destroying these concepts for the universe, declaring them invalid.

Anthroposophy, however, takes a practical approach: it disregards earthly concepts when talking about the moon and Saturn and Jupiter and so on. It no longer speaks in earthly terms, but attempts – however difficult it may be – to characterize Venus and Mars in a way that is no longer possible with earthly concepts. And so, in order to penetrate into the cosmos, we must be willing to lose our earthly concepts. I wanted to show you how the cosmos fits into contemporary spiritual life and how things stand in contemporary spiritual life. There is only a relationship with earthly concepts when one reaches out into the cosmos. Just imagine, when we go to the moon, as I characterized it yesterday, to those entities that are anchored in the moon as in a world fortress and actually live behind the surface of the moon - where they, if may I put it, their world business, when we come to these entities, which can only be approached with a clairvoyantly sharpened gaze, we find that these entities work in secret. Because what is inside the moon does not go out into the world, and everything that comes from the moon is reflected out of the world. Just as the moon does not absorb sunlight but reflects it, so it also reflects everything else that happens in the universe. Everything that happens in the universe is reflected back by the moon as if by a mirror. Processes take place within it that remain hidden.

But I have told you: the spiritual beings who are entrenched in this lunar fortress, as in the universe, and who conduct their world business in there, were once on earth before the moon split off from the earth. They were the first great teachers of human souls on earth. And the great ancient wisdom that is spoken of is basically the heritage of these lunar beings, who now live in secret within the moon. They have withdrawn themselves.

When one speaks in this way about the universe, moral concepts enter into the ideas that one develops. One forgets the physical concepts of the earth; moral concepts enter into the description. We ask ourselves: Why have these lunar entities withdrawn, why do they work in secret? Yes, when they were still on earth, they did indeed suggest an enormous wisdom to people. If they had remained on earth, they would have continued to suggest this wisdom to people, but people would never have been able to enter the age of freedom.

These entities had, so to speak, made the wonderful decision to withdraw from Earth, to retreat to a secluded place in the universe, far from human existence, in order to carry out their world business there, so that people would no longer be influenced by them, so that people could all absorb the impulses of the universe and become free beings. These entities have chosen a new dwelling place in the universe to gradually make freedom possible for people.

Yes, that speaks differently than is spoken of by the physicist, who, if he heard that the moon had split off from the earth, would simply calculate the speed at which it happened, the forces by which it happened, and would only ever have the earthly forces and the earthly speeds in mind. They are completely disregarded when we speak of the moon as I did yesterday. But if we leave aside the physical, what remains are such resolutions, such great cosmic-moral impulses. The important thing is that we move from physical verbiage, which applies to the physical conditions of the earth, to a discourse in moral ideas about the universe.

The important thing is that one does not merely put forward theories that are to be believed, but that there is a moral world order. This has completely confused the human soul in the last three to four centuries, that one has said: One can know some things about the earth, and, based on what is known on earth, calculate the universe and construct theories such as the Kant-Laplace theory, but with regard to the moral and divine order of the world, one must believe. This has greatly confused people, because the insight has been completely lost that one must speak in earthly terms about the earth, but that one must begin to speak cosmically the moment one rises up to the universe. There, physical speech gradually gives way to moral speech. What is otherwise at most imagined is practically carried out.

If you find a description of the sun by a physicist today, it is some kind of gas ball steaming out there, and its eruptions are described like terrestrial eruptions. Everything is projected onto this cosmic body in the same way as what happens on earth, and with the same calculations that we have acquired here, we then calculate how a ray of light passes the sun or the like. But the calculations we use here on Earth no longer apply when we go out into space. And just as the strength of light decreases with distance in a square, the laws no longer apply in outer space. We are only related to the universe in our morality. By rising above the physical as human to the moral, we here on earth become similar to what works in outer space as realized morality.

Thus we must say: in the ultimate sense, Anthroposophy is a science. It actually implements what arises as a demand. It no longer speaks in earthly concepts, except for the moral ones, which, however, are already supermundane on earth. It speaks in such moral concepts when it soars to the universe. This must be taken into account. And from this point of view, the concepts that we need to understand on earth must be gained, which cannot be understood just now.

You see, the beings that are anchored in the moon, I said, only work as if in a fortress. There they do their world business. For everything that the moon gives to the world, that the earth gives, is reflected and mirrored. But this is a state that has only just occurred in the course of evolution in the cosmic becoming. It used to be different. And into the, I would like to say, soft, slimy form that the earth itself and all beings once had, these beings worked when they still walked on earth. And it is in connection with these effects that the spinal cord column develops in both humans and animals. So that the spinal cord column in humans and in animals is an inheritance from very ancient times, when the moon beings were still connected with earthly existence. This can no longer arise today. The spinal column is an inheritance; it can no longer arise today.

But with regard to the four-footed animals, these entities made the spine so strong that it remains horizontal. In the case of humans, they made it so that it could become vertical, and the human being could then become free through the vertical spine for the universe and its influences at the moment when these lunar beings retreated to the lunar fortress.

