The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Dear attendees,

When the topics of theosophy or spiritual science arise today, many of our contemporaries still believe that this school of thought has its roots or starting points in some oriental ideas or spiritual experiences that are foreign to our Western culture. And this prejudice is seized upon by those who believe they see in Theosophy or spiritual science something that is opposed to Christianity, or to a deeper understanding of Christianity, in so far as it permeates our entire Occidental spiritual culture. If such an opinion is entertained, it is based, in particular, on the fact that within the theosophical world view, what may be called the doctrine of repeated earthly lives or, as it is also called, the doctrine of reincarnation, is presented as a basic fact. And it is believed that such an idea, that man has to undergo repeated lives on earth, could only have been taken from Buddhism or some other oriental world view. Now, if we make such a presupposition, then the whole position of spiritual science or theosophy in the spiritual life of our time is misunderstood, because what is this idea of repeated earthly lives for modern man, or perhaps it is better to say what can this idea be for today's conditions?

Today there is a word that is indeed usually only used in connection with scientific facts, but which has a fascinating effect on the educated of the present - on those people of the present who believe they are at the height of our intellectual life - and that is the word 'development'. Admittedly, today this word is usually only used to refer to the development of external forms, that is, the forms of subordinate living beings up to and including humans. The elaboration of this idea of development for human life, encompassing the whole of human life, including the human soul and spirit, is still rarely thought of today; for if one were to engage with the elaboration of the idea of development for the whole of human , one would gradually have to realize that the same thing that we call the development of the species or genus in the animal kingdom must present itself in humans as the development of the individual individual, of the individual individuality.

But this means nothing other than that if we see how the individual species develop apart from one another in the animal world, then we must approach the individual with the same interest as we do the species in the animal kingdom, and we must speak of the development of the individual individuality in the human being. Let us commit this to memory: if we have a healthy mind, we show the same interest in the individual human being as we do in the animal species or genus. We have the same interest in the human being as we do in each individual lion – whether it is the lion's grandfather, father, son, and so on. Therefore, we must think of the same lawfulness that we think of as a law of development in animal species, we must think of it in terms of the individual individuality in the case of human beings.

So you can see that in the field of spiritual science we speak of the development of the individual human individuality. And we must come to say: What comes into existence in the human being at birth, what gradually and mysteriously unfolds from the still indeterminate facial features, expressions and gestures of the first childlike age, that is the soul-spiritual of the human being, which confronts us with each individual as something special, as an individual. We cannot attribute this to the inherited qualities of the immediate ancestors alone, but we must imagine this relationship of human life to its causes differently than the relationship of the animal to its ancestors. There we understand everything that lives in the individual animal – the form, the physiognomy – when we understand the species. But with humans it is different.

What lives in man, we find in each person in a special, particular way. What has developed in man as a generic characteristic, we attribute to physical inheritance; but what confronts us as his special being, we must attribute to what the person, as the cause of his present life, has gone through in earlier lives, in earlier stages of existence. And what we encounter in the present framework of his personality, that in turn forms the cause, the basis for his work in a later life. Thus we have a living chain of development that goes from life to life, from incarnation to incarnation. And we see everything that comes to us as characteristic of a person in such a way that we see the necessity of tracing it back to earlier soul and spiritual states.

Thus Theosophy or spiritual science is able to introduce a law in the higher realm of human life, just as it was incorporated relatively recently into the realm of the natural life of human development. Yes, today's humanity has a short memory. Otherwise it would not be necessary to point out that as late as the seventeenth century not only laymen but also scholars of natural science assumed that lower animals could develop out of decaying river mud without the introduction of germs of life. And it was the great Italian naturalist Francesco Redi who first caused this tremendous upheaval in natural science thinking by stating that living things can only come from living things.

Just as this sentence applies to natural life within certain limits, so the other sentence applies to human life within certain limits: spiritual and mental things can only have their origin in spiritual and mental things. And it is only an inaccurate observation if one wants to trace back what works its way out of the vague depths of an adolescent's consciousness from day to day, from week to week, from year to year as a spiritual-soul element to the mere physical line of inheritance of the ancestors – is just as inaccurate an observation as it is inaccurate to trace what lives in animals, even in earthworms, back to the mere laws of the substances that make up river mud just because one has not considered the living germ. It is an inaccurate observation when we speak today only of the inheritance of mental and moral abilities because we do not pay attention to the soul-spiritual core, which integrates that which it can appropriate from the inherited traits in the same way that the living germ of the living being appropriates the substance in which that germ is embedded.

Such truths always fare in much the same way in the course of human development. In those days, Francesco Redi only just escaped the fate of Giordano Bruno. Today everyone, from the Haeckelianer to the most radical opponents of Haeckel, will recognize this sentence as self-evident, but only within the limits of external nature, insofar as it concerns the body. At that time, however, the sentence “Living things can only come from living things” was a tremendous heresy. Today, however, heretics are no longer burned. But if one stands on the firm ground of today's scientific facts - while in reality one only stands on the ground of one's preconceived ideas, of contemporary prejudices - one regards the law of repeated earth lives, which is the same for the higher areas of spiritual existence as Redi's sentence that living things can only come from living things, as heresy, as fantasy, as sheer madness. But the time is not far distant when it will be said of this law in the same way: It is really incomprehensible that any man could ever have thought differently.

Whence then comes this law of repeated earth-lives? Do we need to go back to some Eastern philosophy of life, must this law be borrowed from Buddhism? No. To understand the law of repeated earthly lives in the context of modern European culture, all that is needed is an unbiased, spirit-searching view that overlooks the facts. And what this view sees has nothing to do with any tradition. Like any other scientific law, it will be accepted by modern spiritual education because, based on the idea of development, it necessarily leads to this law.

But anyone who wanted to claim that this could add anything to our Western intellectual development that would run counter to Christianity is not aware of how this entire Western intellectual life is permeated by the living weaving and essence of Christian feeling, of Christian feeling. Indeed, if one is able to observe with an open mind, it can be seen that the way of thinking, the forms of imagination, even of those who today behave as the worst opponents of Christianity, have only been made possible by the education of Western humanity, which they have received through Christianity. Anyone who is willing and able to observe impartially will find that even the most radical opponents of Christianity fight it with arguments borrowed from Christianity itself.

But there is a radical difference between the Christian essence and what we can call the pre-Christian essence - a difference that is just not immediately apparent because everything in human development is slow and gradual and always encompasses the earlier in the later. There is something in the pre-Christian world view that is radically different from the Christian one, and this can be found and observed among the oriental world views, even in their most modern form, in Buddhism, for example. We can see this fundamental difference between the essence of Christianity and the oriental feeling and thinking that has found expression in Buddhism if we consider just a few of its aspects.

For this purpose, we need only recall a conversation that can be found in Buddhist literature and that is deeply rooted in Buddhist feeling and thinking. By studying such descriptions, we can gain a much more accurate insight into the essence of any world view than by considering its highest tenets and dogmas. After all, one can argue at length about whether this or that is to be understood in terms of Nirvana or Christian bliss. But how that which lives in the Buddhist and Christian way of thinking works its way into people's feelings, and how these feelings then relate to the whole world - the physical and the spiritual world - that is decisive for the value, the meaning and the essence of a world view and for its effect on human souls.

In Buddhist literature, we find preserved that remarkable conversation between the legendary King Milinda and the sage Nagasena. In this conversation, it is said that King Milinda came to the sage Nagasena by chariot and wanted to be instructed regarding the nature of the human soul. The sage then asked the king: “Tell me, did you come by chariot or on foot?” “By the chariot,” the king replied. ”Now tell me, when you have the chariot before you, what do you have there before you? You have the shafts, the body of the chariot, and the wheels before you. Is the shaft the chariot? Is the body the chariot? Are the wheels the chariot? No! Is that all you have in front of you? There is also the seat of the chariot! And what else do you have in front of you? Nothing! The chariot is therefore only a name or a form, because the realities that are in front of you are the box, the shaft, the wheels and the seat. What else is there is only name and form. Just as only a name or a form holds the individual parts together – wheels, shaft, body and seat – so too the individual abilities, feelings, thoughts and perceptions of the human soul are held together not by something that can be described as a particular reality, but only by a name or a form. So it can be said – felt in the right Buddhist sense: A central being in man, which holds together the individual human soul abilities, cannot be found, just as little as anything other than name and form can be found except for the drawbar, the wagon body, the seat and the wheels on the wagon.

And through yet another simile, the wise man made clear to [the king] the nature of the soul, saying: Consider the mango fruit – it comes from the mango tree. You know that the mango tree is only there because another mango fruit was there before, from which it was created. The mango plant comes from the mango fruit, which has rotted in the earth. What can you say about the mango fruit? It comes from the rotten seed. Now follow the path from the old fruit to the new mango plant. What does the new plant have in common with the old plant other than its name or shape? — But it is the same with the soul's existence, said the wise Nagasena to King Milinda. [It was also there only in name!] It was also a law of experience in Buddhism that a person undergoes repeated earthly lives. But this law did not prompt the actual central Buddhist feeling to seek and see something other than name and form in what passes from one life to another, just as with a mango fruit, where nothing passes from one to the other except name and form. Thus, according to the Buddhist view, we can see the effects of past lives in what we call our destiny in a life – our abilities, talents and so on. But no central soul-being passes over from the earlier life to the new one; only causes work out into effects, and what we have in common in one life with an earlier life – except for what we feel to be our destiny in the new life – is only name and form. You have to feel your way through what is actually at hand in Buddhism.

And now we could – in order to remain objective – translate that which appears to us in this story as the correct Buddhist feeling by transferring the whole thing into the Christian sense. What would the two stories sound like in a Christian sense? They don't exist, but let's try to translate them and thereby make the difference very clear.

A Christian sage would say something like this: Take a look at the chariot – when you look at it, you see the shafts, the body, the wheels and whatever else is on the outside. The chariot seems to you to be only name and form, but try to see if you can travel on a name or a form; you can't get anywhere in the world on that. Nevertheless, although only name and form are there for the visible, there is something else besides the body of the wagon, the shaft and the wheels and so on, which signifies a reality when a wagon stands before us and not just its parts. As I said, there is no such Christian legend, but a Christian-minded person felt this when he coined the phrase “parts”, which the scientifically minded person often has in his hand, but for which he lacks the context, when he said:

Then he has the parts in his hand,
Unfortunately, only the spiritual bond is missing.

Goethe, who coined the word, knew that the spiritual bond was a reality.

And now the second parable: Imagine the mango fruit hanging from the tree above and the one that has rotted below. Not only do they have the same name and form, but these also live in the same way in the old and new fruit. However, what makes this mango fruit the same as the other, rotten one is in the forces, in the elements, which are supersensible and which pass from the first mango fruit into the second.

Thus, in the psychological experiences that a person goes through from life to life, we see a central ego at work, a central soul being. And when we see a person in a later life, what he experiences as fate, what abilities and talents he possesses, and so on, is not only the effect of the causes of previous lives, but there is a central, cohesive being that passes from the previous embodiment into the new one.

Thus we see how the idea of repeated earthly lives - re-embodiment or reincarnation - must be brought to life through the fundamental Christian idea. Those who take Christianity seriously are not afraid that the foundations of Christianity could falter when new truths emerge in people's view. Christianity is so strong that it can give rise to feelings such as those just characterized, that it – like all other truths – can also tolerate the truth of repeated lives on earth, and even accept it willingly when human thinking has progressed to the point where this law can be impressed upon it. But then the fundamental impulse of Christianity will assert itself: the reality of the soul-spiritual, which passes through the various earthly lives as a central core.

Thus we have presented such a contrast that can make clear to us the fundamental difference between Buddhism and Christianity. We must grasp both worldviews in their basic sentiments [and not in their dogmas], because one could argue about dogma ideas and concepts not for days, but for months and years. Whether Nirvana is the same as Christian beatitude, for instance, is a question that could be argued about endlessly and which would lead to logical and dialectical quibbling. But the point is never to enter into discussions about the highest concepts, but rather to consider how religious or other ideological impulses fit into the soul, into the heart, into the hopes and certainties of life. In another, [even clearer] way, the same thing confronts us when we allow the basic impulse that inspired the great Buddha to take effect on us. I deliberately say “the great Buddha”, because to those who are able to penetrate what, like the last dawn of all pre-Christian thought, the Buddha produced as a worldview, this Buddha appears as a great, exalted figure.

The greatest influence on the great Buddha seems to us to be the legend that says: We are told - and the legend tells us more truly than any external history - that the Buddha initially spent his life in such a way, through the care of his parents, that he only got to know the joys of life, but not its suffering. But once he was led out of his parents' castle, and there he saw life in its reality. There he saw a sick person. Only now did he learn that life does not only reveal abundant health, now he learned that the same thing that calls illness into life also brings it into life. From this he learned the meaning of suffering for life. And he learned the meaning of suffering through further examples that came his way in life. He saw an old man and said to himself: old age is suffering - as he had first said to himself: illness is suffering. - And finally, when he was shown a corpse, he said to himself in the face of the end of life: death is suffering.

And in further developing this impulse, we see how Buddha recognized suffering in the act of coming into existence. He said: birth is suffering, illness is suffering, old age is suffering, death is suffering. Being separated from what one loves is suffering, being united with what one does not love is suffering, not being able to achieve what one desires is suffering. And from this, the great Buddha derived the essence of his doctrine of salvation.

Buddhism is a doctrine of salvation in that it says: It is the urge for existence, the thirst for existence, that leads that which is better than this world into the world. Only through the salvation of this world can man enter into real higher states of existence. But he can only achieve this by fighting the thirst for existence that leads him into earthly embodiment. Let us not grasp things only theoretically, but also emotionally; let us see the great Buddha with the great, wide heart full of love that he had. Let us grasp him as he stands opposite a corpse that represents the end of life for him, and he says to himself: “Death is suffering.” In the twilight of the old, pre-Christian world view, a corpse becomes the symbol of suffering for the great Buddha, the symbol that this thirst for earthly life must be fought. He teaches man to turn away from this earthly life; he teaches him to rise to what beckons him as Nirvana.

And now let us go back 600 years and then forward again 600 years and then take another look at humanity's view of life. 600 years before our era, we have the work of the great Buddha in India. Then, 600 years after our era, we no longer have to do with the Buddha, but with simple, naive minds. Like Buddha, they fix their eyes on a corpse – on the corpse of Christ Jesus, who died on the cross and who represents the Mystery of Golgotha for them. What is this corpse for these simple people 600 years after the founding of Christianity? The same as was once the symbol of a religion of redemption for the Buddha is now, for these simple people who received the Christian impulse 1200 years after Buddha, not the symbol of a religion of redemption that turns away from all earthly things, but the symbol of a religion of resurrection, for at the sight of this corpse, the certainty descends into human hearts and human souls that all suffering and all death is the gateway to the victory of the spirit over all that is physical, to liberation from death.

There was no greater, no more incisive impulse than the Christ impulse, which came into the development of mankind between the two epochs: between the epoch when even the great Buddha could look at a corpse and only find the idea of deliverance from the body, and that epoch when one could again look at a corpse, but now saw in this corpse a symbol that the highest and best, the most valuable that lives within man, will always be the victor over the physical, will always rise, will rise above the physical. This is how one must characterize the impulse, because only through it can one approach the impulse of Christianity in the right way, through feeling, as it should be, and not through theoretical ideas. And if we now want to grasp this impulse of Christianity in the right sense, we can still do so through something else.

Basically, the pre-Christian religions do not know something that only through Christianity has entered fully into the world view of humanity. Here again we can look to Buddhism. If we examine and understand it, we find that it has crystallized out of one of the highest concepts of the human being, the concept of the Bodhisattva. What is that, a bodhisattva? Well, if you want to grasp this concept of the bodhisattva, in which Buddhism sees one of the highest guides in the spiritual life of humanity, you have to look back a little at the developmental history of the human mind and soul. We must be clear about the fact that just as we live today in relation to our state of mind, this state that we carry within us is also subject to development. The way we see the things around us today and how we combine our senses with our minds – that is our present state of mind – this soul nature has developed slowly and gradually. And anyone who, without the means of spiritual science but only through thinking, looks back at the cultural development of humanity will become aware of how, in earlier times, the human soul was in a very different state.

Now, I would first like to characterize how spiritual research has to understand this earlier state. We look back into ancient times, into the times of prehistoric human development - into times to which no historical documents lead back. Man did not see the world in the same way as he does today, for example in science; in those times, a kind of clairvoyant state of mind still existed. People today are annoyed when clairvoyant states of mind are spoken of, and perhaps rightly so, because the word is so often misused today, and it is often understood to mean something highly superstitious. But what is really meant by it is quite different from the state of mind we have today from waking up to falling asleep, and the state of unconsciousness during sleep. In ancient times, there was a third state of consciousness between waking and sleeping. All that remains of this third state for today's humanity is what we must call a kind of atavism, namely the dream state. The only thing that ancient clairvoyance had in common with today's dream consciousness was the pictorial, the symbolic. But while today's dream images usually appear fragmented and chaotic, the content of what was perceived clairvoyantly could be related to spiritual realities that lie behind our sensual world, so that we can say: In an intermediate state between waking and sleeping, the spiritual world was an immediate experience for people of ancient times. Man looked into spiritual reality. And therein lies the meaning of human development: that man has descended from that state to our present consciousness, where we have bought the possibility, through the surrender of ancient clairvoyance, to grasp the world with our intellectual concepts, with our ideas.

But development continues, and in the future, this present consciousness will again unite with the old clairvoyant consciousness. Just as today some individuals undergo a development of soul through which they develop a clairvoyant consciousness in addition to the external object consciousness, so later all of humanity will attain an intellect that simultaneously functions as a clairvoyant consciousness. So we can say that people who lived in ancient, very ancient cultures could still look back to a time in the development of humanity when their forefathers had knowledge that came from direct observation of the divine spiritual world. And in those most ancient times, the leaders in regard to such knowledge were those people whom, in the sense of Buddhism, we call the first Bodhisattvas. Then the clairvoyant powers of people increasingly declined. And those peoples who particularly felt the decline of these abilities, as was the case with the inhabitants of ancient India, incorporated this looking back to the origin of man out of the spiritual into their feeling, and they said: In the way we now look at the world with our ordinary day-to-day consciousness, we basically do not live in a way that corresponds to the innermost core of our being.

People in earlier times could look back into the spiritual world to which we actually belong; but today this is only possible for those who undergo a special spiritual development. The ancient Indian people saw behind the physical world the old spiritual home of man, which could well have been seen in the past, but which can no longer be seen now. They felt this so strongly that they said: Everything that today's consciousness beholds is Maya, the great illusion, the great deception; behind it is what the ancestors beheld, what our souls themselves beheld in previous bodies. And what our fathers handed down to us in the teachings of ancient times contains the truth about the spiritual home of man. And so the old Indian strove out of Maya, the great deception, up to the spiritual home, to the spirit to which man felt connected when he said to himself in his soul: The spiritual that lives in me is one with the spiritual that lives and weaves through the world as Brahman.

That was the mood in ancient India, but humanity has always retained an echo of this ancient wisdom, and that is what we are considering here. If we look only at external evidence, we see that what people in pre-Christian times had as religions goes back to what people had as ancient wisdom, which comes from [ancient] clairvoyance. And one also sees that since those times, from age to age, great leaders of humanity must always arise who have within themselves, in their soul, the content of the ancient wisdom and truth that governs them. Thus the ancient wisdom lives on in the leaders and teachers of humanity, the bodhisattvas. And in the sense of Buddhism, one would have to regard Buddha himself, Zarathustra, Hermes, Orpheus and others as such bodhisattvas. They were initiated into the primal wisdom that they had within them as truth, and that meant that their souls were connected to the spiritual worlds. Thus, Buddhism looks up to the great leaders who, from epoch to epoch, have passed on the ancient wisdom, because “wisdom” and “truth” are roughly what the word “bodhisattva” means.

The Bodhisattva dignity is achieved by the fact that man gradually develops to such an extent that his soul can absorb the wisdom that characterizes the spiritual home of man. When a person has progressed from embodiment to embodiment to the point of becoming a bodhisattva, the next step – the highest rank he can achieve, so to speak – is the Buddha level; one goes from being a bodhisattva to being a Buddha. But the Buddha is no longer called upon to descend to earth again, but after becoming a Buddha, he has arrived where the thirst for life in the body is extinguished, where salvation occurs, where he no longer remains connected to the physical world, where he no longer lives in it. Thus the last development, so to speak, of the pre-Christian world view recognizes in the Bodhisattva the human being who stands at the boundary of that which still remains connected to earthly existence. In the moment when the human being rises one step higher, he no longer needs to remain connected to the earth. However, this world view does not yet truly know the concept of the Christ. What does the concept of the Christ consist of?

The Christ concept is higher than the bodhisattva and the Buddha concepts. We arrive at the Christ concept only when we turn our spiritual gaze to an inner experience of the human soul, an experience that is hinted at in the Christian Gospels and that we can call inner resurrection or rebirth. Usually, this inner rebirth is presented as something quite abstract. However, we need only consider a few aspects of the human soul in order to realize that this inner rebirth refers to something quite concrete. We need only consider the individual elements that form the basis of human soul life. In his outer life, man presents himself to us with his perceptions, feelings, emotions and volitional impulses. We see how he draws his ideas about the world around him from this soul, which lives in drives, passions and other impulses, and how he can ascend ever higher and higher to purer and truer concepts. Who would not admit that man feels within himself the urge and drive for ever-increasing perfection? One need only imagine the demands of all noble idealists of humanity, and one must say: These demands set high ideals, and people also live them out in methodical acts of noble human compassion and so on. Therefore, one must say: Man can, as it were, rise above himself.

We are dealing here with a fact of the human soul life that, when considered in the human sense, cannot always be called abstract. This is also admitted when one says: something lives in us like a second ego, a higher self, to which one can grow beyond the lower everyday self. Sometimes one admits in the abstract that Goethe's saying is right:

From the force that binds all beings,
the human being frees himself who overcomes himself.

But this higher self is usually imagined as something bloodless, colorless, something that for most people does not have the same immediacy and reality as those expressions of the human being that are tied to the person as he or she appears to us in life. He comes to us with all his feelings, impulses, with everything he does as a natural being, with his blood, with all the forces that pulsate through his body, with everything that nature has given him as a personality. If we want to summarize all this, we can say: Just as the human being comes to us as a natural being, so is he endowed with the forces that permeate the whole world. Just as he comes to us as a personality, so has he become through the forces of the world.

How colourless and abstract, in contrast, is what people often have as the content of their higher impulses. And how concrete it is when a person flies into a rage because of his blood. If, on the other hand, you set up an ideal of the higher self, then it usually remains quite abstract - so colourless and bloodless that it seems quite consumptive to us. For example, what Kant calls the “categorical imperative” could be described as a consumptive ideal. A bloodless idealism! Now, against what so often confronts us as bloodless abstractions, we need only hold up a word from the development of Christian impulses that is effective, Paul's word:

Not I, but the Christ in me.

With this, we have mentioned that which is able to describe the essence of Christianity in the deepest sense.

We have before us the human being as a natural personality; we see how he stands with his affects, his passions, as a confluence of all the forces that permeate and interweave the whole world. He stands there, composed into a small world, like a microcosm in the big world, in the macrocosm. And now we see how this human being is inspired by the pursuit of perfection, how he wants to experience something within himself, as it is expressed in the aforementioned saying by Goethe:

From the force that binds all beings,
man frees himself who overcomes himself.

What initially presents itself to us as a natural personality, composed like a microcosm from the forces of the world, now strives beyond itself in concepts and ideas, which may initially appear in abstract ideals as man's better self. But then we can imagine that these abstract ideals, these higher wisdoms, the highest ideals, which man can only have by rising above his natural existence, now permeate this higher self in the same way ing, and becoming an expression of that which the world experiences and interweaves spiritually, as spiritual, as world-moral, just as the physical-sensual of the personality is an expression of the whole macrocosm.

When, as if by lightning, a world being, a world essence, strikes into the highest ideals of man, which is conceived just as real in the spiritual-supersensible as the external world forces are conceived as real, which, acting in from the macrocosm, have put together the human natural personality as a microcosm Then we have the human being who frees himself – the human being who in this way rises above himself, who now lives in his higher self, which otherwise remains an abstraction, consisting of unfilled, bloodless concepts that do not have an immediate effect. Now the higher impulse that has taken hold of this person is at work; something spiritual lives in him that will become his higher personality. Now he not only has abstract ideals, the highest moral ideas within him, but he also carries a second, spiritual personality within him. Now that to which he can rise as to a highest is also permeated by spiritual personality, just as the natural man was formerly permeated by abstract ideals.

When we feel that this can happen in a person, then we understand the words of St. Paul: “It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me.” This Christ in me can permeate and penetrate everything that is and remains an abstraction of a higher self. Thus, through Christ, we ascend to a higher personality. While the Bodhisattvas are those teaching guides of man who lead him to impersonal higher wisdom, to abstract concepts and ideas, the Christ impulse does not merely lead man to an impersonal wisdom, but to a higher personality within himself. This concept, however, only came into the world through the establishment of Christianity. Everything that happens in the world has its causes. And when today, through a development such as that indicated in the writing “How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds”, man rises to spiritual insight, to spiritual clairvoyance, then he has this higher personality directly before him as a reality, like a new man in man - the Christ in ourselves.

But now there comes a moment for the real clairvoyant in which a word is spiritually fulfilled that Goethe used about the external, physical facts of nature and then also applied to the highest entity in man, namely the word:

If the eye were not sun-like,
How could we behold the light?

Goethe's point, with regard to the external, is: My eye is there, and sees the sun; if it did not possess the power of perceiving light, we could not see the light. But he also says:

The eye is formed by light for light.

We could not have eyes if light did not live and weave through the world: the eye is formed by light. – The Schopenhauerian truth “The world is my idea”, that is, that the world of light and color is the idea of the eye, is only half the truth. The whole truth is only found when we add: Through the world my idea is created, so that when we use the eye formed by the sun, we look into the world in which the sun is. - And in the same way we can say: As no eye without the sun, so no divine knowledge and feeling in us without God as objective God in the outside world.

In the same way, the Christ in us can be experienced objectively as a personality. And this event, where we experience our higher self in such a way that we can say: “Not we, but the Christ in us,” becomes a concrete experience for us. Then our inner soul existence is transformed, then we have become a different person, a reborn person, and through this experience a new, spiritual eye has been opened for us. And then we also see that the Christ in us needs the Christ outside of us, the subjective spiritual Christ in us needs the objective, historical Christ. To deny the Christ who went through the Mystery of Golgotha is logically the same as denying the sun that the eye has formed out of an otherwise indifferent organism, as Goethe said.

The fact that we can experience the Christ in us is formed in us as an inner experience from our soul organism, just as our physical eye is formed from sunlight. So what our inner spiritual eye is, is formed by the real, objective Christ, and those who truly experience this, not just in feeling but through clairvoyant consciousness, experience this as their most direct knowledge, which could be characterized as the clairvoyant looking up from the spiritual personality of Christ in us to the real, objective, historical Christ. We need no gospel, no historical document, we need only the true, genuine gaze of the clairvoyant, and we know that the embodiment of that being from whom the impulse for the “Christ in us” came has lived in the course of human development. That is the objective, not merely the subjective mystical experience of the Christ.

But we know something else. We know: When, under the compulsion of logical thinking, the doctrine of repeated lives on earth gradually becomes implanted in the process of human development and thus in all earthly life, then we have the Christ before us clairvoyantly as the historical Christ, who triggers the inner view in us so that we can look at future embodiments. And now we do not say, as in Buddhism: the fewer earthly embodiments, the better for the person, because the sooner he will be released from existence - but we say: as long as the Earth has a mission to educate, we, by being embodied on earth, we absorb more and more of the Christ impulse, and the Christ impulse in us becomes ever stronger and more comprehensive; higher and higher we carry it in us in every new embodiment. And so we look into a future in which more and more of us can fulfill the word, “Not I, but the Christ in me.” Therefore, we look upon future embodiments, upon our future earth-lives, as upon lives more and more permeated with the Christ, and we understand why in the pre-Christian world-picture, even in Buddhism, only an idea of redemption could arise - the Christ-impulse had not yet come, which brings ever new and new fruitfulness into every earth-life. On the contrary, the point had even been reached when it was no longer possible to perfect life on earth further. The Christ Impulse gives meaning to earthly embodiments and to the lives of human beings on earth, whereas Buddhism could no longer provide any meaning for this.

And if we now look at the history of the development of Christianity, the question is answered: How did Christianity come into the world, not the Christ, but Christianity? Anyone who wants to look at history objectively will have to say: Paul contributed the most to the development of Christianity. Let us take a look at him. Was he convinced by what had happened in the world as a physical fact or by what was described to him? As a contemporary of the events that took place in the physical world, he was able to hear everything that happened to him, but what he was able to absorb into his soul from these Christian ideas was unsuitable for making these external events appear to him in such a light that he could have changed his soul to Christianity. But then the event occurred that scientific theology has not yet been able to interpret. What was that event? Externally, what Paul could not have believed through any perception or observation in the physical world became an immediate certainty for him through what he saw supernaturally, in the spirit. No message from the physical world could be decisive for him - but it was a supernatural experience, a superphysical event. And this convinced him, not merely of the existence of some Christ, but that the Christ had experienced the event that, when translated into human life, means: In every human being, the spiritual core of the being will conquer the death of the outer covering of the lower human being, because “if Christ had not risen, our faith would be vain and vain our preaching”. Paul appealed to the risen Christ because it had become clear to him that in the Mystery of Golgotha that spiritual sun had appeared which makes the inner Christ in man possible in the first place. For Paul, the starting point of Christian development was a supersensible event that gave him the impulse to work for Christianity.

Thus, in relation to its first great teacher, Christianity emerged from a supersensible impulse, and only later were the Gospels able to provide what people needed to clearly visualize the Christ event in their minds. This event can be renewed forever, even today; if man observes the laws of inner human development, he provides himself with the opportunity to relive the event of Damascus within himself. Then he can experience the objective Christ spiritually as truth; then he can begin to believe the Gospels without needing to have historical proof, because what he beholds in spirit, what clairvoyant consciousness gives him, he then finds confirmed by the Gospel writings.

Thus, the essence of Christianity is to be sought within the human soul. And the strongest impulse for the spread of Christianity is to be found in a supersensible event of knowledge. Through this event, every human being, so to speak, immediately sees the necessity for the most important impulse in the historical development of humanity to have been the appearance of the Christ Himself. And then one truly understands that in the person of Jesus, the Christ lived as an entity that cannot be compared to any other. While the bodhisattvas progress from incarnation to incarnation like all other people until they have fulfilled their task and become a Buddha, we can only record one single life on earth for this entity that lived in the body of Jesus of Nazareth as the Christ. And [as in the successive generations the same blood passes from father to son], so from the one Christ who lived through the event of Golgotha - this is a fact that presents itself to the higher consciousness - a spiritual impulse goes out to all those who find the way to this Christ.

This idea that the Christ is connected by a spiritual bond to the one who finds the way to him – just as the descendant is connected to the ancestor by the bond of blood – this idea not only establishes a mysticism of Christianity, but a Christianity that can be described as a “mystical fact”. There is not only a Christian mysticism, an inner mystical experience in the sense of Christianity, but what happened in Palestine at the beginning of our era is a fact that can only be understood through mysticism. Just as the course of blood through the succession of generations can be understood by natural science, so that which happened through Christ can only be grasped through spiritual realization, through the wisdom of mysticism. Through spiritual realization one can comprehend that “spiritual blood” flows from Christ Jesus into the souls of those who find their way to him.

I am with you all days until the end of the earth cycles.

To recognize and see how the impulse of Christ flows within the development of the earth and thus he himself flows – this in turn can be converted into sensations, and one will feel how such contradictions as the following allow us to look into the depths of the development of worldviews.

We have a passage handed down from Buddha that can be compared with the saying just quoted: “I am with you always, to the end of the age”. Buddha said to his disciples: “When I look back on earlier earth lives, I know that my soul has gone through many earth lives and has undergone this or that experience. It has acquired abilities and now built my body, this outer, physical body. This has become my destiny because the soul built it and led it to such places where it could experience all this. So I see in my present physical body the results of the spiritual forces that I have gathered. And he called the body a temple built out of divine powers, by way of the human individuality. [And further said Buddha:] The temple of my body is the result of the previous lives I have gone through. But I know full well that since I became the Buddha, this temple has been standing, and it is the last time that my inner powers have built such a temple. I feel exactly how the beams are already breaking, the columns bursting; this is the last body that my soul will inhabit - the last body, because I have become a Buddha.

Deliverance from the body, that is what the Buddha teaches. Let us translate this into feeling and contrast it with another saying, namely the saying where Christ Jesus also spoke to his disciples about the temple of his body. But how did He speak? Did He also say, like Buddha, that this is the last existence and that everything that led to this body will dissolve? No, the Christ foresaw that what He had become in this body would give the impulse to continue working through all earthly existence: “Break down this temple, and in three days I will raise it up again.” That is the great contrast: on the one hand, the breaking of the Temple and the desire to break in order to bid farewell to the earth, and on the other hand, the contemplation of the structure of the Temple as the starting point for all subsequent human salvation. And for this stands the expression: Break down this Temple, the impulse is already there, which continues to work.

Thus we must not see the impulses that proceed from the Christ Jesus and that form the essence of Christianity in abstract terms, but we must transform the concepts so that they become sensations and feelings. Then, precisely in the realization of repeated earthly lives, we will feel the full significance of this Christ impulse. We will look at the human lives of the future and see in Christ the starting point for an ever higher and higher fulfillment of the destiny of humanity in the future.

And so we can say: We look back to ancient, pre-Christian times, to the wisdom that stands at the starting point of humanity, but which has gradually been lost until people had only the last remnants of it. Then came a time when the greatest impulse, the Christ impulse, struck humanity, which is a new starting point and leads people into the spiritual world, bringing the soul the possibility of ever higher and higher ascent, of ever higher and higher life, until man is so far advanced in terms of his earthly existence that he can ascend in spirit to the heights of all earthly existence. Nothing fulfills us as significantly, deeply and powerfully as this, which we can understand as a characteristic of the actual mission of humanity within our earthly existence. There stands the human being; he sees himself surrounded by the physical-sensual world, he strives for perfection, he sees ideals above him, he knows that through them he reaches up into a spiritual world. And he knows that from this spiritual world, spiritual forces and entities extend into his existence. But man cannot live his way up into the spiritual worlds with mere abstract concepts and ideals, because just as he is here in the physical world as a personality, so he must also educate himself as a personality into the spiritual world. Therefore, only a model personality can lead him there - that is the Christ-personality!

Thus man looks up to Christ as the Bringer of the spiritual world and says: By raising my own self to you, by ever more fully realizing St. Paul's saying, “Christ in me,” I draw down from the spiritual worlds the most intimate and potent impulses, clothe them in my human being and transmit them into our physical world, into our sense world. I am the mediator between the spiritual world and the world of the senses. I bring spiritual things into the physical world. I permeate and structure the physical with that which comes from the spiritual world. The Christ is my helper and model in this, the true Christ, who is just as necessary for the inner man as the outer sun is necessary for the physical eye, and who, as an historical being, walked on the outer physical plane at the beginning of our era.

We then feel as human beings in the world: we can hint at our mission on earth by saying that we should thoroughly imbue with a Christian spirit those words in which I would like to summarize what today's reflection has revealed about the relationship between man and the physical world on the one hand and the spiritual world on the other:

Man's sense is overwhelmed
From the depths of the world, full of mystery
The rich abundance of matter.
It flows into the depths of the soul
From the heights of the world, full of content
The spirit's clarifying light.
They find each other in the human heart
To a reality full of wisdom.

When we speak of spiritual science in our present time in the sense in which it will underlie the considerations of today's lecture, we are by no means speaking of something that is recognized in our time, not even remotely of anything popular. On the contrary, all the habits of thought and ways of thinking that have developed in a large proportion of our contemporaries are rooted in an area from which one believes that anything this spiritual science has to bring to light can be seen as something that is not scientific at all, and in many respects even as something that is mere dreaming or fantasizing. And it must be said that there is no need to be surprised at this state of affairs. On the contrary, anyone who is familiar with the whole essence of spiritual science, as it is meant here, and its task in the present, would be surprised if it could easily find the ear of our contemporaries. All the great achievements of our time, all the intellectual triumphs of our time, are based on a different field from the one in which spiritual science has its roots. And however true it is that this spiritual science fully recognizes everything that has been achieved by the scientific way of thinking since the dawn of modern natural science, since the appearance of the Copernican world view, and however true it is that spiritual science, and especially it, fully recognizes and appreciates this, it is nevertheless understandable that many people today believe that they can only stand on the firm ground of this natural science if they reject everything that this spiritual science does, and this - as will be shown sketchily in this lecture - from the way of thinking, from the same logic from which natural science itself comes.

Even if one does not speak of something popular or recognized, one speaks on the other hand of something that is deeply, deeply connected with all the longings of the human heart and soul, with all the great riddles of existence, without whose the human soul cannot exist in the long run; which do not confront us, as some scientific puzzles do, but with riddles that confront us at every hour, one might say, of our existence, at every turn. And although spiritual science has a broad field - its field is as wide as the whole universe, so to speak - it must be said that what it has to explore in the wide field of spiritual activity and existence is concentrated first of all into two significant life questions, which can be described as questions of fate and death or immortality.

This fateful question confronts us at every turn. If we just consider how one person enters into existence through birth, so that blessing hands surround him from the very beginning, that he grows to the full development of the abilities and powers that are within him, so that one can foresee in a certain way: he will be a useful member of human society. The other person [...] is surrounded from the cradle by circumstances [...] so that one can say that he will have to fight the bitterest battles throughout his life, have little opportunity to develop his abilities and strengths, so that one can say that he will become only a slightly useful member of human society. Between the two extremes – how many nuances of the fateful question that arises before the soul of man! Not so, as with some other questions, let us say, scientific questions, which man always formulates precisely – perhaps not at all in clear words does this or that man express these questions; it does not matter, every soul must ask them. And even if she does not ask: What about fate? , through its contact with the outside world it is tuned one way or another, feeling happy or dissatisfied, working joyfully, going through life confidently or having to weep at every moment. Even if it is not always clear, but rather in the way that every human soul is tuned - in the way it presents itself to others, how it behaves when it is alone with itself - you can tell that at the bottom of its soul, unspoken, it is itself a mystery of the human soul.

And not in the same way as other questions – at every turn you encounter the questions of life. They are not always raised in such a way that they appear scientific. When man faces the riddle of death, affects, feelings, hopes, doubt, all of these are certain to be involved. Fear of death, the desire for another existence, all of these are involved in the question and in the answer that many people give themselves; and it must be said that, especially in recent decades, when many of our contemporaries claim to have to reject all life after death, quite a few personalities, who were not without nobility, but who, out of their materialistic views, arrived at an illumination of the mystery of death, which, when all is said and done, is much better and much nobler than many an answer given by this or that soul, motivated by the fear of death and the longing for life. Many a materialistically minded person rejected any life for the human soul after the human being had passed through the gate of death. But he said to himself: “I will consider what I have worked for in my soul, what I have educated myself to between birth and death, what I have made it capable of, in such a way that I silence all selfishness, all selfishness and self-love and - as my scientific knowledge requires - gladly sacrifice it on the altars of general human development.

So not everything is ignoble, [if you think] that it is better, higher, not [to] wish that you carry what you have developed in your soul through the gate of death, but gladly give it to the following generations, who can do whatever they want with it. But it is precisely these feelings, which certainly cannot be described as ignoble, that show that there is a scientific aspect to the question of immortality, because if one just looks at the nature of the human soul, everything that a person works towards and cultivates up to the gate of death, then a peculiarity of the human soul comes to the fore that cannot be mistaken if one looks more closely at this human soul. One can ask: What is the most valuable, the most significant thing about the human soul? It is the incommensurable, the ideal element that this human soul has shaped in such a personal way that it cannot be given up to any other power, to any other element. This cannot be given up by the individual human soul to the human species at all. And especially when viewed impartially, it can be seen that this would disappear into nothing if the human soul itself were to disappear into nothingness, [that] something is worked out that we could not otherwise describe than that through a whole human life, [so that it] acquires inner strength, becomes richer, and [what] becomes, so to speak, only for the purpose of it [then] disappearing after all. But this contradicts the general economy. Nowhere in the whole world do we see that forces are combined in such a way to achieve the highest tension, and then, when the highest tension is reached, suddenly disappear.

One arrives at the formulation of the question out of admiration for the economy of the world, independently of all fear of death, of all hope for humanity, of personal interests, so objectively through the observation of the world, as one can objectively arrive at such an observation through the observation of any other being or thing in the external world. Thus there is indeed a scientific way of formulating the question of immortality. Of course, one does not arrive at an answer through all of the above, but only at a formulation of the question. That is to be the subject of today's consideration, that one can arrive at an answer through spiritual scientific research.

It must be emphasized from the outset that everything that man can observe in the external world, and that he can also recognize through the external sciences of this external world, is based on such an inner activity that is bound to the organs of the external body. No one can imagine that he could observe what man recognizes as sensual reality if he had no senses. But that the senses fade away with death is an immediate certainty. Likewise, man can recognize that his ordinary mind is bound to the brain and thinks and works in dependence on the senses. He must assume that his mind, his soul activity, is bound to the outer body and must fade away with death. This is just as true, [as] our external organs of perception and the external brain fall away. Thus we see how the question comes down to whether the human being is capable of becoming aware of something within himself that is independent of his senses, of the external corporeality. And it is impossible from the outset to claim that anything other than what is independent of the external body has a duration beyond death.