And so we will gradually come to explaining the earthly from the universe, and to judging spiritual forces and impulses in the right way in earthly existence as well. It is the case that human minds have been invaded by ideas that have only emerged in the last three or four hundred years. And all of them under the influence of the view that the only thing one can apply to the whole universe to explain it is what one has gained from physical events and from the physical things of the earth. One has made the whole universe into a physical image of the earth. Now, however, people have realized: Something coincides with my crosshairs, but that was there once! The whole story does not apply in this way. And if one takes into account stars that are far enough away, today's physicist can say: What I record as a map is not there at all. I draw two stars next to each other: one of them was there, say, a thousand years ago, the other was there six hundred years ago. No, the stars were never there, side by side, as I see them in my crosshairs, coinciding as the rays of light.

So it all melts away, it is not really like that at all. With these concepts, you do not get what is out there. You calculate, calculate, calculate. It is just as if the spider weaves its web and then imagines that this web weaves through the whole world.

The reason for this is that these laws, according to which one calculates, no longer apply out there, but at most one can use the morality that is within us to get concepts of what is out there. Out there in the starry sky, things happen morally, sometimes also immorally, ahrimanically, luciferically, and so on. But when I take morality as a generic term, things happen morally, not physically. But this is something that must be rediscovered, because the other has become so firmly entrenched in people's minds over the last two or three centuries that even doubts such as those of the relativity theorists — for their negations have a great deal to be said for them — cannot dislodge it from people's minds. It is also understandable, because if even this last chimera, the time-space calculation that they perform, if even this still disappears from their minds for the starry sky, then there is nothing left in these minds, and people do like to retain something in them. For something else will only be able to be in it if one rises to the possibility of looking at the starry sky as we did yesterday.

Now we must realize that all this points to the fact that it is necessary for people of the present time to form clear ideas about what has actually happened in the last three to four centuries, and what has found its preliminary expression in the greatest of all wars that have ever taken place on earth, and in the chaotic conditions that will become even more chaotic in the near future. What is required of humanity is to really come to terms with these issues. And in this respect it is interesting to take a look beyond the Earth with its present level of intellectual development.

Within the civilization in which the Westerner with his American followers live, everything that has been developed in the last three to four centuries under the influence of a phenomenally magnificent technology and a magnificent world traffic - which is only now breaking down - is considered so solid that, of course, anyone who does not adopt the same concepts is a fool. Now it is true that the Orient is in a state of decadence, but one must also say: What one has to express again today from the sources of our own anthroposophical research, as I did yesterday, was, albeit in a completely different way, once in ancient times, still oriental wisdom.

We cannot accept this oriental wisdom in its old form today, as I have often discussed. We have to regain it from the Western mind, from the Western soul. But it was once, I would like to say, the custom to speak about the stars in the way that I began to speak about them yesterday, based on the old clairvoyance, on this dream-like old clairvoyance. Only that has been completely lost to humanity, and European humanity today considers all of this to be absurd, which was once considered the highest human wisdom.

Now, as I said, although this was once a great and original wisdom in the Orient too, today people there are in a state of decadence. But in a certain sense, at least externally and traditionally, something of such a way of looking at the universe has been preserved in the Orient, I would even say a soulful way of looking at the universe. And the technical culture of Europe impresses the Orientals very little. These souls, who today in the Orient lovingly engage with the ancient wisdom, fundamentally disdain what has developed in Europe as a mechanical culture and civilization. They study what concerns the human soul from their ancient scriptures. In this way, some inwardly experience an, albeit decadent, enlightenment, so that something of the soul's view of the world still lives in the Orient. And it is not unnecessary to also look at the way in which these people, who still have some kind of reflection of an ancient culture, look at the European-American intellectual scene. Even if it is only for the sake of comparison, it is still interesting.

A remarkable book has been published by a certain Rãmanãthan, an Indian from Ceylon, entitled “The Culture of the Soul among the Western Nations” [the title was written on the board]. This Rãmanãthan speaks in a remarkable way. He obviously belongs to those people over there in the Orient who, within Indian civilization, have said to themselves: These Europeans also have very strange scriptures, for example the New Testament. Now these people, to whom Rãmanãthan also belongs, have studied the New Testament - but of course in the way that the soul of these people can study the New Testament - and have absorbed this New Testament, the work of Christ Jesus, through the New Testament according to the state of their soul. And there are already people over there – as this book by Rãmanãthan shows – who now speak of the Christ Jesus and the New Testament from the remnants of an ancient culture. They have formed very specific ideas about the Christ Jesus.

And now this man writes a lot about these ideas of Christ Jesus, and of course he addresses the book - he wrote it in English - to the Europeans. He addresses the book, which is written by the Indian spirit about Jesus in the Gospels, to the Europeans, and he says something very strange to the Europeans. He says to them: it is quite extraordinary that they know nothing at all about the Christ Jesus. There are great things in the Gospels about Christ Jesus, but the Europeans and Americans know nothing about it, really know nothing about it! And he gives the Europeans and the Americans a strange piece of advice. He says to them: “Why don't you have teachers of the New Testament come from India, they will be able to tell you how it actually is with Christ Jesus.