But do we ever have reason in our normal lives to see something in our own soul that is independent of the external body? Consciously, certainly not at first. But the fact that we have to assume it at first is suggested to us by the consideration of a changing state in human life, which, however, is not always sufficiently observed in normal life and not understood in its importance, because man easily passes by what he experiences habitually. And some of these are precisely what point the researcher as deeply as possible into the secrets of life. What is meant here is what happens to the soul daily: sleeping and waking. We need only consider the moment of falling asleep in a very ordinary way to get an idea of the nature of sleep. From the outset, it should be said that, of course, recent scientific hypotheses, which would be extremely interesting to consider, are not to be considered in a short evening reflection. There are extremely interesting observations about the nature of sleep; and even if it could be shown that the spiritual scientific observations do not contradict the natural scientific ones, but today it must be refrained from this and based on mere spiritual science it must be said: When we observe the moment of falling asleep, we do see how the human being's physicality falls away at the moment of falling asleep. The human being loses control over his limbs, which are left to the force of gravity; they are handed over solely to the force of gravity and the other forces of our earth that are independent of the soul. The human being loses the use of his senses; they gradually begin to fall silent; the surging of desires, drives and passions, ideas and ideals into an indeterminate darkness; memory is silent. Now, anyone who claims that they cannot think differently because of their scientific presuppositions will say: this calmness is only a by-product of the body. When we have the sleeping human body in bed, it is only another way in which it works, through which it conjures out of itself what we call the life of the soul.

Now, science will always recognize – and if it is unbiased, it is already on the way to recognizing it – that everything that goes on in the sleeping human body has nothing to do with the inner life that flows up and down in the waking soul. Not only von Du Bois-Reymond fully admitted in the 1870s: When we have the sleeping human body before us, it is recognizable to science, but the laws that are in this human body, what emerges, what speaks in this existence in terms of passions, sensations, drives, perceptions, will never be recognized. Rather, one will always fully recognize that Yes, when you have the sleeping human body in front of you, all chemical and physical processes take place within this sleeping human body. But thoughts, feelings, passions and drives arise from these just as little as oxygen or air can arise from the life processes of nutrition or from the lungs. Just as the air outside is and is absorbed by the lungs through the breathing process and the human body, so it must be assumed that everything we call mental life springs into the human being when they wake up – like air when inhaled – and that this has nothing to do with the processes that take place in the sleeping human body.

Today, in our time, this is only a spiritual-scientific realization, but especially in this field, spiritual science will always have the help of natural science. It will recognize that it would be just as absurd to derive the processes of the inner soul experience from the body as it is impossible to derive air as an entity from the lungs. This gives us the right to say, at least as a hypothesis, in spiritual scientific terms – we want to believe that it will rise to certainty –: Well, it is indeed the case that the spiritual-soul core of the human being flows out of the human being when he falls asleep and is in a purely spiritual world, and when he wakes up, it flows back into him into the human body. This can be logically compared to inhaling and exhaling, except that we inhale a material substance and quickly exhale it again, while sleeping a spiritual-soul essence. One might call the state of transition between sleep and waking a spiritual inhaling and exhaling of the soul, only in much larger intervals than the physical inhaling and exhaling. But this will always be recognized by the way of thinking of mankind, that it is impossible to derive the soul-spiritual from the physical body. Just as one seeks the air outside, as it has its origin outside the organism, so the spiritual origin of the spiritual-soul life is outside the human body and is taken up by the human body when one wakes up.

Thus we could initially assume – and we do not wish to say too much at this point – that the human being is outside of his physical body with his spiritual and soul-like essence. However, we must say – if we can hypothetically assume this – that when a person is asleep, his soul is alone with itself, separated from the body, but he is unaware of this. Consciousness fades at the moment of falling asleep; he is surrounded by darkness and gloom when he passes into the state of sleep. From this, however, it can be seen what the prerequisite is for recognizing the soul-spiritual. Let us first leave it completely uncertain what is outside the human body when the human being is in a state of sleep. We can then make it certain if we are able to consciously bring about the same state that is supposed to occur during sleep: to make the soul-spiritual independent of the body, and then not to experience it unconsciously, but to make it active within, even though the soul is out of the physical body. Can that be the case? Is that possible?

All the possibilities of spiritual science actually depend on the answer to this question. And this is what makes people real spiritual researchers, what helps people to look into the spiritual world, [...] puts them in exactly the same state in which they are in their sleep, only [now] instead of being unconscious, they are in a state of inner consciousness. And this latter happens through very specific spiritual scientific methods, which are just as much methods as those underlying any chemical experiment in the external world, except that the external methods are applied with hands or with other tools, while the only tool with which man can penetrate the spiritual world is his own soul -[...] there are no methods other than those of the soul - [but only if] it conquers these forces [and] transforms them.

[When] can they be conquered? Only when one is able to say to oneself: Man is unconscious in sleep, inwardly inactive and unalive, because certain forces are so weakly developed that they cannot come to his consciousness by themselves. If a person is in a position where forces in his soul become perceptible that are otherwise asleep but not perceptible, then he can summon up forces that make him a conscious being when he is independent of his body. Then the proof is provided by the experience [and] the observation that the human soul is also something when it is independent of the body.

So, if this is not to be a fantastic assertion, a state must be possible that is similar to the state of sleep on the one hand, and radically different from it on the other. Similar in that the person allows his limbs to be just as inactive and his senses to be just as unimpressionable as in sleep, but through inner arbitrariness he rejects all the worries and concerns of life. Man must be able to bring about such a state in his soul that his soul is independent of the body, as in sleep, that the body is uninvolved in the life of the soul. But then - and now radically different from the state of sleep - this soul, after renouncing all external stimuli, including all memory, must awaken slumbering powers from its own depths through what is called meditation, concentration, contemplation.

What is it? These are certain activities of the soul, admittedly not immediately noticeable activities of the soul, but they transform the soul, change it into a new entity in many respects, at least for itself. If we want to form an idea of what meditation, concentration and contemplation are, which every soul researcher must apply to himself to a great extent, we have to say: in ordinary life we form concepts, let ourselves be stimulated by things into ideas and hold these ideas in thought. How much would remain in our thought-image if we only had what comes from outside? But the spiritual researcher must withdraw all attention from everything that is essential in the normal state through his arbitrariness; and then, when there is complete empty consciousness, he must be able to place some or a single idea or sensation or a single volitional impulse at the center of his consciousness through a stronger development of his will, while in normal life one very easily sinks back into sleep. So here, when the spiritual researcher wants to make his soul into an instrument, everything is placed at the center of consciousness by his own arbitrary will.

Now one can say: It does not matter what kind of idea, sensation, feeling is used for this, [but] the fact that one pushes the whole soul life, which is otherwise distributed over many ideas and impressions, into a single idea, thereby concentrating, contracting it – that is what matters. While in ordinary life one quickly hurries from idea to idea, one must then let such an idea hover in consciousness for a long time. By doing this, during a time when the soul life would normally change from one perception to the next, the entire soul life strives to concentrate on this one point. And that is what matters. We know that we also draw strength from the outside world by exercising it; the living draw strength from exercising it. What matters here are the forces that lie in the depths of the human soul and at most below the surface of consciousness, but are now being strained and exerted.

In general, it can be said that it does not matter which ideas are used for this purpose, but some are better suited than others. But, so that it is not spoken abstractly, not as a theory, we want to draw attention to something concrete right away. In general, one does not get very far in preparing the soul in spiritual research if any old idea is taken; but if so-called allegorical, pictorial ideas are taken, then one gets the furthest – pictorial ideas. Now, especially the materialistically minded person can easily say that they have no value because they do not express anything external. But what they depict is not important, whether they have a value for this or that external thing, but what this idea brings about in the soul, in that the soul concentrates its power on it alone.

An example [that] may initially sound quite crazy: imagine two glasses [, in the first is water, in the other none. By pouring the water from the first into the second, the amount of water in the first increases, not decreases]. The point is that this idea can be a significant symbol for a life process, a process that permeates everything in life: for the effectiveness of love. However absurd this idea may seem, it can still be said that there is something in a person's life that basically works like this symbol. A person who, out of the very impulses of his soul, always performs such acts of love, does not become poorer as a result, but richer and richer. This relationship of love to the human soul can be expressed symbolically through the otherwise nonsensical idea.

Now, when doing such exercises, one can arrange one's consciousness in such a way that one has such a feeling in the background, which gives warmth to the image, so that the soul is permeated with warmth; otherwise, one must turn one's attention away from all external life through arbitrariness, as one otherwise only does in sleep, and then direct all the soul's strength towards this one image. If you do such exercises – how to use them can be found in my book 'How to Know Higher Worlds'. It describes how to do such exercises, how a person can draw on those means in their soul through which they can really, little by little, exclude everything except meditation. And if he has the patience and persistence to work on and educate his inner soul life in such a way that he repeatedly does such concentration and meditation exercises, then he will become aware that something is indeed appearing in his soul that he was previously unaware of. Before, there was only the state of being asleep and awake. Now there is a new state of soul, which arises in the same way as the moment of falling asleep – only deliberately; it occurs when the body is surrendered to its own conditions, its that we reject all ideas, everything that is otherwise stimulated from outside, that only what we want is in the soul; that we are concentrated, bringing out of the soul the powers that would otherwise remain untrained. Then we feel that we are like the sleeping human being, but not unconscious, but inwardly active. And we notice this - if we have come so far as spiritual researchers - that we enter a certain point in time when we no longer have to conjure up images before our soul through our own arbitrariness, but now we have arrived where they arise and appear of their own accord.

Then gradually the state comes where a completely new world picture, a picture full of diversity, which we did not know before, arises before the soul. As in the morning, before the sun rises, first the dawn appears on the clouds, so a world of forms and impressions appears to us. Because we have strengthened what was previously weak within us, because we have brought about a state through inner activity in which our soul perceives something completely new that could not be perceived before; because it has become active, has become active, [it] encounters a new world; just as one can only encounter the world of colors and light when one has eyes, so now one encounters a new world because one has now made [oneself] organs for it.

It is now the case that – in the face of those who lightly object to such soul faculties – one is reminded of the words of the great philosopher Fichte, who said in 1811 and 1813:

Imagine a world of the blind, who know only the things and their relationships that exist through the sense of touch. Step among them and speak to them of colors and the other relationships that exist only through the light for the eye. Either you talk to them about nothing, and this is more fortunate, as they will say so; for in this way you will soon notice the error and, if you are unable to open their eyes, stop talking to them in vain. [...] Or, for some reason, they want to give your teaching a meaning: in doing so, they can only understand it in terms of what they know through touch: they will want to feel light and colors and the other relationships of visibility, assume that they can feel them, feel something within the feeling, contrive and lie to themselves about what they call color. Then they misunderstand, distort, and misinterpret. [...]

This teaching presupposes a new and special sense, sensory organ.

This world [is] not yet the world of the spiritual researcher, but for him it is the piece of spiritual research that he had already come to; there he was aware that he, without organs, speaks of “nothing”, of reverie, and that is why he says that one presupposes a world of [blindly] born. So, Fichte thought, the point is to create a new soul organ.

But only [the spiritual researcher] is able to make the soul into such an organ by means of the methods indicated. And now one must say: When he has reached this point, only then does the most difficult part begin for him, the part that must be observed most carefully. For now he is truly in a new world. The materialist will say, and from his point of view rightly so, that the spirit researcher can grasp all this, but his opponent does not understand it. He will say that the images also occur in the diseased soul, in hallucinations, visions, delusions, not externally, but internally all the more. [...] What is important is that [the inner perception of the spiritual researcher] is different from the delusional world of an unhealthy soul, that he [sees] something different from what emerges from the unhealthy soul. With delusions, visions, hallucinations, the essential thing – as we know to our chagrin – is that the person in question has such a rock-solid belief in them that they see them as a new world, as an objective world. And perhaps many of you know that it is easier to talk some people out of what they see with their eyes than out of their hallucinations, delusions and the like, and that some people invent strict logical systems to justify these delusions in a strictly logical way. But for the spiritual researcher, the important thing is to answer the question: Why is that so, why images that are only reflections of one's own soul, why does he see this as an objective reality?

If one tries to answer with the eye of the soul researcher, one comes upon something that is usually not taken as seriously in ordinary human observation as it should be taken. In truth, this is based on self-interest, one might say, self-love; we just must not take it as we know it in ordinary life. In ordinary life, selfishness is self-love; but we know that there are certain degrees, that because they are mental qualities, one can conquer them. External natural phenomena are different from what is in the soul. With lightning and thunder, we cannot fight against them as we would against selfishness when it arises in the soul, when it tempts us. We cannot command lightning to stand still, or thunder to roll and be audible. We have control over the inner being, not the outer. But the fact that the diseased soul has the mirror images of its own nature before it, makes such inner facts a necessity, so that they then remain as natural facts; that one can do nothing against them, as against the flickering of lightning. That is the peculiar thing, that everything that arises from self-love, from self-interest, to an inner soul activity, remains like a natural fact.

The aim of the proper schooling of the spiritual researcher is that he should not only acquire inner activity, but should also be able, precisely when he is at this point, to conquer even the stronger selfishness that the “objective” world conjures up for us. This is the most important point in his development. Everything he has done before must be overcome, as described in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”. Alongside this, the spiritual researcher must have undergone such a self-education that he not only knows that the world of images that arises on the horizon of his consciousness is nothing other than a mirror image of his own soul; not only must he know this, but he must have trained his soul so that he is able to remove and erase these images at any time. This requires a strong self-conquest, which in itself acts like a force of nature. For just consider, my dear audience, what this means: first, all the strenuous efforts to make the soul so alive within that a new world appears to it, and then, after making every possible effort, to be able to extinguish that world again. Practical experience shows that it is part of the soul's efforts to overcome, because in ordinary life one is never necessarily required to bring about what has just been described. One can extinguish this world, and through overcoming, through constant overcoming, one can extinguish it, up to a certain remnant - one cannot extinguish that, it remains. What is this remnant? One only really gets to know it when one has come to this point. For the spiritual researcher, when he has done everything up to this point, something occurs that is one of the most harrowing experiences that the human soul can ever have. Those who have known about it in the course of human development have coined a word that only those who have reached this point understand. This word is: coming to the threshold of death – I have tried to characterize it in my writing 'A Path to Self-Knowledge of Man'. It can occur in a hundred or a thousand different ways for the human soul, but it always has a certain typical character. It may be that at a certain moment, after doing such exercises long enough – and “long” means different things for different people in this life or later – that then a moment comes when one or in the middle of your daily activities, you experience this moment as follows: you have, as it were, everything that you previously referred to as your self, as your own personality, as yourself, as a human being, beside you as if it were outside. One feels as if one had really gone out of one's body while sleeping and had gone along with everything that is the ordinary phenomena of daily life. One has one's being beside oneself like another being, not feeling, one has the sensation: something has gone through one like a flash of lightning that has struck and taken from one what one has previously called one's self, one's own being. One now learns to approach the threshold of death – not death itself, because at first one recognizes it in the image. One sees what one has to face when one has passed through the gate of death, what one must give up when one passes through the gate of death. One learns what it means to speak only “you” to that to which one has spoken “I” until now.

At the same time, something is now entering and the spiritual researcher must be able to get to this point, to control himself at this moment – which can be characterized something like this: The person has the feeling: All the perception on which you have relied so far is now outside of you; you are now consciously in your soul with inner activity, but there is nothing beside you. One now lives as if standing over an abyss, all supports have now been withdrawn, everything has disappeared, only abyss and emptiness. The feeling that arises is akin, very, very akin to fear, but a fear that arises in the soul with the power of a natural phenomenon, no longer a quality of the soul, but like lightning and thunder over which one has no control. That is why you educate yourself to be able to conquer this fear when it arises. For the paths of spiritual research are not merely theoretical and practical teachings, but victory in life, overcoming of life. And one conquers what arises as fear of the void. And then one becomes even more aware: what remains and what cannot be extinguished – that is actually you, that is your true being. The rest is discarded. But what you are experiencing now is what you bring with you when you enter the physical world through birth or, let's say, conception, and what leaves again when you pass through the gate of death.

So you get to know yourself inwardly, and at the same time something else is connected with that. In the moment when you have experienced yourself in this way, when everything that was previously the reality of the world has been left behind, in that moment the real world emerges, spiritual beings and facts. And in the face of this world, there is a certainty that is different from that in the face of the unhealthy soul - the certainty of life: to distinguish the reality of spiritual facts and entities from fantasies and mere ideas of the unhealthy soul, just as one can distinguish reality from mere ideas in the physical world. Schopenhauer tried to mislead people to some extent [by taking] the world as an idea, even if [he meant] something else by it. [...] If you imagine that you are holding a piece of iron at 90 degrees Celsius [...] to your face, it will not burn you, [whereas an actual piece of hot iron would burn us]. There is no other proof of reality than the proof of life; and this proof is valid. You cannot prove anything against Kant's sentence that ten possible dollars contain no more than ten real dollars. But there is a considerable difference: you can hardly pay debts with ten possible dollars, but you can with real dollars. That having been said, in a lecture, an objection was raised: Yes, but if life is the only proof of the spiritual world, then one must remember that some people have such a power of selfishness that [gap in the transcript]. That someone can have a taste of lemonade on their tongue just by thinking about it and not letting it flow down their throat, that may be, there's no denying it. But the 'proof through life' is not carried to its conclusion: one can have the taste of lemonade, but not quench one's thirst with it. One must always go to the end with the proof of life. And just as there is only the proof of life that something is real, but as this proof of life is sufficient, so it is also the case with the facts and entities of the supersensible world, into which the spiritual researcher enters. He actually enters into a world that shows him spiritual beings that are spiritually close to him, as he is spiritually close to these beings. These beings are not physically visible in the material world, but, like him, are in a state that he goes through when he has passed through the gate of death.

I have shown you how the nature of man is such that it cannot be known through ordinary introspection, but rather by first putting himself in the inner activity and then becoming aware of himself after he has awakened to a new being, as it were. This new being is the same one that passes through birth and through existence and passes through death again. This life is only a school and a labor. This soul is a sum of powers that we also see at work in man in other ways, but only externally. When a person steps into existence through birth, the facial features of such a human being stepping into human life are still indeterminate; they become more and more distinct as soul power upon soul power works its way to the surface from that inner core of being, which we are now getting closer and closer to: that which the spiritual researcher must now see when the soul has arrived and the soul has been recognized in its true essence. The soul-power works its way to the surface from that inner core of being, which we are now getting closer and closer to: that which the spiritual researcher must see when the soul has come there, when the soul has been recognized in its true essence. For the spiritual researcher recognizes that the spiritual-soul core of being, which comes from the spiritual world, connects with what the father and mother give. Especially in the first years, [this spiritual soul] works most to shape the physical body plastically. What the spiritual researcher learns to recognize, what comes into existence through birth, is what we see working at this point; but when he learns to recognize, through the processes described, what he actually has within him, then he gets to know within himself what works in from the outside between sleep and waking, what replaces the expended forces: soul forces; he gets to know the spiritual core of the human being. In this way, the spiritual researcher is in a similar position to the natural scientist not so long ago, in the seventeenth century. [In] river mud, [so it was thought at the time, lower animals, even warmer ones and fish, arise] through the inner activity of the river mud itself; [it was Francesco] Redi, [who proved: one had] observed inaccurately; the exact observation shows that [these] arose because a germ [was present] in the river mud. Life can only come from life; this was only first scientifically stated in the seventeenth century. At the time, such a contradiction arose, in contrast to the prevailing doctrine, that Redi only narrowly escaped the fate of Giordano Bruno. Today's fashion has changed, not becoming more tolerant, but more snivelling – today it is no longer the custom to burn people, in those days people were burned – but in a certain inner sense the matter has remained the same. In those days, there was the greatest contradiction. Today, the spiritual researcher comes and shows: It is a mistake to believe that the qualities and powers of the soul come only from the line of inheritance, from father and mother, from grandfather and grandmother and so on; in this you commit an observation that is just as inaccurate as that lower animals arise from river mud. Rather, you have to recognize that a spiritual core must be present from the past, which takes hold of the physical properties like [the] germs in the river mud. The spiritual comes only from the spiritual.

And if we then go into the nature of the human being in more detail, then we come to the conclusion – if I should have the honor of speaking to you again, I can expand on this – that we recognize this spiritual-soul core of our being as a repetition of earlier earthly lives. Just as the germ in the outer physical body repeats the essence of the species, so the core of our being repeats the essence of the soul, and the present life is so bound up with past lives that, with the help of spiritual research, we can recognize that What comes into existence through birth is what we have acquired through a series of previous lives on earth. We take it with us through the gate of death, then live a purely spiritual life with the powers we have acquired, which do not disappear into nothingness, and use them to build a new life, and so on again and again. This is only the consequence of the law that the spiritual and mental comes only from the spiritual and mental - not from another person, but only from oneself, because it is ideal; that is, from one's previous lives on earth. As [then with] Redi, so [is it] today, the idea of repeated lives on Earth is fought against. [It is] always so: at first [it appears] absurd, ridiculous; after some time, it is taken for granted. And just as Haeckel and Du Bois-Reymond admitted that the living can only come from the living, so it will later be admitted that the spiritual and soul-like can only come from the spiritual and soul-like; because it is bound to the individuality, not to the species. Real research then naturally only results from real spiritual research. But then we have before us the solution to the riddle of fate. The riddle of fate, what does it consist of? We are placed with these or those forces that we have worked out in previous earthly lives; we suffer blows of fate that we have condemned ourselves to in previous lives, in such a way that we have been drawn to those events that correspond precisely to what we have created for ourselves in previous lives. And if that is found to be cruel, if it is said that not only is fate to be endured, but that it is even deserved, it must be countered that it only needs to be seen in the right light for it to appear differently. Let us take an example: an eighteen-year-old man, living off his father's ample fortune, encounters the misfortune of losing the family's wealth. He has to work and gradually becomes a capable person. ... At the age of fifty, he says to himself,] For my father it was perhaps a painful fate, but for me it was a condition of my present perfection; otherwise I would not have become the person I am now, and not from the standpoint that makes fate seem unjust. In earlier life, one predisposes oneself to imperfections that can only be compensated for by overcoming this fate. Then [one's] soul becomes strong, then fate finds not only its explicable, but its great forgiving, because through this [we see] [how] humanity goes in progressive development from life to life, and [how] fate is composed of cause and effect.

Today the question is often asked: Did the earth once have a beginning? We find something else. The fateful question will one day be truly resolved for man when repeated earthly lives are recognized within the stream of fate of man. And what we call eternity, the immortal being, we experience by finding ourselves completely immersed in the supersensible view of the world.

[Let us again use a comparison: just as we can] observe the plant [as it develops] from leaf to leaf, [to] flower, then [to] germ, in which the life forces are so concentrated that they already contain the guarantee for the emergence of a plant the following year, we also look at a person who is constantly acquiring strength and carrying this germ of life through the gate of death by carrying it within themselves, as truly as the plant carries the germ of life within itself. This guarantees that he builds up a life in the same way as the germ builds up life again. [One cannot actually] speak of immortality in general, but [it is] composed of individual lives, [which carry the] germs of the following life [within them]. Likewise, [life follows] life, as plant follows plant. Of course, my dear audience, if you approach these things with today's habits of life and thought, then the opposition is understandable, and [also] that many declare it to be fantastic and dreamy. But it is the same here as with all great truths. Schopenhauer [says about] the poor truth:

In all ages, poor truth has had to blush for being paradoxical; and yet it is not her fault. She cannot take the form of the enthroned general error. So she looks up with a sigh to her patron, Time, who beckons victory and fame to her, but whose flapping of his wings is so great and slow that the individual dies from it.

That's how it is. But many a person should say to themselves – [I can only sketch this out today] – that anyone who gets to know the literature of spiritual research and delves into it could then say that there is not the slightest contradiction with science. Only those believe this who see the truth in scientific thinking habits. Whoever says that heredity is a scientific fact; that this simply contradicts what earlier earth lives say, [overlooks] that the things do not contradict each other at all. [Let us take an example]. If there is a person standing in front of us, a second person: [one] lives because there is air outside and lungs inside. No, [you could say, that does not apply, because the other person lives because he] hanged himself, [but was cut down in time] and saved. Is one thing true and the other false, or are both things true? This is how it is with things: what is inherited is true, and just as true as this scientific fact that we live because there is air outside and lungs inside, but it is also true that these inherited facts are there because these reasons [why a person embodies himself in this inheritance stream] lie in previous lives on earth.

Anyone who engages with spiritual science will see that spiritual science itself is very aware of these objections, and that some people only raise them because they are not yet familiar with these objections. But when spiritual science gradually becomes known, not just as a theory, as abstract spiritual science, but as an elixir of life that can pour into the soul of man, [then all this will become clear], and [one should not] think that one has to be a spiritual researcher to understand them; one can only research these things if one is a spiritual researcher, but when they are brought down into concepts for the physical mind, then anyone can understand the spiritual researcher today, as is also presented in 'How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds'. But it is the same with these things as with what arises under the earth and what is illuminated by the sun on the earth. When a mine is dug out and then illuminated by the sun, it is the same as with the achievements of spiritual science. One must be a spiritual researcher to ascend into the spiritual worlds, to recognize the beings that live there, to see what is going on there. But when they have been researched, then they can be illuminated like the sun, which can create what can arise through it, the treasures of the mine. Then one recognizes it through the influence of sunlight, sees it only in its individual nuances, and can absorb it into the sensations and feelings of the physical mind. Whether it is the spiritual researcher or someone who just grasps it, when it is absorbed, it is an elixir of life, because then we not only know about immortality, but we also become aware of the soul life in us that goes through death in us; [the soul life] grows stronger [in the same way] that a plant would feel when the germ grows up [and it] knew: next summer [it will] reappear in the same form. Invisible vitality, certainty of life [emanates from that which is acquired through spiritual science]. In this way, it gives people support by answering the question not only theoretically, but practically, as a life force, a life assurance, so that they have what they need in life: security and strength for their work, hope, confidence for the core of their lives, which no external force can break. Fichte says:

I raise my head boldly up to the threatening rocky mountains, and to the raging waterfall, and to the crashing clouds floating in a sea of fire, and say: I am eternal and defy your power. Break down upon me all, and thou earth, and thou heaven, mingle in wild tumult, and ye elements all - foam and rage and grind in wild struggle the last solar dust of the body that I call mine - my will alone, with its firm plans, shall float boldly and coldly over the ruins of the universe; for I have grasped my destiny, and it is more enduring than theirs; it is eternal, and I am eternal, like it.

This is also what the soul says when it has absorbed spiritual science and gained inner support from it. And it will always need this, but then it will also have it. The truth penetrates through thin cracks and crevices, and it will find it too. This is also the case with spiritual science. And anyone who has grasped its essence knows of its certain existence in such a way that he can be certain of life through it; and then he stands, as it were, opposite the opponents who deny the immortality of the soul and so on, as Goethe's saying stands opposite opposing views that he, Goethe, considers nonsensical , towards philosophical views – for there is the philosophical view, already in ancient Greece, [that there is] no movement [because the arrow that has been shot] [is always at one place during every moment of its flight], thus [is always at rest]; [therefore there is] actually no movement, because [it is] always at one place [. This can be proven rigorously by the intellect. But Goethe contrasted this with the certainty of life. He expressed it, not particularly deeply, but certainly:

Enemies may eye each other,
You remain calm, remain silent;
And if they deny you movement,

Go around in front of their noses.

Goethe thought that he had provided the proof; it is proof of life. The spiritual scientist can, without offending in the slightest, say a word in which we may summarize the considerations of this evening - not theoretically, but intuitively - as a certainty in the face of what they deny. To those who are inwardly moved by what spiritual science has to give, one can say:

Adversity may arise,
But you remain calm, remain cheerful,
And if they deny the spirit,
Do not brood over it,
Yes, in the end even agree with them:
Perhaps things are not going well for their spirit.

Anyone who superficially and casually reads a brochure about the aims of spiritual science or Theosophy and what their goals are can easily come to a judgment, as undoubtedly many, many of our contemporaries do who listen to this kind of Theosophy. This judgment is: What does spiritual science or Theosophy actually have to say about the practical training of thinking? For many people form their opinion from such superficial acquaintance that spiritual science or Theosophy is something that floats in cloud-cuckoo-land, is alien and far removed from the world, and that it draws people away from the true, genuine practice of life, and that it can therefore say the least about the demands of practical thinking, which should actually be linked to the demands of practical life.

Those who delve a little deeper into the nature of spiritual science or Theosophy will come to a different conclusion and will recognize that there are two reasons why it is particularly suited to say something about thinking as a practical task in life.

The first reason is that Theosophy or spiritual science is not intended to educate impractical, unworldly and hostile people. On the contrary, in all that it seeks to be, it can reach into the most everyday life, one might say, into the handholds of the hourly life with which we deal in the practice of life. Only then is the task of spiritual science or theosophy properly grasped when it permeates us into all our individual activities, when it not only makes us wise, not only teaches us about the highest tasks and riddles of existence, but when it also makes us skillful and practical for the most everyday life. That is one reason. The other is one that is more closely related to the task and mission of spiritual science or theosophy.

It has often been emphasized here in this city that what spiritual science or Theosophy has to say about the highest problems of existence, about the secrets of life, about the riddles of man, what is presented through the observations of clairvoyant consciousness, that all this, when presented, can be understood by the unprejudiced, healthy human mind. That has been said often. Research and investigation into the laws and secrets of existence in the higher worlds can only be carried out by those who have developed the abilities and powers slumbering in their souls, the spiritual eye and the spiritual ear. When what has been researched in the higher worlds is then related, it can be understood by anyone who does not let themselves be deterred from this understanding by the prejudices that flow into them through the suggestion of our contemporary culture or any other culture.

If Theosophy can be understood in this way, then it is not only useful but necessary for everyone, regardless of their station in life. It is what makes them a true human being, so to speak. It is therefore a universal human good, and it can and must also be of interest to those who perhaps say to themselves: I will never get around to becoming a spiritual researcher myself in this life, to having my eyes opened to see into the spiritual worlds. You don't need to do that to get to know spiritual science or theosophy; but from certain points of view, spiritual science or theosophy is a preparation for this opening of the spiritual eyes, of the spiritual organs of perception and cognition in general. It should lead people up into the spiritual world.

So for anyone who wants to penetrate into these spiritual worlds, who, so to speak, wants to acquire clairvoyant consciousness, the right foundation is not enthusiasm, not overheated enthusiasm, but for them the right foundation is to stand firmly on the ground of life with both feet. One would almost like to say, although it may sound grotesque, that the less a person approaches spiritual research with overheated imagination and reveries and fantasies, the better it is. Not the enthusiast, not the person with a particularly vivid imagination, not they are the ones who can actually become the spiritual researcher's dearest students, but rather those who stand firmly on the ground of life. He prefers sober people, because enthusiasm comes from the thing itself, when the great facts of life affect us. Then we are already raised to the poetic, enthusiastic attitude by the facts, and that is what is healthy — not by letting an overheated inner self bring us to enthusiasm.

Therefore, a practical thinking that stands firmly on the ground of life is also a good, even the very best prerequisite for those who aspire, so to speak, to clairvoyant consciousness. The more sober a person is, the more practical, the better if he is to be raised to the spheres of clairvoyant vision.

All this can show you that, on the one hand, spiritual science has every reason to believe that something can be said about the practice of thinking and its training on the basis of its results, and that, on the other hand, it has a profound interest in giving a great deal of practical thinking. However, it will therefore quite easily come into conflict with those people who usually, especially today, call themselves practitioners of life, with those practitioners of life who, when they hear just a few words about spiritual science, will immediately speak of fantasy and say: This is something that contradicts all practice.

But what is life practice for these practitioners, for those who are so proud of their life practice, who are so full of themselves about their life practice, who reject everything that does not fit neatly into their life practice? For those who are able to observe life, it is the case that these people are accustomed as early as possible, early and diligently accustomed to walking on well-trodden paths – to observe what one sees, how it is done, and to observe it in such a way that one can see how it is done, whether in the trading office or in the workshop, everywhere, and yes, yes, not to step out of the usual hand movements; otherwise, if you wanted to step out, you expose yourself to the danger of being expelled from the spheres in which you want to be included; that is the usual practice of life, that you only muddle through in the way it has become everywhere.

For those who are able to observe life, this practice consists of short-sightedness, habit, intolerance, always with certain additives - this will soon be apparent to the psychoanalyst - brutality. This is necessary so that everything that does not want to fit into this dogmatic practice of life can be trampled down. But then very strange things happen.

It is best to illustrate this with examples, some of which have already been mentioned here. Today, we want to bring one of these examples to mind in order to hold up our usual way of life to it. Who would not find it practical today that you don't have to go to the post office with every letter and that you don't have to open a huge book to look up how far away the place is to which the letter is addressed, and then determine, based on half-pennies, how much postage you have to pay? In the few cases where you still have to do that today, you can see how practical it is to have what is known as the penny postage stamp, the standard stamp, even for long distances. That was not the case eighty years ago. In the forties of the last century, you still had to go to the post office counter with a letter and it was very complicated. It was not a postal practitioner who invented this standard stamp, but an Englishman named Hill, who was not from the “practical” side of life. He was the first to say what advantages there would be if postage stamps were introduced. This is no myth. You can read it in the records of the English Parliament. The one who was the practitioner said: Oh, I don't believe what Hill has calculated; because such a device certainly cannot improve our traffic as he claims. And even if it were true, then one would have to be against it, because then one would have to make the post office building three times as large as it is. – That was the practical man, while the impractical man has just made this world-changing discovery of the penny postage stamp.

And I need only remind you of something that should be known here. When the first railroad was to be built, a medical council was asked whether, for hygienic reasons, railroads should be built. The document can be read, and the judgment was passed by the practitioners – it is not that many years ago – that railroads should not be built because, as the practitioners judged, people would destroy their nervous systems. But if you wanted to build railways anyway and people could be found to ride them, then you would have to build high board walls on both sides so that those who pass by the railroad would not get concussions. Another example of such a judgment based on practical experience is when the postmaster Nagler in Potsdam said: “I already send two stagecoaches out every day with no one sitting in them; how is anyone supposed to sit in the train if I send even more every day?”

These are all facts from practical life. With such a view of the practice of life, however, truly practical thinking can come into conflict. But these truly practical thinkers must penetrate a little deeper into the nature of actual thinking, and there I may perhaps start from something very concrete. Here we have a case of thinking that is quite impractical. During my time as a student, I experienced an instance of impractical thinking that was so pronounced that it revealed to me a type of impractical thinker that I would call “the inner prankster.” This category can be used to describe many people in terms of their thinking.

And I can make it clear to you what these inner pushers of thought are. During my time as a student, a colleague approached me with a red face and said: I have now made a wonderful invention; I have to go quickly to Radinger – that was the departmental representative – and explain my invention to him. It's something revolutionary. — He couldn't be stopped, he ran to the specialist and came back a little dejected. He had to wait an hour and yet had no time to lose with his world-changing invention! In the meantime, he wanted to explain the matter to me. He started. He was very perceptive and told me about an extraordinarily well-designed machine construction. He couldn't come to any other conclusion than that he had solved the problem: by using as little steam power as possible, which the machine initially consumes, with the help of the most diverse translations, it ultimately achieves a huge amount of work. I had the matter explained to me and finally I said: Yes, you see, if you boil the matter down to a simple idea, it is just as feasible as the important problem of standing inside a railroad car and pushing it. As surely as you move it forward, so surely does this machine work. — He also saw the matter immediately and no longer went to the expert.

The way this man thought at the time is how many people think, and that is why they can be called the “inner pushers”. They think in certain contexts that represent a limited area. They do not see what goes beyond that. They are inside the matter and find everything very astute, as it must be inside the matter. But people do not think that there must also be something out there. It is actually the case, without people realizing it, that the vast majority of them move in a very limited circle, without even looking out into the distance and without knowing that you have to look for resistance outside in order to push. People don't think about the fact that you can't push from the inside as long as you're just fiddling around inside the car, in your own limited area. They think they need not know anything about what is going on outside. But the world has little to do with these pushers. They make no progress in the world, just as the cart pushed from the inside makes no progress. But many people make no progress because they think in the same way as this category.

What is important is that we learn to develop our thinking so that we can see beyond the wagon. Even if we also have an overview of the sciences, we very, very often find precisely this element, the thinking of pushing the wagon inwardly, within them. For it is usually — and this is characteristic of our sciences — the person who works in a particular field who does not see beyond the narrowest view. I have already explained this. Think of the Kant-Laplace theory. For many people it is still something to which they cling, even if it is no longer held to in some places. But the other theories are no better.

This theory, which assumes an original nebula, lets it rotate, lets it secrete the rings and planets, it sensualizes very nicely in our schools, very cute, on a small scale the formation of a world system. You take a certain substance that floats on water, make large drops out of it, cut a map sheet into a circle and slide it into the equator direction. Then you take a pin, stick it in and make the drop rotate. Droplets separate and rotate. You have a nice, cute little planetary system; the sun in the middle and the planets around it. How could one, people think, more vividly show that things can really come into being through something like this? You see it coming into being on a small scale. That is obvious proof. It's quite pretty. But that is an inner cart-pusher thinking. The experimenter has forgotten that he is turning and that the cute thing would not come into being if he did not turn. Of course, you don't need to think that there is a giant standing out there in the room setting the primeval nebula in motion. But you must not forget the spiritual foundations that must underlie what is taking place mechanically.

All this shows you how necessary it is for our outer life and for our life in science that our thinking is truly rooted in the soil of thinking practice. Spiritual science itself can now show us three things that must be fulfilled if we really want to train our thinking in a practical sense. And it is the case that, however little it may initially appear to lead to thinking practice, the person who applies it to themselves will experience how their thinking becomes clearer, sharper and more comprehensive.

We will look at these three stages of practical thought training in a moment. But first we must consider the basic condition, the attitude needed if we want to think about acquiring the right attitude towards thinking. I have already used the image. No one should think they can draw water from a glass that contains none. Those who think about thinking today think according to this pattern. They think that they can draw thoughts from a world in which there are none. This alone gives our thoughts and concepts and ideas that arise in our soul the possibility of meaning something, of not being something insubstantial, but rather that the world is only really built according to the thoughts that we find in it. Only a world that has arisen from the thoughts that we find is entitled to be thought through thoughts. The person looking at a clock will readily see that the thoughts inherent in it were had by the clockmaker. Only he who reflects on the world would wish to believe that the world is ordered according to thoughts that are only conceived afterwards by man. He would only accept thoughts that the soul forms, and would not believe that things are only formed according to the thoughts that man forms last.

Aristotle coined the phrase: What man finds last in things is what was first put into them. If man finds thoughts last, it is because they were first put into things. But if you take this seriously, you gain, above all, what could be called trust in such thinking, which seeks to be in league with reality. If I know that thinking is not only found in the mind, as materialistic thinking believes, but that everything that confronts me is thought, then I will seek to see the thoughts in the things, to hold to the things when I should think.

A psychologist of Goethe's time, Heinroth, has just Goethe's thinking - because Goethe was born into this life as if by predisposition with the aim of thinking about things with thinking, as it were, in thinking in things, not abstractly. Heinroth called Goethe's thinking concrete thinking, which, so to speak, only thinks what is in the objects, and only thinks what can really flow into the objects. And Goethe himself found this to be extremely true. Truly, Goethe had this disposition – as we shall perhaps see more clearly, to think precisely in things – so that thinking was not separate from things, but immersed in the fabric of things.

Those who are not born with such an inclination but have to gradually acquire this practical, objective thinking that lives in things must observe three things: First, if we want to become practical thinkers, we as human beings must have a certain relationship to the objects and facts around us, and this relationship can be expressed as follows: We must strive as much as possible to have interest in the objects and facts of life. Interest in the outside world is the first magic formula for acquiring practical thinking.

The second is: Our own actions, our own activities must be controlled as activities of joy and love.

The third is: When we think for ourselves, when we go beyond life and turn our thoughts inward, then we must preferably have inner satisfaction for doing so.

These are indeed the three gradations, the magic means of all practical thinking: interest in the environment, pleasure and love for all activities, and inner satisfaction, as one says, in reflection, that is, in the thinking that we do silently to ourselves, apart from things. But we must really have these things.

Yes, but what is interest in things, really? Interest in things is nothing other than a real introduction to practical thinking, when we do not approach things with our templates, with our preconceived notions, but when we are inclined to take things as individualities at every moment and to say to ourselves: They always have something to tell us.

It seems to be saying little, but it means an enormous amount when applied to life practice. Most people approach people and the things around them with stereotyped concepts. And they look at an individual person, for example; but they do not see this person, only something superficial and fleeting, and if that fits with their stereotyped concepts, then they are done. This never leads to practical thinking.

It is very difficult to be understood in these matters. When I gave this lecture recently, someone said afterwards: Yes, I always have the idea: If someone has a thick, red neck and also looks very thick in other ways, then he is a materialist, the person himself “tells” me that through his appearance. — The person who spoke has heard everything that has been said, but has not understood it. He has been in the case that he has formed the dogmatic concept: When he sees a man with a red, thick neck, who is also otherwise thick, he judges him to be a materialist, instead of looking at the individual being and thinking: “She has something to say to me, she has the spiritual-conceptual within herself, I have to respond to her; each individual can still say something to me.”

That is one thing. But then it is not just a matter of cultivating such an interest for this individual thing, but for the course of events itself. And here one can go a long way by means of special exercises. Suppose you are confronted with a very specific event, a specific fact; you observe the fact; a person does this or that. You record this faithfully. Then form the following thoughts: If this happens today, then, on the basis of this fact, I will form an idea of what may have happened yesterday as a prerequisite for what is happening today. I will construct in my mind what has gone before, that is, I extend the fact backwards in my mind. And then I go about and research how it was. At first, the person will find that he was mistaken, but little by little he will realize that by doing such exercises, by constructing backwards the causes up to a certain time and then then, by looking at the facts, he will see whether his thinking is based in such a way that it meets reality. After some time, he will see that he thinks from the facts themselves, that they guide him, that he makes the right assumptions.