So these people in Asia, who are dealing with European progress today and who then read the New Testament, tell these Europeans: If you want to learn something about the Christ Jesus, then you must have teachers come to you from us, because all the teachers who speak to you understand nothing about it, it is all misunderstood! —And he explains this in detail. He says: In Europe, at a certain time, a certain understanding of words took the place of an understanding of spiritual essence. The Europeans cling to a certain understanding of words with regard to all things. They do not carry a spiritual understanding in their heads, but the words they learn from their individual populations rise up into their heads, and then they think in words.

It is a remarkable way in which these Indians, despite their decadence, still come to this insight, because so far the story is quite striking. Even in physics and mathematics, thought is done in words today, not in things. In this respect, people today are quite strange. If someone wants to be very clever, then he quickly quotes: “For just where concepts are missing, a word comes at the right time.” But today it happens mostly out of the urge that the person in question has run out of all concepts: then the Goethean saying quickly comes to mind. But then he does not notice that. He does not realize that he is quite bitter in this vice at the moment when he criticizes it.

So this Indian says to the Europeans: You have only a word-understanding of all things, and you have extended this word-understanding over the New Testament, and thereby you have killed the Christ for four centuries. He no longer lives among you, he has been dead for four centuries. Get teachers from India so that he can be awakened again.

He says: For three to four centuries, the Europeans have known nothing at all about Christ. They cannot know anything because they do not have the concepts and ideas through which one can know something about Christ. — The Indian says to the Europeans: You need a renaissance of Christ Jesus. You have to rediscover the Christ, or someone else has to discover him for you, so that you have him again! - So says the Indian, after he has come to read the Gospel. He realizes that strange things have happened in Europe in the last three to four centuries. And then he says: If the Europeans themselves want to find out which Christ lives in the New Testament, they would have to go back a long way. Because this lack of understanding of Christ has been slowly prepared, and actually the Europeans would have to go back to Gnosticism if they still wanted to learn something from their own scriptures about the Christ.

A strange phenomenon! There is an Indian, who is only representative of many, who reads the New Testament and says to the Europeans: There is nothing that helps you more than going back to the Gnostics.

But the Europeans only have the Gnostics in the counter-writings. The Europeans know nothing of the Gnostics. It is a strange fact: the writings of the Gnostics have all been destroyed, only the polemics of the Christian church fathers against the Gnostics have survived, with the exception of the 'Pistis Sophia' and a few others, but these cannot be understood as they are, any more than the Gospels themselves can be understood. '

But now, if you are not a Gnostic but rediscover the Christ through modern spiritual science, the theologians come along and say: There the Gnosis is being warmed up again - the Gnosis, which they do not know, however, because they cannot know it from any external things. But 'warming up Gnosticism' is what it is, and that must not be done, because it distorts Christianity. This is also a divergence between East and West. Those who study the New Testament in the East find that one must go back to the first centuries. When theologians of the present day are confronted with something that appears as the description of Christ in today's anthroposophy, and which, to them, sounds like an unknown gnosis, they say: He wants to revive gnosis, that must not be allowed, it distorts Christianity.

Yes, the judgment of the Indian is quite remarkable. This Rãmanãthan actually says: What the Europeans now call their Christianity is falsified. The Europeans say: The Rãmanãthan falsifies our Christianity. But the Rãmanãthan comes quite close to the right view, albeit with his decadent view. The right thing is always a falsification of the wrong. It is only important to call these things by their right name. The right thing is always a falsification of the wrong, because if one did not falsify the wrong, one would not arrive at the right.

But that is the way things are today. Just think of the abyss you are looking into when you take this example from Rammanathan. For example, someone might say: Read the Gospels impartially. — It is difficult for a European today to read them impartially, after having been presented with the mistreated translations for centuries and having been educated in certain ideas. It is difficult to read them impartially. But if someone reads them impartially, even from his point of view, then he discovers a spiritual Christ in the Gospels. For that is what Ramanathan discovered in the Gospels, even if he cannot yet see it in the anthroposophical sense. But Europeans should still take note of this advice from the Ceylonese Indian: Let preachers of the Christ come to you from India, for you have none.

In these matters, one must have the courage today to look into the development that has taken place over the last three to four centuries, and only through this courage is it possible to truly emerge from the immense chaos into which humanity has gradually plunged. This tendency towards ambiguity clouds all concepts and ultimately also causes social chaos. For that which takes place between people does take place after all out of their souls, and there is already a connection between the highest truths and the destruction of external economic conditions. And so one must again be willing to lose one's earthly concepts if one wants to penetrate into the cosmos.

In yesterday's lecture I wanted to give you an example of how the cosmos fits into present-day spiritual life and how things stand in present-day spiritual life. A relationship with earthly concepts only exists when one comes out into the cosmos.