But you can also do it differently, like this: You can examine a natural event or any event in human life that happens today, and then you constructively imagine in your thoughts what will happen tomorrow as a result of this event. You wait quietly for what actually occurs and compare it with what you have thought up yourself. Again, you will see that you are initially wrong. But if you stick so faithfully to real facts and have the confidence: you immerse yourself in the facts and let that arise in your thoughts, which must also arise in reality, you stick to the event and demand of yourself that the thoughts themselves take a course like the facts, then you will get ahead.

These are tremendously effective exercises that can be done in relation to practical thinking. But there is one thing to watch out for. Such an exercise must be done selflessly in a certain way, otherwise it will not work. That is experience. It is ineffective if this selfishness is involved, which can be expressed in this way: if a person imagines that this or that must happen, and then when it actually happens, he says, “Didn't I predict it just like that?” This selfish joy is an obstacle to the power we are developing actually working. This is a fact, a real experience that anyone who does the exercises can experience for themselves. These things are subject to certain laws, just like the facts of chemical analysis and synthesis.

So we see how man can, as it were, creep into things, can identify himself with facts in thought. Then what he thinks takes place in the sense of the facts. I am speaking today to adults – it would be going too far for children – but let me just say this: if someone wants to develop real thinking that is connected to the outside world, so that, as it were, their thinking corresponds to what is going on outside, then they must be careful not to do such exercises in such a way that one event is placed next to the other, but they must take care to develop a feeling for the weight of an event. This is something that is connected with the practical training of thinking, but which very few people today know. Anyone who observes knows how little people have a feeling for the fact that it makes a difference whether one thing is said by one person or another. Both can express the same thing. But the way one presents himself to us gives his statements a different weight than the way the other presents himself to us. For the weight of what we acquire, we must, above all, acquire a certain feeling.

Goethe was born with such talents. He had developed them in previous incarnations. Therefore, he became something — for those who know the facts, this is clear —, therefore he became something that many who call themselves practical today are not at all. Goethe, of course, became a lawyer and also practised law. Those who know of his work in this field are aware that although his legal knowledge was not very extensive, his legal work was characterized by the opposite of what can be observed today: a lawsuit is in progress and it is handed over to a lawyer. You go there and want to ask him something. But there is no real reflection. You are not immersed in it. Bundles of files are opened, notes are looked at. You can find the most impractical thing there. For many, the people you have to turn to as practitioners are those who make things as impractical as possible. Goethe was practical. He didn't know much about law, but what he touched, he touched in the most practical way. We must not imagine that a person like Goethe is necessarily impractical. If the files that Goethe created as a minister in Weimar are ever released, we will see that he was a practical man. Goethe's practice was quite different from that of non-poets, although this is not meant as a dig at practitioners who are so arrogant.

Another thing can be said about Goethe: it is well known that he accompanied his duke to Apolda and that he practically carried out everything that needed to be done during the recruitment of new soldiers. And when they were finished, he worked on his “Iphigenia”, and he was already working on it during this process. Now we have to say, how many of our poets would not feel disturbed if they had to dig up recruits in addition to writing down their brilliant ideas! But I don't think that the “Iphigenia” has become worse than some contemporary poetry because it was worked on during the recruitment of recruits. But Goethe did that because his thoughts were concrete, so that his thoughts worked in the things, not detached from the things, not speculative.

This is evident when Goethe was able to explain the connection between his train of thought and the course of events outside in the most eminent way. Goethe studied meteorology. Today's meteorologists look down on the dilettantism of his knowledge of the weather; but with him things were such that they were practical eye movements, eye movements that sensed when they looked over something what an event would become in the near future. It often happened that Goethe would stand at the window, look out and see a small piece of sky and say: “In three hours it will rain.” That was a better prediction than many today. Goethe wove his thoughts into the things within it. It is precisely through his interest in the world around him that we can also artificially acquire this level of intellectual practice.

A second important thing is the joy and love for what we do. This means that we must try to have joy and love for the hand movements themselves, regardless of what comes of them. Then we will also gladly do what can be missed, where nothing comes of it but that which leads to beautiful results. This is really a condition of practical thinking.

I knew a young person who practised his practical thinking by binding his schoolbooks himself. He took great pleasure in doing all the various steps involved in binding a book. This is a better training for practical thinking than all brooding and ruminating. The necessity to check, so to speak, every thread that you stretch and pull for its effectiveness, to always pay attention to how the fingers move, that is really a good pre-school for practical thinking. And the more you have made futile attempts, the better for practical thinking.

Even excellent people in the field of theory and practice, such as Leonardo da Vinci, emphasize this, and they never tire of characterizing the details. Leonardo da Vinci talks about how to try to draw a template, first drawing the template on tracing paper; then you place the drawing over the template and memorize where you have deviated. Then you draw again, taking special care in those places. This simple matter was not too insignificant for Leonardo da Vinci to fill an entire page of his works with it. And you can try to apply this instruction to all possible areas of life to shape your thinking into a practical one.

The third thing is the inner satisfaction of the thought process. Everyone should have this, regardless of their station in life. Even if you devote only a little time to it, it will come back to you in abundance, even in material terms. No matter what area of life you are in, you should be able to reflect not only on the things you are involved with, but also on other areas. You should have moments of reflection on this or that question. Such minutes of reflection, in which you think in such a way that you do not desire that your thoughts flow into the outside world, should fill you with inner satisfaction. As a human being, you will get nowhere by solving problems that are actually far removed from what you are thinking in relation to the immediate practicalities of life. If you initially only have inner satisfaction from what you are doing with your thoughts, you will get ahead as a human being. If the carpenter only thinks about making tables and chairs, he will get nowhere as a human being. As a human being, you get ahead when you think about what gives you inner satisfaction. This trains the thinking organs. As a human being, and indirectly as a practitioner, you get ahead. No one will deny that you face life differently if you are this or that being. There is a big difference between a dog and a human standing before the Sistine Madonna. Man has a completely different relationship to it. Because man always remains in a certain area, he does not go beyond himself. Because he engages in thought and finds satisfaction in it, he advances. Through the process of reflection, in which he finds satisfaction, he affects practice differently than without it, and it is precisely through this that he will transcend a narrow field. He will rise above the standpoint of the inner coachman with an inwardly satisfying thinking, which is nothing more than what grants and seeks inner satisfaction.

Here one can also find the reasons why it is wrong that it is emphasized over and over again by our schools: Oh, what things are taught that cannot be applied in practical life! If only they are taught properly, then these things, which cannot be applied directly, are of immense importance. They transform the human being, these things that cannot be applied in life. What flows into life flows less into the human being himself; what does not flow into life forms the fine organs. This helps people to progress. It makes them more independent, and their minds are so imbued with the ferment of thought that it goes right to their limbs. You can see that a person develops such inner, satisfying thinking that does not directly involve the outside world; they become more agile, more skillful in their limbs.

There is no substitute for such training of the mind. Anyone who has experience in these matters can very precisely distinguish between those who do the exercises mentioned and those who do not. If you are traveling, for example, you can easily recognize the “practitioners”. Those who are practical in the workshop are sometimes quite awkward in other respects. It makes one feel peculiar when one sees how the simplest finger movement cannot be performed when the situation is different from what it usually is. This is a direct result of the fact that they have not been accustomed to developing thoughts inwardly and deriving satisfaction from them. Of course, one does not have to do one without the other. Those who only want to live in reflection become a foe of life and a speculator. But the person in whom the two things are in balance, who looks at things calmly and reflects calmly, will live his whole life, one might say, with skill. He will be able to do anything; he will even use the soup spoon differently than someone who does not do that.

This can be taken into the details of life, because thoughts are realities. They communicate with the material in all possible ways. That is what matters. In this way, we train our thinking for right practice. We then look out the windows of the car in which we sit and see the laws that are given by the fact that the car is still connected to the world, and not just pushing inside. This pushing inside is very widespread; and especially in today's culture, as it is so intimately and intensely influenced by science, those who have engaged in real practical training of thinking can see how much depends on the mere impracticality of thinking.

If people had any idea of what practical thinking is, they would see from the impracticality of thinking that certain things must be wrong. The facts investigated by science can be admirable, but the conclusions drawn from them are often dreadful because of the impractical thinking of the person drawing them. How can it be proved to many today that there is actually no soul, that everything a person accomplishes is based on purely mechanical laws? Yes, you can still find a very strange conclusion in the first pages of a “Outline of Psychology” — written by a person who is highly respected. Anyone with even a spark of understanding and practical thinking will immediately be able to reduce this to its true value. It says: Earlier times said that there was an independent soul; but today man has also been drawn into this web of the preservation of strength. It was first investigated, they say, in animals that everything that is fed to them is only transformed, and that what they do is transformed food. What the animals receive as strength is only converted food. How could there be an independent soul when only what you have stuffed in comes out converted?

They were not satisfied with showing this in animals; they also tried to show in humans that what you put into people in the way of the energy values of food comes out again in other forms. Why do you need a soul for that? This was tried on students. The calculations are very ingenious and are supposed to prove that there is no soul in it, that everything is converted food energy, what a person thinks and does. The facts are admirably observed. The methods are very well thought out, the instruments are magnificent. But the conclusions are the most gruesome one can imagine. One only has to trace the thought back to the simplest elements to see this immediately.

The thought is constructed exactly according to the following pattern. We line up at a bank. We know that money is carried into it. Now we check all the money, we write everything down, individually. Then we check what is carried out. We then come to the wonderful conclusion that the money that is carried out is exactly the same amount as what is carried in. From this we conclude that there is no need for officials inside; because just as much money is carried out as comes in. The other judgment is equally astute: just as much work and thought goes out as food value goes into people.

But it goes into much more subtle areas. Today we have a wonderful field of research that shines a light into the smallest organs of beings. There we find very significant small organs. The research methods are admirable, through which one is able to prove something in plants that imitates the human soul organs. It is proven that there are faceted organs that form the eye. Yes, they even photograph images that arise in the plant eyes, and from this it is concluded – nothing is to be disparaged about the wonderful research method, but only the conclusion is to be put into the right perspective – it is concluded: because it can be observed in this way, the plant must be ensouled in a similar way to animals and humans. One sees certain plants that draw insects through their organs and consume them. They develop a certain digestive activity; they attract insects and, as it were, digest them. And the conclusions that are drawn from this are very likely to blur the difference, which must not be blurred, between plants, animals and humans.

Someone who is familiar with practical thinking can say the following: I also know a strange creature that has the property of attracting small creatures by certain actions within itself, as if with magnetic force, and, when they approach, not only to transport them into its interior, but even to kill them there. That is the mousetrap. And the thought form that is now applied to the mousetrap is formed according to the same pattern as the thought forms that some people apply to something that is supposed to open up a new field of plants, to the soul life of plants.

When you consider things like this, you can begin to appreciate how important it is to really train this thinking through the specified means in practice. You cannot just train the circumspection of thinking, but also achieve a certain clarity of thinking through artificial means, through the following exercises. Again, the exercises differ from the habits of thinking.

Most people will not be able to form their judgments about any matter quickly enough. And once they have them, they are satisfied. They do not consider that it could have been different; if someone else says otherwise, they are a fool. This is not how you learn to think. You learn it by considering other possibilities for thought when you have formed an opinion, by not clinging to what you yourself have thought, but also putting the other opinion alongside in all love. You will see that it is possible, which can only be characterized by saying: Only those who disregard their own opinion can recognize the truth.

It is very useful when answering a question or solving a task to first consider the different ways in which it can be resolved, and then to leave it at that, to say to yourself: “Now I'll leave it.” You have to have a belief that is very important for practice, the belief that you have something within you, a kind of higher person who can think even better than you think when you are present. You don't have to be so selfish that you want to be everywhere in your soul and believe that you know the very best. Those who believe in the real validity of thinking and have confidence in it will say to themselves: my thoughts will progress most beautifully and objectively through their own powers if I am not there at all, if I switch off and turn to something else, and then present it all to myself again tomorrow or the day after. You will notice that, if you have not been there, you have become much wiser about this question. The possibilities of thought then work in one, and one comes to a decision in a much more favorable sense. This is of tremendous importance. And if one believes that selflessness has not yet allowed a decision to be made a second time, then it is of tremendous educational importance to wait again. And one will very soon notice how thinking becomes clearer and more forceful. It becomes much easier to quickly put things together once you have trained your thinking.

In this way, you can specify the things through which thinking can gradually be trained. Again, something of great importance is that you pay attention to the following for practical training in thinking: As long as you are interested in something, you should look at it, observe it and remain silent. You should only speak when you no longer have any direct interest in it, when you have risen above it. As long as you are still too involved in your interest in something, you should consider it and remain silent. It is best to speak when you no longer have a direct interest in something, but have detached yourself from it with joy and sorrow. Those who can do this will get very far. Those who resolve to form an opinion only when their interest has waned, who can take an interest in anything and hold back with their judgment, who only form their opinion in retrospect, will go a long way. This is a very significant pointer to how one can essentially train one's practical thinking.

And what is particularly important now is that one is not at all with what one already is, with the way thinking develops. It is very important for those who want to train themselves practically to try not to think at all for certain periods of the day. For the best training of the thinking is achieved when we harm it as little as possible by our thinking. When we can refrain from all thoughts, when we are able not to grasp the thoughts we can grasp, but to think nothing, then the inner, ever-present power of the soul takes effect and actually brings us a step forward.

This is very difficult and requires a great deal of energy. But it is of immense value to suppress all those errant thoughts that surge up and down within us and to think nothing at all. What is thinking in us is also there when we are not thinking along with it. This is best achieved when we are not present for a while. Because then we do not stand in the way through our personality, through our individuality. Just as it is work when we consider various possibilities and then let the thoughts work by themselves, it is essential that we let the power of thought work without us being there, that we let the thinking being develop in us, even if only for a few moments, without our intervention. Anyone who does this for a long time will notice the great benefit of such a thing.

Fichte was right when he said something completely different. You see, he was talking about the “destiny of the scholar” and knew in advance that he would have to set such high ideals that people would not go along with them because they would find them impractical. So he says:

We know full well that ideals cannot be applied directly in real life. We only claim that reality must be judged by them and modified by those who feel the strength within themselves to do so. Even if they cannot be convinced, once they are what they are, they lose very little; and humanity loses nothing. It merely makes it clear that they cannot be counted on in the plan of ennobling humanity. The latter will undoubtedly continue on its way; let benign nature prevail over the former and give them, in due course, rain and sunshine, wholesome nourishment and an undisturbed circulation of the fluids, and with that, wise thoughts.

Thus says Fichte about those who speak of the impracticality of ideals. A benevolent providence does indeed do its part in relation to human thinking. For much of what man spoils of his power of thought, the balance is created by man sleeping. If he were always awake and impairing his mental power with his thoughts, it would be unbearable. The fact that a person sleeps gives him the opportunity to repeatedly advance into his inner thinking power. However, thinking is much more effectively promoted when a person decides not to think, even though he is awake. The moments of not thinking are the greatest educational means for thinking.

Only isolated points could be selected from the whole range of what could be said and what could not be exhausted in twenty lectures. These points can indicate how one can find one's way out of the laws of spiritual science or theosophy and how thinking can be trained for practical life. For truly, thinking is trained by such things, it is trained for both perspicacity and clarity as well as for presence of mind. We make constant progress if we do not let ourselves be annoyed when we apply such things. One would like to say: If only such inner schooling of thinking were applied pedagogically early enough, everything that can be chiseled out inwardly would permeate the human organism so completely that it would become skillful.

What has been said today is concrete thinking that makes people skillful. I tell you, as strange as it sounds: nature still ensures that people can pick up what they have dropped. But if one were to train the powers of thinking as it has been said today, one would bring people to the point where they can pick up with their toes what falls down. It is only the lack of training of thinking that makes us so clumsy in many things, because the training of thinking does not work in the center of the human being, does not go to the center. This principle lies in everything that has been said today: to go to the center of the human being, to let the forces radiate out from there into all human limbs, so that the human being is enabled to use even the soup spoon correctly.

When spiritual science introduces proper schooling of the thinking, then people will systematically see an example in Goethe, and they will arrive at valid thinking by immersing themselves in things. It is precisely by training one's thinking in this way that one comes to find the simplest thoughts everywhere, to find what can be easily grasped. It must be possible to trace all things back to their simple thought construction. This is only possible if thinking is trained in the indicated way, otherwise thinking goes its own way. In detail, the thoughts can be correct, but as a whole they are not useful.

Isn't it true that, especially today, science is proving that or the other, which clear thinking recognizes as an error at first glance. There are people today, for example, who say: Actually, there is no substance, only movement. A witty brochure has recently been published that takes the view that everything is movement. It really says that when a person walks from one place to another, he does not carry what appears to us to be his substantiality from one place to another, but only movement, and by walking to the other place, he adds a new movement. This is thought of in terms of the pattern of the sun being up there, the solar particles are moving, they are dancing; by dancing, something does not go from the sun to us, it is said, the nearest ether environment dances, and the ether dances down to us. Only the movement is transmitted, it is said, and that is perceived as light. In this perceptive book, this whole ether dance is applied to the human being. The whole human being is actually just a dance. When I go to the next place, I create a new movement and so on. One would just like to advise the good man, when he walks, never to forget that he is creating the movement again, otherwise he would have to disappear into nothingness.

This is an example of how everything today is traced back to movement. But Goethe, in his straightforward thinking, had to experience that in his time everything was traced back to rest. All this is caused by impractical thinking, which is incapable of reducing complexity to simplicity. Goethe, as a practical man, faced all this, and the fact that he found his way through all the quirks is based on what he said in his practical thinking.

Let us also say this to ourselves in conclusion. It can also indicate the right point of view for the attitude we should acquire. He experienced that people who thought impractically confronted his practical way of thinking, and there he said the principle that one should really write for all thinking practice in one's soul, the principle:

Enemy eyes may meet mine,
But I will keep calm and silent;
And though they deny you movement,
Go on as if before them I do not exist.

Today I should like to introduce as a sort of parenthesis a deeper, Spiritual-Scientific consideration of the subject of our preceding lecture, the threefolding of the social organism. Naturally much of the thought underlying what I want to say, you will yourselves discover gradually from the general world-conception of Spiritual Science. One can hardly present the whole foundation of the Threefold Commonwealth in each single lecture. But today, in order to obtain a deeper view, will consider from the inside, as it were, that which confronts us outwardly as the necessity of threefolding the social organism.

It is really not difficult for one who has lived to some extent with spiritual-scientific conceptions to call up in himself a feeling for the profound differences between those three spheres of life into which it is our intention that the social organism should be divided. As soon as one realizes that the Threefold Commonwealth is something to be taken very seriously, there develops in one's feelings the possibility of strongly differentiating among the three spheres. They are already fairly well known to you. First, that sphere of life which we call the spiritual life, in so far as it manifests itself or has form in what we call the physical world—thus, the entire field of the so-called (I must use a paradox) physical-spiritual life. You know of course what we have to understand by that. It embraces everything that is connected with men's individual faculties and talents. As we shall see directly the spiritual life is much more comprehensive for us than for a person of materialistic mind. We think of the spiritual life as much more material than the materialistic person does, in so far as we speak of the physical-spiritual life. That fact is ingrained already in my lectures. One can only understand the spiritual life if one starts with the realization that all material life is really concretely saturated by the spiritual: so that for us there is never a purely material something; that which reveals itself through the medium of matter is always according to its inner being also—I say also—a spiritual something. Art, science, conceptions of right, the ethical impulses of mankind—all these things, roughly speaking, come within the boundaries or the spiritual life. Above all, It includes everything that belongs to the cultivation of individual talents, thus the whole field of education and individual training.

Next, it is important to distinguish something which is connected in a certain way with the physical-spiritual life but which nevertheless is fundamentally different. That is, everything that one can described as rights-life, political life, state life. Naturally one must employ all one's powers of perception hare to see the important distinction, otherwise one will make the mistake of thinking that the rights-life is practically the same as the sense of right. But we who are accustomed, to careful discrimination must distinguish between phases of ideas of right, between—if I may so express myself—the being-inspired with ideas of right, and right as it is applied in the outer world. We will speak more fully about all these things directly.

The third sphere is the one you can most easily distinguish from the other two, the economic life.

Now, as we have said, man stands in an entirely different relation to each one of these three spheres of life. If you try with a healthy feeling to understand what the physical-spiritual life is, you will feel (try to lead your soul-faculties of perception in the direction I have indicated) that anything rooted in any degree in man's individual talents, individual faculties, leads into the innermost part of human nature, springs from the very depths of human nature. Now if one proceeds quite scientifically in the work of perceiving, then one experiences everything that comes to expression in art and science, in the impulses of education, as a psychic-spiritual something that lives and works in us, when we surrender to its activity, in such a way that we can only experience it properly if we withdraw somewhat from the outer world. Certainly we must give expression to it in the outer world; but that is different from experiencing it inwardly: we cannot as men get a true conception of that something that manifests itself in art and science, in educational impulses, we cannot grasp it inwardly, unless we are able to withdraw a little from life. One does not need, of course, to withdraw to a hermit's cell: One can be taking a walk, as far as that matters; but one must withdraw into one's self, into one's soul-life, one must live in oneself. That fact becomes apparent to the human soul as soon as it cultivates the most simple feeling for the physical- spiritual Spiritual Science must express it in these words: the physical-spiritual life is lived in such a way by our human soul that in unfolding it we do not entirely depend upon our body. In this respect, Spiritual Science—as you can gather from everything that Spiritual Science has already disclosed—takes the very opposite stand to the materialistic analysis of the human being, which nurses the delusion that when one creates within oneself something that belongs to the physical-spiritual life, one accomplishes this creation entirely through the instrument of the brain, the nervous system, etc.. We know that is not true. We know that an independent inner life must be present in man in order that manifestations of this physical-spiritual life may be possible. Something is present in man in this physical-spiritual life without there being any corresponding physical manifestation in the physical body; something transpires solely within the spiritual-psychic being of man.

It is different when we manifest those life impulses which we desire to place on a democratic basis in our Threefold Commonwealth, to which every man rives expression in relation to all other men. They appear when men allow themselves to be instruments of their bodily nature, in order to unite with each other. Not theoretical ideas of right, but impulses of right for life; not inner ethical ideas, but ethical impulses for life, that are active among men, and that are manifested in the way men meet one another, work with one another, in the way men exchange their experiences with one another. Those Rights-impulses are only present when men do business with one another, when men turn their bodily outer nature to one another, when they communicate with one another, see and live with one another in mutual experiences—in short, they can only be cultivated amid the vicissitudes of human intercourse. With respect to everything that is cultivated on the basis of our individual talents, that is, with respect to what in the sense of the above is independent of our body, we live as individual men, each one a separate personality, an entity. Except for slight distinctions that arise through differences in race and people, but which are a small matter as compared with the differences in men caused by individual talents and abilities (if one has any perceptive organ one must know that)—with that exception, we are equal as men with respect to our outer physical humanness, through which we meet men as men; through which we express ethical impulses, impulses of right. We are equal here as men in the physical world precisely through the sameness of our human body, simply through the fact that we all have a human face. This fact makes us develop for ourselves as outer physical man impulses of right, ethical impulses, on a democratic basis,—it makes us equal in this sphere. We are different one another in our individual talents, which belong to our inner nature.

With respect to the third, the economic sphere: truly one does not need to adopt a false asceticism (it is certainly contrary to the prevailing tendency of our day, that is, in the West) in order to perceive how the economic life allows men to be submerged, as it were, here in the physical world, in a stream of life in which to a certain degree they are lost as men. Do you not feel, my dear friends, that in economic life you are immersed in something that does not allow you to be so fully man as in the rights- or state-life? And it is so in still greater contrast to the life that flows out of your individual talents, out of the individual talents of all mankind. Without, as I said, adopting a false ascetic attitude, one feels with respect to the economic life that we cease to be complete men when we engage in economic activity. We are obliged to pay tribute to that part of us which is sub-human when we concern ourselves with economic life. (We have the same processes of economic life, that is, production, circulation, and consumption of commodities in spiritual production that grows out of economic life and has the same character as the circulation of commodities—and we have all of that life because, so to say, we are men and not animals. When its economic aspect comes into consideration, spiritual production has the same character as any economic activity concerned with material goods. The material goods are necessary to satisfy our bodily needs; also, spiritual,activity within the economic life—dentistry, for instance, and the like—in the end leads to this, that through an exchange of commodities the dentist, etc., is able to live physically within the economic life.) At all events, economic life is always connected with physical life, and that brings us into a certain relation with animal life, even though it is on the human plane. It submerges us in experiences which we have instinctively together with the animals. There you have as a beginning a simple healthy feeling for the different relations an individual man has to these three spheres of life.

Now let us approach the subject in a more deeply spiritual-scientific way. Spiritual Science must first of all observe the periods of human life, the evolution of human life between birth, or conception, and death. Whoever allows himself the possibility of perceiving the course of human life will be strongly impressed by the way in which everything that partakes of the nature of a man's individual faculties is unmistakably announced during the early days of childhood. To one who has a spiritual eye for it and who acknowledges his life experience, the special form of the child soul is easily perceptible. In what develops during the first three life-periods, from the 1st to the 7th year, the 7th to the 14th, and the 14th to the 21st year, there lies the prophecy as from an inner elementary force, of the man's future individual gifts. And not only what we are accustomed to think of as a man's individual gifts, but connected with that, whether he will be able to do much or little muscular work. That is where we are obliged to extend the spiritual further into the material than materialistic thinkers do. Through spiritual vision we see a strong connection between the nature of a man's muscular system and his individual talents. For one who can observe the human being, everything is connected with the development of the human head. Even a man's outer form, whether he has strong less or weak legs, whether he can run much: all that is seen by one who has developed his spiritual vision, from the man's head, precisely from his head. Whether a man is skillful or clumsy, one sees from his head. These so-called physical abilities of man, which are closely connected with his fitness for outer physical , manual work, are connected with the form or his head. Now you know what I have often told you about the shape of the head, basing my remarks on the most varied fundamental facts: everything that comes into shape in the human head, that gives the human head its conformation, its form, points to something before birth, to that which man brings through birth into physical life from out of the spiritual worlds—from the spiritual world itself or from previous incarnations on the earth. And so, when one sees the connection between all human individual talents, either spiritual or manual, and the formation of the human head: then one is led further in one's seeing, and one is able to trace back everything that comes from man's individual talents to his life before birth. That, you see, is what gives the spiritual-scientist such important enlightenment as to physical-spiritual life is. Physical-spiritual life, my dear friends, is here in the physical world because we as men bring something with us at birth. Physical-spiritual life, in the sense in which I have spoken of it today, does not arise out or this physical world: all of it arises out of impulses which we bring from the spiritual world through birth into physical existence. Inasmuch as we bring into physical existence echoes of a supersense existence, we create in human society here in the physical world that which comprises the physical-spiritual life. There would be no art, no science—at the most, in science, a recording of experiments—there would be no impulse for education, no education of children at all, if we did not bring impulses through birth into physical life out of our life previous to birth. That, then, is one thing.

Now let take everything in my book Theosophy, or in Occult Science, that describes the supersense world. Take especially what is said in those books about the relation that exists between human souls when they are disembodied, when they are living between death and a new birth. You know that we have to speak of quite other relations existing between souls there than those which exist here in tae physical world. You remember how I described what is experienced there from soul to soul as being reflected here in shadowy images. You remember the description in Theosophy of life in the soul-world: when I wanted to describe the disembodied life of the supersensible world between death and a new birth I had to speak of certain reciprocal influences, of soul forces and astral forces, that do not exist in the physical world. There, souls have an inner relation to one another, a relation of soul to soul which is called out by the inner force of the soul itself. Now if one is thoroughly imbued with the idea of what relation exists in the supersensible world between souls, if one fixes one's vision upon the relation quite objectively, then one makes a remarkable discovery if one draws a comparison to it in the right way. You know it depends very much on the tendency to such inner activity as this, whether one is led to knowledge of the supersense world, or even to knowledge of the connections between the supersensible world and the sense world. If one turns directly to the Rights-, State-, or political life, one finds that there is no greater contrast to the particular form of supersense life than the political or Rights-life here on the physical plane. They are the two great opposites, my dear friends, that one experiences when one ready learns to know the supersense life. Supersense life has nothing at all that can be regulated bylaws of right or outer ethical impulses; there, everything is regulated through inner soul impulses. It is just the opposite here in the physical world where everywhere state-life has to be established because through birth into the physical world we lose those deep impulses that are alive in the soul in the supersense world and that make the relations there between souls. Here, we make laws of right that will create what must be created: relations of Right—because man has lost that which in the supersense world makes the relation between souls. Those are the two opposite poles: supersense relation of soul to soul, and state-relation here on the physical plane.

In the physical-spiritual cultural life we carry from man to man something that stays with us after birth as a reflection from the supersense world. We spread, as it were, a lustre over life here by letting in the light from the supersense world, and seeking to reflect it here in art, science, and education. It is quite different with the Rights life: we have to establish that on the physical earth as a substitute for what we lose of supersense relations when we enter through birth into physical existence. That gives you an idea, too, of what certain religious documents mean (and you know how far religious documents are always penetrated by this or that absolute truth) when they speak of the authorized “Kingdom of this world”. They mean by that, that the state should not presume to any right to control that which man brings with him as a reflection of the supersense world when he comes through birth into the physical world. It should confine itself to ruling the kingdom of Rights, which is the life we need here because by our physical birth we have lost the impulses of the spiritual world. The task of the state life is to create what is necessary for human intercourse in the physical world. It has meaning only for our life between birth and death.

Let us look at the third, the economic life. Something must be said about it that is quite paradoxical: expressing it crudely, we are submerged in a sub-humanness, in engaging in an economic life. At the same time, however, something is going on in our soul when we concern ourselves with the subhuman. And that, you can experience. Think how very actively you must struggle within yourselves when you give yourselves up to spiritual culture; and on the other hand, how thoughtless men can be in purely economic life, often following mere impulses and instincts. Economic activity proceeds, on the whole, without much truly active inner thought. And in that case, we sink into a subhumanness. Our soul stays hidden in the background. Spiritual Science would say that our body is more exerted when we are engaged in a material activity than one ordinarily believes. Consider the end members of the economic process, eating and drinking: we can realize that there is not a complete balance there between bodily and spiritual activity, that the body outweighs the spiritual-psychic in activity. But then this spiritual-psychic carries on a strong unconscious activity. And within this unconscious activity a seed is hidden. We carry this seed through the gate of death. The soul can rest, as it were, when we are busy with economic life; but in what appears to outer consciousness as rest, a seed is developing which we carry through the gate of death. And if we cultivate brotherliness in economic life, as I always describe it, then we carry a good seed through the gate of death—precisely by virtue of what we cultivate in our relations with men in the economic life. It may seem materialistic to you when I say: Precisely in the brotherliness of economic life man is planting the seed in his soul for his life after death; in his spiritual culture, he is spending his inheritance from his life before birth. It may appear materialistic to you, but it is true, simply true to the spiritual-scientific investigator. However materialistic this may seem to you it is true when I say: when you are submerged in animalness take care of your humanness, for you are planting supersensible seeds for time after death.

Man is a threefold being. He has in the first place an inheritance from time before birth; then, he evolves something here that has value only for the time between birth and death; finally, he develops here in the physical world something by which he links his physical life here with lire after death. That which is manifested here as the lustre of life and the promise and interest of life, in the physical-spiritual culture, is an inheritance from the spiritual world that we bring with us into this physical world. In possessing this spiritual wealth we show ourselves as belonging to the spiritual world; we bring into the physical world a reflection of the supersense world through which we passed before our conception and birth.

You see, abstract science, even abstract philosophy, talks—naturally—always in abstractions. They talk about proving the eternity of substance, how the human substance present at birth remains and then lasts on through death. Such proofs can never be gained out of mere thinking. The philosophers have always sought them, but no proof has ever held against inner logical knowing, because the thing simply is not so. Something much more spiritual is connected with immortality. Nothing at all material, much less anything substantial, is present in any such way. What is present after death is consciousness: consciousness that looks back into this world. That is what we have to consider when we are considering immortality. We must be much less materialistic than the abstract philosophers themselves when we talk of these higher things. It is like this: we use up what I have characterized as a reflection of the supersense world , which we reveal as the ornament, the polished surface of life here—we use that up, and must make here, during our life, a new link for the chain of our eternal existence, to carry through death. Anyone who only thinks of what goes forward in this life, must conclude, if he is consistent, that the thread wears out; only when he knows that he makes here a new part of the chain that goes out beyond death, only then has he come to immortality.

And so man is this threefold being. He cultivates talents in himself that bring a reflection of the supersense world into this life. He develops a life that forms the bridge between life before death and life after death, that expresses itself in all that which has its roots only in the time between birth and death, the outward Rights, or State-impulses, etc. And in that he is submerged in economic life and is able to plant something moral in this economic life—brotherliness—he develops the seed for his life after death. That is the threefold man.

Now think of this threefold man in such a phase of evolution ever since the 15th century that he must now cultivate consciously everything that formerly was instinctive. For that reason it is necessary today that his outer social life should afford him the opportunity of standing with his threefold human nature in a threefold organism. We unite in ourselves three very distinct members of one being, the pre-birthly, the one that is active on the earth, and the after-death member; therefore, we can only stand in the social organism properly in three parts. Otherwise we come as conscious men into disharmony with the rest of the world; and we will come into more and more disharmony unless we will consider shaping this world that lies around us into a threefold social organism.

There, you see, you have the question from the inside. I am trying to show how spiritual-scientific research points out the way to the threefold social organism: how it must be wrested out of human nature itself.

Many persons nave thoughts about what I have evolved. But in open lectures and also on other occasions I have always warned you that these thoughts to which I give expression should not be confused with the thoughts of the elder Schäffle in his book On the Structure of the Social Organism, or with the dilettantism of Merey's most recent book Concerning World-mutations, and similar works. The spiritual scientist cannot be concerned with mere play of analogy, such as these books offer; it is at most unfruitful. What I should like when speaking about the social organism is that men should train their thinking.

The general training of thought today is not even adequate for natural science to be able to grasp facts that I investigated at 35, and that I presented in my book Riddles of the Soul, showing that a human being consists of three members: nerve-sense-life, rhythmic life, and metabolic life. The nerve-sense-life can also be called the head life; the rhythmic life can be called the breathing life, or blood life; and the metabolic life includes all the rest of the organism as a kind of structure. Just as this human organism consists of three members, each centred in itself, so in the social organism each of the three members works for the whole because of the very fact that it is centred in itself. The physiology and biology of today believe that man is a centralized, unified being. That is not true. Even in regard to his communication with the outer world man is a threefold being: the head life is in independent connection with the outer world through the senses; the breathing life is connected with the outer world through the air; the metabolic life is in connection with the outer world through independent outlets. The social organism also must be threefold, with each part centred in itself. Just as the head cannot breathe but nevertheless receives what is communicated by the breathing through the rhythmic system, so the social organism should not itself develop a Rights-life, but should receive bights from its State-member.
However, I said that one must not mistake what is presented here for a mere play of analogy, such as arises when one works from all kinds of hypotheses. Spiritual Science is real investigation, and does not stop short at appearances. People believe that a Spiritual Scientist just thinks something out. Before one is a real spiritual investigator one has to learn to observe the spiritual world. One has to give up thinking; that has value only for the physical world. Naturally one does not give it up for the whole of life, only for spiritual research.

I have told you one usually comes to things upside down if one sets out to describe the spiritual world by using analogies from the sense world. Spiritual research shows, for instance, that the earth is really an organism; that what geology and mineralogy find is only a bone system; that the earth is living, it sleeps and wakes like man. But one cannot go farther in the analogy. If ordinarily you ask a man: When is the earth awake and when is it asleep? he will undoubtedly answer: The earth is awake in summer and asleep in winter. And that is the opposite of what is actually the truth. The truth is, the earth is asleep in summer and awake in winter. Naturally one only finds that out if one actually investigates in the spiritual world. That is the puzzle that makes spiritual research so liable to error, the fact that when one goes with some inquiry from the physical into the spiritual world one gets perhaps the very opposite of the physical fact, or perhaps quarter-truths. One has to investigate every single case.

So it is also with the surface analogy that people draw between the three members or the human, and the three members of the social, organism. that will a man say, using this analogy? He has to say: On the outside is a spiritual life, art, science. He will draw a parallel between that and the human head system, the nerve-sense-life. How could he do otherwise? Then, when he establishes that, he will compare the metabolic life , to which I have referred in my Riddles of the Soul as the most material, with economic life. Nothing could be more upside down than that. And nothing whatever is accomplished by looking at it in that way. One must give up toying with analogies if one wants to reach the truth. People outside of Spiritual Science believe that these ideas have been obtained by a thought game of analogies. That is the greatest illusion. It is to no purpose to parallel outer physical-spiritual life with the head system. It is to no purpose to relate economic life to the metabolic system. All that is of no avail if one wants to fathom the question.

When one makes a real investigation one gets a very paradoxical result. Comparing the social organism to the human organism one comes to the truth only if one stands upside down in the social organism. One must compare economic life with the nerve-sense-life, state-life with the rhythmic system,and physical-spiritual life with the metabolic system for the laws obtaining in them are similar. That which is present in economic life as natural conditions is of exactly the same significance for the social organism as are for man the individual talents that ne brings with him at birth. As man in his individual life is dependent upon what he brings into life with him, so the economic organism is dependent upon what Nature bequeaths it in the way of existing conditions. The preliminary natural conditions of economic life—land, etc.,—are the same as the individual talents that man brings into individual life. How much coal, now much metal is in the earth, whether land is fertile or not, are as it were the talents of the social organism. And as man's metabolic system is related to the human organism and its functions, human spiritual production is related to the social organism. The social organism eats and drinks what we give it in the form of art, science, technical ideas, etc. That is its nourishment. That is its metabolism. A country that has unfavorable natural conditions for its economic life is like a man who is poorly gifted. And a country in which the people produce nothing in the way of art, science, or technical ideas, is like a man who must go hungry because he has nothing to eat. That is the reality, the truth! The social organism is our angry spiritual child. And the natural conditions of the social organism are its capacities, its talents. A comparison of the spiritual life with the human head system has meaning perhaps for one who is playing with analogies; out one reaches the correct and helpful truth only if one knows that the laws stand as I have presented them. One can know that these are the laws of human metabolism; but one must direct the same thinking to them as one directs to the social organism and then one easily gets a larger result. To tamper with spiritual things without such guiding threads is extraordinarily difficult and wearisome. Because of the fact that today analogies are often merely toyed with, on account of which there is a prejudice against this drawing of parallels between the social and the human organism, I have only just touched upon it in my book, but I tried at least to indicate it because it can be a great help to those who think healthily about it.

And so you see that today men are in a peculiar position. Natural science which has made this great progress, which has so influenced men's minds that at bottom-even though it is not conscious of social thinking orientates itself in the direction of natural science,—this Natural Science is not capable of analyzing man correctly. For instance; it says the greatest nonsense about feeling being transmitted through the nervous system. That is pure nonsense. Feeling is transmitted directly through the breathing system, the rhythmic system, and thought through the nerve-sense-system. And the will is made possible through the metabolic system, not through the nervous system in any elementary way. The thought or willing is transmitted through the nervous system. Only when you have as men a real consciousness or willing does the nervous system take any part. When you think along with your willing then the nervous system is concerned in it. It is because this is not known that the physiology and anatomy of today have made that frightful error of distinguishing between sensory nerves and motor nerves. There is no greater falsity than this differentiation of sensory and motor nerves in the human body. The anatomists are always in a dilemma when they get to their chanter on nerves and they don't get out of it. They are in a frightful dilemma because there is no difference anatomically between these two kinds of nerves. It is pure speculation. And everything that is deduced by examining the nerves is absolutely without support. The reason that the motor nerves are not distinguishable from the sensory nerves is that there aren't any motor nerves there. The muscles are set in motion by the metabolic system. And as you perceive the outer world through the senses with the so-called sensory nerves, with other nerves you perceive your own movements, your muscular movements. The Physiology of today is wrong when it calls them motor nerves. Frightful mistakes such as this exist in science, and corrupt what goes into the popular consciousness—and they have a much more, corrupt influence than one would ordinarily think.

Thus Natural Science is not so far advanced as to perceive this threefold man. We can wait for theoretical views of Natural Science to become popular; a year sooner or later will not affect men's happiness. But the thinking does not exist for comprehending this threefold man. The same quality of thinking must however exist to comprehend the threefold nature of the social organism. And there the thing is serious. We are today at the point of time when it must be comprehended. Therefore a change of thought, a new method of thinking, is essential not only for the simple man, but, truly, most of all for the learned man. Simple men at least know nothing about all those things that have been advanced in natural science in order unconsciously to conceal man's threefold nature. But the learned men are stuck full of all those concepts that today make this threefolding seem like nonsense. To the physiologist of today it is pure folderol. If one tells him that there are no motor nerves and that feelings are not transmitted in the same way as thoughts—through the nervous system—but only the thought connected with a feeling, in other words the consciousness of it—not the feeling as such as he will object strenuously. His objections are well known. Men can naturally say: Now look, you perceive music; you perceive that through your senses. No, experience of music is much more complicated than that. It is like this: The breathing rhythm meets with the sense perception in our brain, and in the contact of the breathing rhythm with the outer sense perception arises the musical-aesthetic experience. Even there, the fundamental thing is in the rhythmic system. And what brings this fundamental thing to consciousness is in the nervous system.

However, this all shows you, my dear friends, that in regard to many things we are living in a time of transitions. Every period is indeed a transition from the past to the future. That is so if one speaks abstractly and one can see that every period is more or less a time of transition. I want rather to say in what particular respect our time is a transition. it is a time of very important inner transition, in regard to important inner human impulses. To men capable of perception this shows itself clearly in a certain way. Men today are not very apt to consider incidental symptoms with sufficient earnestness.

I want to tell you of a purely spiritual-scientific perception. Naturally I can as little prove this perception to you as the man who has seen a wallfish can prove to you that it exists. He can only tell you about it. Then one has developed one's power of spiritual vision so far as to be able to have communication with human souls that are evolving between death and a new birth, then one makes indeed very surprising discoveries. This communication can only be had in thought; and when we think here in the physical body some element of speech is always present in our thoughts. Something of speech always vibrates with the thoughts. We think in words. I had the experience once of declaring energetically: “I am fully conscious of the fact that I can think without words resounding simultaneously”, and of having Hartmann answer: “That is nonsense! That is not possible; man cannot think unless he thinks in words”. Thus there are very spiritual philosophers who do not believe that one can think without an inner forming of words. One can. But in ordinary everyday thinking man thinks in words, especially when he would develop some spiritual intercourse with the dead. For you know intercourse with the dead cannot be carried on in abstractions—any more than we can think in blue. It has to be concrete, this intercourse with the dead. That is why I have said: definite pictures that are formed very concretely reach the dead, but not abstract thoughts. Because this is so we are especially apt to let speech sound innerly in our thought communication with the dead. Then we make the most peculiar discovery ( you may believe it or not, but it is a fact) that, for instance, the dead do not hear substantives. Substantives are like holes in our sentences when we communicate with the dead.

Adjectives are better, but still very weak; but verbs, words of activity, is what their understanding grasps. One learns that slowly at first. One cannot think why so much of the communication goes badly; and one gradually realizes that it is the nouns. One cannot use many nouns. And you see one comes to realize this: that in using words of activity, verbs, one cannot help but be within the words oneself. There is something personal in verbs—one lives in the activity; while a noun always becomes something quite abstract.

Therein lies the basis of the symptom of which I wanted to speak. You see that speech is something that unites us with the super-sense world only in a very limited measure; and the fact that the whole tendency of speech is more and more toward substantives brings about the possibility of our separating ourselves from the spiritual world. The more we think in substantives the more we break our connection with the spiritual world. I only wanted this fact to indicate to you that speech has a great significance for our supersense life, a fundamental significance. But speech evolves within human evolution itself. And the characteristic of the evolution of speech is that it brings men more and more to abstractions, that it takes them farther and farther away from living inner thought-life. You can become aware of this outwardly by asking yourselves, How are the Western languages formed as compared to the Eastern? Take the language that outwardly on the physical plane has progressed the furthest, the English language: it almost spends itself in words, it has least thought content. That is the progress of speech from East to West. That is an important distinction to make in connection with social folk-life.

Now there is a man of our time who has developed great acuteness in his observation of human speech. This man is so clever that already he is stupid again. There is, in other words, a degree of cleverness where one begins again to be a bit stupid in the face of colossal cleverness. It is true. One may have a great respect for this cleverness but one should not value it too highly in face of the corresponding truth. This man is Fritz Mauthner, who has out-Kanted Kant in his Critique of Speech, and also in his Dictionary: observations, however, made undeniably out of the impulses of the time. Mauthner has reached something quite definite that must especially strike the spiritual-scientist: it is this, that in reality human inner soul-activity has, as it were, three stages. The first is ordinary sense perception as it is reflected in art. Mauthner believes in this as something that is real, something that is a reality. Now through sense perception one can arouse inner experiences, that lead over into the supersensible; Fritz Mauthner allows such inner experience. He calls it “Mystic experience,” “religious experience.” Beautiful; but he says:•;When man has this mystic experience he can only be dreaming. One is permitted to dream, out one is outside of reality them. Mauthner altogether doubts the possibility or reaching reality then; the only reality to him is sense perception—at most, art can reach it. As soon as one gets so far away from sense perception as to be experiencing something in mystic religious life, then one is merely dreaming about reality; one has already let reality go by. And then one can go still further, according to Mauthner.

He comes to all these convictions through a consideration of speech. He makes an analysis, a criticism of speech, especially in his philosophical Dictionary. It makes terrible reading. I have already on another occasion drawn your attention to the torture one undergoes reading these articles—and they go all the way from A to Z. One begins to read one or another of the articles; something is said. Then another sentence in which what has just been said is just a little bit qualified. Then a third sentence, and that which was just qualified is again qualified, so that one comes back a little to the first sentence again. One hedges around and around and around, and in the end—one has got nothing, even though one has read the whole article to the end. The article entitled “Christianity” is awful. A frightful torture. But it is proper, in Mauthner's sense, that it should be so. Mauthner thinks that, and he really condemns his reader to the torture; he has gone through it himself. He does not believe that man is capable, when he wants to know something, of getting anything else than just such hedging. He is an absolute skeptic. He finds nowhere in speech any other content than the speech itself. It has only an incidental value to him.

And so to him, inner mystic experience is only a dream. As soon as one gets out of speech one is inwardly dreaming. But according to Mauthner there is a third stage: one can believe that one is thinking but one is only speaking inwardly. Whether one uses this or that language, the language, the words, originated once in outer sense things. I have spoken to you before of the various opinions of learned men of how speech originated. You know that their opinions can be divided into two main classes: the Bimbam theory and the Wan-wan theory (those are the technical terms). Now Mauthner finds that everything has evolved from outer sense perception; real thoughts do not exist for man. In science he strives for real thoughts, when ne reaches the third stage. But he does not succeed there in knowing anything real. In mysticism he is still dreaming; when he in search of thought reality, for instance to natural laws, then ne is no longer dreaming, then he is fast asleep. Therefore for Mauthner all science is Docta ignorantia (learned ignorance). Those are his three stages.

Now my dear friends, as I told you, one can have a certain respect for such observation for it is not altogether incorrect—that, is, not incorrect for today. Something to which mankind tends today has been felt correctly by Mauthner. It is this: when the man of today wants to come to mysticism it is something quite different than with men formerly. The man of earlier times was still inwardly pound up with reality. The man of today has not that possibility; as a mystic he really is dreaming. And the natural laws that man finds today—well, one cannot quite endorse such crude points of view as those of certain theorizers who have analyzed the matter similarly to Mauthner, as for example the French thinker Boutroux, or Ernst Mach. But nevertheless one must say: if one sounds the content of the so-called natural laws today there are fundamentally no thoughts there; one only believes they ate thoughts; they are only combinations of facts. They are really only records. These things have been noticed by individuals, Mach, for example. Mauthner has observed thoroughly—therefore he speaks of Docta ignorantia, of a learned unknowing, of an ignorant learnedness. Yes, as human evolution is today, that is quite true. Today, in mysticism and in science alike, man has become sterile. Only, in his pride, he is not yet aware of it as having any significance. But that is not generally characteristic of humanity. Mauthner and the others believe that it is, because in reality they do not consider human evolution; they think: as the soul is today, so it was always. But really, it is only a characteristic of the present time. Their observation only has significance for the soul life of today; we do come to dreaming and to learned ignorance today, when we want to rise in these stages.,

But one must not conclude that human nature is such that it is obliged to sink either into mystic dreaming or into learned ignorance (as those do who think as Mauthner does). One must come to this conclusion: what the ancients reached in old ways must therefore be found now in new ways. That means, we must seek a new mysticism, we must not get into old mysticism. This new mysticism is sought in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment. must rise to this new Imagination, to a new Inspiration, but we must rise of new methods. I have elaborated that in my book "Riddles of Humanity". Because we dream in mysticism and sleep in science the necessity is before us today of waking up. Therefore I have described the phenomenon of present day knowledge in this book as an "awakening". We must put in the place of mystic dreams a wide-awake Imagination; in the place of Docta ignorantia, Inspiration; in the sense in which I have talked of it in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment. We live today in a transition period in respect to the human soul; we must evolve out of the deepest foundation of this human soul active power that leads to the spiritual. We will not find our way through the chaos of the present age unless we develop the will to evolve active inner soul powers. The spiritualists do the opposite. They perceive that nothing springs up unconsciously from within, and so they allow themselves to project spirits in outer manifestation, outer sense vision.

And a tragic phenomenon makes its appearance in the present day. We have the experience today of seeing men who a short time ago still believed that materialism could satisfy their souls become alarmed in their advancing years about materialism. That is nothing else than what the healthy soul should feel, in spite of the biology of today, or the sociology: a smell of decay, a smell of the corpse of one's soul, that one only prevents by an inner soul activity. Many do not want that activity today. And therefore the tragedy of men growing old who will not have anything to do with spiritual scientific research and who go back to Catholicism. That allows the soul to remain passive, and gives it something that it can believe is a spiritual content. It is a great danger.

That points from another angle to the transition-humanity is making in the present age. Quite secretly the human soul is going through an important stage of development. And with this transition through an important stage of development is intimately connected the necessity of learning to think anew in many other respects concerning man. Read how the individual man, when entering the supersense world, begins to divide into three parts. Read it in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. Thinking, feeling, and willing that here in the sense world are fused as the natural condition for man—read the chapter on the “Guardian of the Threshold”: thinking, feeling, and willing become separate from one another when one gets into the supersense world. Mankind is going through that process today secretly in the subconscious. A threshold is being crossed there. Man divides inwardly into a threefold man in a different way than was formerly the case. Observation of this passing of men over a certain threshold teaches one that the threefolding of the social organism is dictated to us out of the spiritual foundations of existence itself. If in the future we want to find a picture of ourselves in the outside world so that we shall agree with it, then we shall have had to threefold the social organism.

You see the signs that spiritual science gives for the Threefold Commonwealth. But I again emphasize the point: once the Threefold Commonwealth is found it can, like all occult truths, be comprehended by a healthy human understanding. To find it, spiritual scientific research is necessary; but once it is found, healthy human, understanding proclaims its truth. That is also something that we must recall at every opportunity.

I have tried today to give you a deeper consideration of what in service to our time must be said today about the Threefold Commonwealth. Next Sunday we will extend this consideration and conclude it, and perhaps bring it to full inner completeness.

Yesterday I drew attention to the way in which a man is able with the higher members of his being - his etheric body, astral body and ego—to leave his physical body; and I pointed out how, having left his physical body, he then makes his first steps in initiation, and learns that what we call man's spiritual activity does not come only with initiation but, in reality, is there all the time in everyday life.

We had particularly to emphasize that the activity which enters our consciousness through our thoughts actually takes its course in man's etheric body, and that this activity taking its course in man's etheric body, this activity underlying the thought-pictures, enters our consciousness by reflecting itself in the physical body. As activity it is carried on in soul and spirit, so that a man when he is in the physical world and just thinks—but really thinks, is carrying out a spiritual activity. It may be said, however, that it does not enter consciousness as a spiritual activity. Just as when we stand in front of a mirror it is not our face that enters our consciousness out of the mirror but the image of our face, so in everyday life it is not the thinking but its reflection that as thought-content is rayed back into consciousness from the mirror of the physical body. In the case of the will it is different.

Let us keep this well in mind—that what finds expression in thinking is an activity which actually does not enter our physical organism at all, but runs its course entirely outside it, being reflected back by the physical organism. Let us remember that as men we are actually in our soul-spiritual being all the time.

Now this is how it might be represented diagrammatically. If this (a) represents man's bodily being, in actual fact his thinking goes on outside it, and what we perceive as thoughts is thrown back. Thus, with our thinking we are always outside our physical body; in reality spiritual  knowledge consists in our recognizing that we are outside the physical body with our thinking.

It is different with what we call will-activity.  This goes right into the physical body. What we call will-activity enters into the physical body everywhere and there brings about processes; and the effect of these processes in man is what is brought about by the will as movement.

We can thus say: While living as man in the physical world there rays out of the spiritual into our organism the essential force of the will and carries out certain activities in the organism enclosed within the skin. Between birth and death we are therefore permeated by will-forces; whereas the thoughts do not go on within our organism but outside it. From this you may conclude that everything to do with the will is intimately connected with what a man is between birth and death by reason of his bodily organization. The will is really closely bound up with us and all expressions of the will are in close connection with our organization, with our physical being as man between birth and death. This is why thinking really has a certain character of detachment from the human being, a certain independent character, never attainable by the will.

Now for a moment try to concentrate on the great difference existing in human life between thinking and what belongs to the will. It is just spiritual science that is capable from this point of view of throwing the most penetrating side-lights on certain problems in life. Do we not all find that what can be known through spiritual science really confronts us in life in the form of questions which somehow have to be answered? Now think what happens when anyone goes to a solicitor about some matter. The solicitor hears all about the case and institutes proceedings for the client in question. He will look into all possible ingenious grounds—puts into this all the ingenuity of which he is capable—to win the case for his client. To win the case he will summon up all his powers of intelligence and reasoning.

What do you think would have happened (life will certainly give you the answer) had his opponent outrun the client mentioned and come a few hours before to the same solicitor? What I am assuming hypothetically often happens in reality. The solicitor would have listened to the opponent's case and put all his ingenuity into the grounds for the defense of this client—grounds for getting the better of the other man. I don't think anyone will feel inclined to deny the possibility of my hypothesis being realized.  What does it show however?

It shows how little connection a man has in reality with his intelligence and his reason with all that is his force of thought, that in a certain case he can put them at the service of one side just as well as of the other. Think how different this is when man's will-nature is in question, in a matter where man’s feelings and desires are engaged. Try to get a clear idea of whether it would be possible for a man whose will-nature was implicated to act in the same way. On the contrary, if he did so we should consider him mentally unsound. A man is intimately bound up with his will—most intimately; for the will streams into his physical organism and in this human physical organism, induces processes directly related to the personality.

We can therefore say: It is just into these facts of life which, when we think about life at all, confront us so enigmatically, that light is thrown by all we gain through spiritual science.  Ever more fully can spiritual science enlighten men about what happens in everyday life, because everything that happens has supersensible causes. The most mundane events are dependent on the supersensible, and are comprehensible only when these supersensible causes are open to our view.

But now let us take the case of a man going with his soul through the gate of death. We must here ask: What happens to his force of thinking and to his will-force? After death the thinking force can no longer be reflected by an organism such as we bear with us between birth and death. For the significant fact here is that after death this organism, everything present in us lying beneath the surface of our skin, is cast off. Therefore, when we have gone through the gate of death, the thinking cannot be reflected by an organism no longer there, neither can an organism no longer there induce inner processes. What the thinking force is continues to exist—just as a man is still there when after passing a mirror he is no longer able to see his reflection. During the time he is passing it his face will be reflected to him; had he passed by earlier the reflection would have appeared to him earlier. The thinking force is reflected in the life of the organism as long as we are on earth, but it is still there even though we have left our physical organism behind.

What happens then? What constitutes the thinking force cannot, in itself be perceived; just as the eye is incapable of seeing itself so also is the thinking, for it has to be reflected-back by something—and the bodily organism is no longer there. When a man has discarded his physical organism what will then throw back the thinking force for whatever the thinking force develops in itself as process? Here something occurs that is not obvious to human physical intelligence; but it must, be considered if we really want to understand the life between death and rebirth. This can be under stood through initiates' teachings. An initiate knows that even during life in the body knowledge does not come to him through the mirror of his body but outside it, that he goes out of his body and receives knowledge without it, that therefore he dispenses with his bodily mirrors. Whoever cultivates in himself this kind of knowledge sees that what constitutes the thinking force henceforward enters his consciousness outside the body; it enters consciousness by the later thoughts being reflected by those that have gone before.

Thus, bear this well in mind—when an initiate leaves his body, and is outside it, he does not perceive by something being reflected by his body, he perceives by the thinking force he now sends out being reflected by what he has previously thought. You must therefore imagine that what has been thought previously—not only because it was thought previously—mirrors back the forces developed by the thinking, when this development takes place outside the body.

I can perhaps put it still more clearly. Let us suppose that someone today becomes an initiate. In this state of initiation how can he perceive anything through the force of his thinking? He does this by encountering, with the thinking forces he sends out, what, for instance, he thought the day before. What he thought the day before remains inscribed in the universal cosmic chronicle—which you know as the Akashic record—and what his thinking force develops today is reflected by what he thought yesterday.

From this you may see that the thinking must be qualified to make the thought of yesterday as strong as possible, so that it can reflect effectively. This is done by the rigorous concentration of one's thought and by various kinds of meditation, in the way described from time to time in lectures about knowledge of the higher worlds. Then the thought that otherwise is of a fleeting nature is so densified in a man, so strengthened, that he is able to bring about the reflection of his thinking force in these previously strengthened and densified thoughts.

This is how it is also with the consciousness men develop after death. What a man has lived through between birth and death is indeed inscribed spiritually into the great chronicle of time. Just as in this physical world we are unable to hear without ears, after death we are unable to perceive unless there is inscribed into the world our life, with all that we have lived through between birth and death.  This is the reflecting apparatus.

I drew attention to these facts in my last Vienna cycle.¹ Our life itself, in the way we go through it between birth and death, becomes our sense-organ for the higher worlds. You do not see your eye nor do you hear your ear, but you see with your eye, you hear with your ear. When you want to perceive anything to do with your eye you must do so in the way of ordinary science. It is the same in the case of your ear. The forces a man develops between death and rebirth have the quality of always raying back to the past earth-life, so as to be reflected by it; then they spread themselves out and are perceived by a man in the life between death and rebirth.

From this it can be seen what nonsense it is to speak of life on earth as if it were a punishment, or some other superfluous factor in man’s life as a whole. A man has to make himself part of this earthly life, for in the spiritual world in life after death it becomes his sense-organ.

The difficulty of this conception consists in this that when you imagine a sense-organ you conceive it as something in space. Space, however, ceases as soon as we go either through the gate of death or through initiation; space has significance only for the world of the senses. What we afterwards meet with is time, and, just as here we make use of ears and eyes that are spatial, there we need temporal processes. These processes are those carried out between birth and death, by which the ones developed after death are reflected back. In life between birth and death everything is perceptible to us in space; after death everything takes its course in time, whereas formerly it was in space that we perceived it.

The particular difficulty in speaking about the facts of spiritual science is that, as soon as we turn our gaze to the spiritual worlds, we have really to renounce the whole outlook we have developed for existence in space; we must entirely give up this spatial conception and realize that there space no longer exists, everything running its course in time—that there even the organs are temporal processes. If we would find our way about among the events in spiritual life, we have not only to transform our way of learning; we must entirely transform ourselves, re-model ourselves, acquire fresh life, in such a way that we adopt quite a different method of conception. Here lies the difficulty referred to yesterday, which so many people shun, however ingenious for the physical plane their philosophy may be. People indeed are wedded to their spatial conceptions and cannot find their bearings in a life that runs its course entirely in time.

I know quite well that there may be many souls who say: But I just cannot conceive that when I enter the spiritual world this spiritual world is not to be there in a spatial sense.—That may be, but if we wish to enter the spiritual world the most necessary thing of all is for us to make every effort to grow beyond forming our conceptions as we do on the physical plane. If in forming our conceptions of the higher worlds we never take for our standards and models any but those of the physical world, we shall never attain to real thoughts about the higher worlds—at best picture thoughts.

It is thus where thinking is concerned. After death thinking takes its course in such a way that it reflects itself in what we have lived through, what we were, in physical earthly life between birth and death. All the occurrences we have experienced constitute after death our eyes and our ears. Try by meditating to make real to yourselves all that is contained in the significant sentence: Your life between birth and death will become eye and ear for you, it will constitute your organs between death and rebirth.

Now how do matters stand with the will forces? The will-forces bring about in us the life-processes within the limits of our body—it is our life-processes which they bring about. The body is no longer there when a man has gone through the gate of death, but the whole spiritual environment is there. True as it is that the will with its forces works into the physical organism, it is just as true that after death the will has the desire to go out from the man in all directions; it pours itself into the whole environment, in the opposite way to physical life when the will works into man. You gain some conception of this out—pouring of the will into the surrounding world, if you consider what you have to acquire in the way of inner cultivation of the will in meditation, when you are really anxious to make progress in the sphere of spiritual knowledge.

The man who is willing to be satisfied with recognizing the world as a merely physical one sees, for example, the color blue, sees somewhere a blue surface, or perhaps a yellow surface; and this satisfies the man who is content to stop short at the physical world. We have already discussed how, even through a true conception of art, we must get beyond this mere grasping of the matter in accordance with the senses; how when we must experience blue as if we let our will, our force of heart, stream out into space, and as if from us out into space there could shine forth towards what shines forth to us as blue something we feel like a complete surrender—as if we could pour ourselves out into space. Our own being streams into the blue, flows away into it. Where there is yellow, however, the being, the being of the will, has no wish to enter—here it is repulsed; it feels that the will cannot get through, and that it is thrown back on itself.

Whoever wishes to prepare himself to develop in his soul those forces which lead him into the spiritual world, must be able in his life of soul to connect something real with what I have just been saying. For instance, he must in all reality connect the fact that he is looking at a blue surface with saying: This blue surface takes me to itself in a kindly way; it lets my soul with its forces flow out into the illimitable. But the surface here, this yellow surface, repels me, and my soul-forces return upon my soul like the pricks of a needle. It is the same with everything perceived by the senses; it all has these differences of color. Our will, in its soul-nature, pours itself out into the world and can either thus pour itself out or be thrust back. This can be cultivated by giving the forces of our soul a training in color or in some other impression of the physical world. You will discover in my book "Knowledge of the Higher Worlds" how this may be done.

When, however, this has been developed, when we know that if the forces of the soul float away, become blue (becoming blue and floating away are one and the same thing), this means to be taken up with sympathy whereas becoming yellow is to be repelled and is identical with antipathy—well, then we have forces such as these within us. Let us say that we have experienced this coloring of the soul when we are taken up sympathetically and that we do not, in this case, confront a physical being at all, but that it is possible through our developed soul-forces for a spiritual being with whom we are in sympathy to flow into us. This is the way in which we can perceive the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies and the beings of the elemental world.

I will give you an example, one that is not meant to be personal but should be taken quite objectively. We need not develop merely through the forces in our color-sense, it is possible to do so through any forces of the soul. Imagine that we arouse in our self-knowledge a feeling of how it appears to our soul when we are really stupid or foolish. In everyday life we take no notice of such things, we do not bring them into consciousness; but if we wish to develop the soul we must learn to feel within us what is experienced when something foolish is done. Then we notice that when this foolish action occurs will-forces of the soul stream forth which can be thrown back from outside. They are, however, thrown back in such a way that on noticing the repulsion we feel we are being mocked at and scorned. This is a very special experience. When we are really stupid and are alive to what is happening spiritually we feel looked down upon, provoked.  A feeling can then follow of being provoked from out of the spiritual world. If we then go to someplace where there are the nature-spirits we call gnomes, we then have the power to perceive them. This power is acquired only when we perceive in ourselves the feeling I have just described. The gnomes carry-on in a way that is provoking, making all manner of gestures and grimaces, laughing, and so on. This is perceptible to us only if when we are stupid we observe ourselves. It is important that we should acquire inward forces through these exercises, that with our will forces we should delve deeply into the world surrounding us; then this surrounding world will come alive, really and truly alive.

Thus we see while our life between birth and death becomes an organ, an organ of perception, within the spiritual organism that we bear between death and rebirth, our will becomes a participator in our whole spiritual environment. We see how the will rays back in initiates (in the seeing of gnomes, for example) and in those who are dead. When gnomes are seen it is an example of this, out of the elemental world.

Now consider how there once lived a philosopher who in the second half of the nineteenth century had a great influence on many people, namely, Schopenhauer. As you know, he exercised a great influence both on Nietzsche and Richard Wagner. Schopenhauer derived the world—as others have derived it from other causes—from what he called conception, or representation, and will. He said: Representation and will are what constitutes the foundation of the world.

But—obsessed by Kant’s method of thinking—he goes on to say that representation are never more than dream-pictures and that it is impossible ever to come to reality through them. It is only through the will that we can penetrate into the reality of things—this is done by the will. Now Schopenhauer philosophises in an impressive manner about representation and will; and, if one may say so—he does this indeed rather well.  He is, however, one of those who I have likened to a man standing in front of a door and refusing to go through it. When we take his words literally—the world is representation, the world is a mere dream-picture—we have to forgo all knowledge of the world through representation and can then pass on to knowledge of the representations themselves, pass on to doing something in one's own soul with the representations—in other words to meditate, to concentrate. Had Schopenhauer gone a step further he would have reached the point of saying: "I must renounce representations! If a representation is something produced within me, I must put it to an inward use.’ Had he made this step he would have been driven to cultivate his representations, to work upon them in meditation and concentration.

When he says: The world is will—when, as in his clever treatise on the "Will in Nature", he goes on to describe this will in nature, he does not take his own proposition in earnest. In describing the will we seek the help of representations and he denies those all possibility of knowledge. This reminds us of Munchausen who to pull himself out of a bog catches hold of his own pigtail. What would Schopenhauer have been obliged to be if had taken in earnest his own words—the world is will? He would have had to say: Then we ought to pour out our will into the world; we must use our will to creep inside things. We must delve right into the world, send into it cur will, no longer taking the color blue as mere representation, but trying to perceive how the will sinks down into it; no longer thinking of our stupidity as a representation, but realizing what can be experienced through that stupidity.

You can see that here too it is possible to arrive at a description which needs only to be taken in earnest. Had Schopenhauer gone further he would have had to say: If the representation is really only a picture we represent to ourselves, then we must work upon it; if the will is really in the things, then we must go with it right into the things, not just describe how things have the will within them.

 You see here another example of how a renowned Philosopher of the nineteenth century takes men to the very gates of initiation, right up to spiritual science; and how this philosopher then does everything he can to close these gates to men. Where people really take hold of life they are shown on all sides that the time is ripe for picking the fruits of spiritual science—only things must be taken in earnest, deeply in earnest. Above all we must understand how to take people at their word. For it is not required of spiritual science to stand on its own defense. For the most part this is actually done by others, by its opponents, though they do not know this, have no notion of it.

Now consider a certain class of human beings to which very many in the nineteenth century belonged—the atomistic philosophers, those who conceived the idea that atoms in movement were at the basis of all the phenomena of life. They had the idea that behind this entire visible and audible world there was a world of atoms in movement, and through this movement arose processes perceived by us as what appears in our surroundings. Nothing spiritual is there, the spiritual is merely a product of atomic movement, and all—prevailing atomic activity.

Now how has the thought of these whirling atoms arisen? Has anyone seen them? Has anyone discovered them through what they have experienced or come to know empirically?  Were this the case they would not be what they are supposed to be, for they are supposed to be concealed behind empirical knowledge.  Had they any reality, by what means would they have to be discovered? Suppose the movement of atoms were there—the understanding cannot discover them in what is sense-perceptible. What would a man have to be in order to possess the right to speak of this world of atoms?  He would have to be clairvoyant; the whole of this atom-world would have to be a product of inner vision, of clairvoyance. The only thing we can say to the people who have appeared as the materialists of the nineteenth century is: There is no need for us to prove that there are clairvoyants for either you must be silent about all your theories, or you must admit that to perceive these things you are possessed of clairvoyant vision—at least to the point of being able to perceive atoms behind the world of the senses.  For if there is no such things as clairvoyance it is senseless to speak of this material world of atoms. If you find it a necessity to have moving atoms you prove to us that there are clairvoyant human beings. 

Thus we take these people seriously, although they do not take themselves seriously when they say things of this kind.  If Schopenhauer is taken in earnest we must come to this conclusion—“If you say the world is will and what we have in the way of representation is only pictures, you ought to penetrate into the world with your will, and penetrate into your thinking through meditation and concentration.  We take you seriously but you do not take yourselves so.” Strictly speaking, it is the same with everything that comes into question.

This is what is so profoundly significant in the world—conception of spiritual science, that it takes in all earnest what is not so taken by the others—what they skim over in a superficial way. Proofs are always to be found among the opponents of spiritual science. But people never notice that in their assertions, in what they think, at bottom they are at the same time setting at naught what they think. For the materialistic atomist, and Schopenhauer too, set a naught what they themselves maintain.

Schopenhauer nullifies his own system when he asserts: Everything is will and representation. The moment he is not willing to stop there, however, he is obliged to lead men onto the development of spiritual science. It is not we who form the world-conception of spiritual science; how then does this world-conception come into being? It enters the world of itself—is there, everywhere, in the world. It enters life through unfamiliar doors and windows; and even when others do not take it in earnest, it finds its way into men’s cultural life.

But there is still something else we can recognize if, through considerations of this kind we really have our attention drawn to how superficially men approach their own spiritual processes, and how little in a deeper sense they take themselves seriously—even when they are clever and profound philosophers. They weave as it were a conceptual web, but with it they shy away from really fulfilling the inner life’s work that would lead them to experience the forces upon which the world is founded. Hence we see that the centuries referred to yesterday, during which ordinary natural science has seen its great triumphs, have also been the centuries to develop in human beings the superficial thinking. The more glorious the development of science, the more superficial has become investigation into the sources of existence.

We can point to really shining examples of what has just been touched upon here. Suppose we have the following experience—a man, who has never shown any interest in the spiritual world undergoes a sudden change, begins to concern himself about the spiritual world and longs to know something about it. Let us suppose we have this experience after having found our way into spiritual science. What will become a necessity for us when we experience how a man, who has never worried about the spiritual world, having been immersed in everyday affairs, now finds himself at one of the crossroads of life and turns to the spiritual world? As spiritual scientists we shall interest ourselves about what has been going on in this man’s soul.  We shall try as often as possible to enter into the soul of such a man, and it will then be useful for us to know what has often been stressed here, namely, that the saying in constant use about nature making no sudden jumps is absolutely untrue. Nature does make sudden jumps.  She makes a jump when the green leaf becomes the colourful petal, and when she so changes a man who has never troubled himself about the spiritual world that he begins to interest himself in it, this too is like a sudden jump; and for this we shall seek the cause.  We shall make certain discoveries about the various spiritual sources of which we have spoken here, and see how anything of this kind takes place. 

When doing this we shall ask: How old was the man? We know that every seven years something new is born in the human being: From the seventh year on, the etheric body; from the fourteenth year on, the astral body, and so on.  We shall gather up all that we know about the etheric and astral bodies, taking this particularly from an inner, not an outer, point of view.  Then we shall be able to gain a good deal of information about what is going on in a human soul such as this.

It is also possible to proceed in another way.  We can become interested in the fact that men in ordinary life suddenly go over to a life concerned with spiritual truths, and the profundities of religion. Some men may look upon spiritual science as a foolish phantasy, and when we examine into what is going on in the depths of his soul it is possible for us to discover what makes him find it foolish. But we can then do the following. We write, let us say 192, or even more, letters to people whom we have heard about as having gone through a change of this kind. We send these letters to a whole continent, in order to learn in reply what it was that brought about this change in their life.—We then receive answers of the most diverse kind….someone writes: When I was fourteen my life led me into all manner of bad habits. That made my father very angry and he gave me a good thrashing; this it was which induced in me a feeling for the spiritual world.—Others assert that they have seen a man die, and so on. Suppose then that we get 192 answers and proceed to arrange them in piles—one pile for the letters in which the writers say that they have been changed by their fear of death or of hell; a second pile in which it is stated that the writers come across good men, or imitated them; a third pile—and so on. In piles such as these matters easily become involved and then we make an extra pile for other, egocentric motives.  Then we arrive at the following.  We have sorted the 192 letters into piles and have counted how many letters go into each one; then we are able to make a simple calculation of the percentage of letters in each pile. We can discover, for example, that 14 per cent of the changes come about through fear, either of death or of hell; 6 per cent come from egocentric motives; 5 per cent because altruistic feelings have arisen in the writers; 17 per cent of them are striving after some moral ideal—supposedly those belonging to an ethical society; 16 percent through pangs of conscience, 10 per cent by following teachings concerning what is good, 13 per cent through imitating other men considered to be religious, 19 per cent by reason of social pressure, the pressure of necessity and so forth.

Thus, we can proceed by trying with love to delve into the soul who confesses to a change of this kind; we can try to discover what is within the soul; and for this we have need of spiritual science.  Or we can do what I have just been describing. One who has done this is a certain Starbuck who has written about these matters a book which has aroused a good deal of attention. This is the most superficial exposition and the very opposite of all we must perceive in spiritual science.  Spiritual science seeks everywhere to go to the very root of things.  A tendency that has arisen to the materialistic character of the times is to apply even to the religious life this famous popular science of statistics.  For, as it has clearly pointed out, this means of research is incontrovertible. It has one quality particularly beloved by those people who are unwilling to enter the doors of spiritual science—it can truly be called easy, very easy.

Yesterday we dwelt on the reason for so many people being unwilling to accept spiritual science, mainly, its difficulty.  But we can say of statistics that it is easy, in truth very easy. Now today people go in for an experimental science of the soul; I should have to talk about this science at great length to give you a concept of it.  It is called experimental psychology; outwardly a great deal is expected from it.  I am going just to describe the beginning that has been made with these experiments. We take, let us say, ten children and give these ten children a written sentence—perhaps like this: M… is  g… by st… We then look at our watch and say to one of the children: “Tell me what you make of that sentence.” The child doesn’t know; it thinks hard and finally comes out with “Much is gained by striving.” Then it is at once noted down how much time it took the child to complete the sentence. Obviously there must be several sentences for effort has to be made to read them; gradually this will be done in a shorter space of time. Note is then made of the number of seconds taken by the various children to complete one of these sentences, and the percentages among the children are calculated and treated further statistically. In this way the faculty of adaption to outer circumstance and other matters, are tested.  This method of experimental psychology has a grand-sounding name, it is called “intelligence tests”; whereas the other method is said to be the testing by experiment of man’s religious nature.

My dear friends, what I have given you here in a few words is no laughing matter.  For where philosophy is propounded today these experimental tests are looked upon as the future science of the soul to a far greater extent than any serious feeling is shown, not for what we subscribe to here, but for what was formerly discovered by inner observation of the soul.  Today people are all for experiment.

These are examples of people’s experiments today and these methods have many supporters in the world.  Physical and chemical laboratories are set up for the purpose of these experiments and there is a vast literature on the subject.  We can even experience what I will just touch upon in passing.  A friend of ours, chairman of one of our groups, a group in the North, had been preparing his doctorate thesis.  It goes without saying that he went to a great deal of trouble (when talking to children one goes to a great deal of trouble to speak on a level with their understanding) to leave out of his thesis anything learnt from spiritual science. All that was left out.  Now among the examiners of the thesis there was one who was an expert in these matters, who therefore was thoroughly briefed in these methods; this man absolutely refused to accept the thesis. (The case was even discussed in the Norwegian Parliament.) Anyone who is an experimental psychologist is firmly convinced that his science of the soul is founded on modern science and will continue to hold good for the future.

There is no intention here of saying anything particular against experimental psychology. For why should it not be interesting once in a way to learn about it? Certainly one can do so and it is all very interesting. But the important thing is the place such things are given in life, and whether they are made use of to injure what is true spiritual science, what is genuine knowledge of the soul. It must repeatedly be emphasized that it is not we who wish to turn our back on what is done by people who in accordance with their capacities investigate the soul—the people who investigate what has to do with the senses, and like to make records after the fashion of those 192 replies. This indeed is in keeping, with men's capacities; but we must take into consideration what kind of world it is today in which spiritual science takes its place. We must be very clear about that.

I know very well that there are those who may say: Here is this man, now, abusing experimental psychology—absolutely tearing it to shreds! People may seek thus just as they said: At Easter you ran down Goethe's "Faust" here and roundly criticized Goethe. These people cannot understand the difference between a description of something and a criticism in the superficial sense; they always misunderstand such things. By characterizing them I am wanting to give them their place in the whole sphere of human life. Spiritual Science is not called upon to play the critic, neither can what has been said be criticism.

Men who are not scientists should behave in a Christian way towards true spiritual science.

Another thing is to have clear vision. Thus when we look at science we see how superficially it takes all human striving, how even in the case of religious conversion it does not turn to the inner aspect but looks upon human beings from the outside.

In practical life men are not particularly credulous. The statisticians of the insurance companies—I have referred to this before—calculate about when a man will die. It can be calculated, for instance, about when an 18-year-old will die, because he belongs to a group of people a certain number of whom will die at a certain age. According to this the insurance quota is reckoned and correctly assigned. This all works quite well. If people in ordinary life, however, wanted to prepare for death in the year reckoned as that of their probable death by the insurance company, they would be taken for lunatics. The system does not determine a man’s the length of life. Statistics have just as little to do with his conversion.

We must look deeply into all these things. Through them we strive for a feeling which has within it intuitive knowledge. It will be particularly difficult to bring to the world-culture of today what I would call the crown of spiritual science—knowledge of the Christ. Christ-knowledge is that to which—as the purest, highest and most holy—we are led by all that we receive through spiritual science. In many lectures I have tried to make it clear how it is just at this point of time that the Christ-impulse, which has come into the world through the Mystery of Golgotha, has to be made accessible to the souls of men through the instrument of spiritual science. In diverse ways I tried to point out clearly the way in which the Christ-impulse has worked. Remember the lectures about Joan of Arc, about Constantine, and so on. In many different ways I tried to make clear how in these past centuries the Christ-impulse has been drawn more into the unconscious, but how we are now living at a time when the Christ-impulse must enter more consciously into the life of man, and when there must come a real knowledge of the Mystery of Golgotha. We shall never learn to know about this Mystery of Golgotha if we are not ready to accept conceptions of the kind touched upon at Eastertide²—about Christ in connection with Lucifer and Ahriman—and if we do not permeate these conceptions with spiritual science.

We are living in a terribly hard time, a time of suffering and sorrow. You know that for reasons previously mentioned I am not able to characterize this time; neither do I want to do so but from a quite different angle I will just touch upon something connected with our present studies.

This time of suffering and sorrow has wakened many things in human souls, and anyone living through this time, anyone who concerns himself about what is going on, will notice that today, in a certain direction, a great deepening is taking place in the souls of men. These human souls involved in present events were formerly very far from anything to do with religion, their perceptions and feelings were thoroughly materialistic. Today we can repeatedly find in their letters, for one thing, how because of having been involved in all the sorrowful events of the present time they have recovered their feeling for religion. The remarkable thing is that they begin to speak of God and of a divine ordering when formerly such words never passed their lips. On this point today among those people who are in the thick of events we really experience a very great religious deepening.

But one fact has justly been brought before us which is quite as evident as what I have now been saying. Take the most characteristic thing, in the letters written from the front, in which can be seen this religious deepening. Much is said of how God has been found again but almost nothing, almost nothing at all—this has been little noticed—of Christ. We hear of God but nothing of Christ.

This is a very significant fact—that in this present time of heavy trial and great suffering many people have their religious feeling aroused in the abstract form of the idea of God. Of a similar deepening of men's perception of the Christ we can hardly speak at all. I say “hardly", for naturally it is to be met with here and there, but generally speaking things are as I have described.  You can see from this, however, that today, when it behooves the souls of men  to look for renewed connection with the spiritual world, it is difficult to find the way to what we call the Christ-impulse, the Mystery of Golgotha.

For this, it is necessary for the human soul to rise to a conception of mankind as one great whole. It is necessary for us not merely to foster mutual interest with those amongst whom we are living just for a time; We should extend our spiritual gaze to all times and beings, to how as souls we have gone through various lives on earth and thorough various ages. Then there gradually arises in the soul an urgent need to learn how there exists in man a deepening and then an ascending evolution. In the evolution of Time we must feel one with all mankind; we must look back to how the earth came originally into being, focus our gaze on this ascending and descending evolution, in the centre point of which the Mystery of Golgotha stands; we must feel ourselves bound up with the whole of humanity, feel ourselves bound up with the Mystery of Golgotha. Today the souls of men are nearer the cosmos spatially than they are temporally, that is, to what has been unfolded in the successive evolutionary stages. We shall be led to this, however, when with the aid of spiritual science we feel ourselves part of man's whole course of evolution. For then we cannot do other than recognize that there was a point of time when something entered the evolution of mankind which had nothing to do with human force. It entered man's evolution because into it an impulse made its way from the spiritual world through a human body—an impulse present in the beginning of the Christian era. It was a meeting of heaven with the earth.

Here we touch upon something which must be embodied into the religious life through spiritual-science. We shall touch upon how spiritual science has to sink down into human feeling so that men come into a real connection with the Mystery of Golgotha, and find the Christ-impulse in such a way that it can always be present in them not only as a vague feeling but also in clear consciousness. Spiritual science will work. We have recognized and repeatedly stressed the necessity for this work. In reality, the fact of your sitting there is proof that all of you in this Movement for spiritual science are willing to put your whole heart into working together. When in the future hard times fall again upon mankind, may spiritual science have already found the opportunity to unite the deepening of men's souls not only with an abstract consciousness of God but with the concrete, historical consciousness of Christ.

This is the time, my dear friends, when perceptions, feelings, of a serious nature can be aroused in us and they should not avoid arousing in ourselves these serious, one might say solemn, feelings. This is how those within our movement for spiritual science should be distinguished from the people who, by reason of their karma, have not yet found their way into this Movement—that the adherents of spiritual science take everything that goes on in the world—the most superficial as also the profoundest—in thorough earnest.    

Just consider how important it is in everyday life to see that with our ordinary understanding bound up with our brain and with our reason we are outside what mostly interests us in ordinary physical experience, and that hence—as is the case with our hypothetical solicitor—we are strangers to our own thinking, strangers to ourselves. When we enter spiritual science, however, we develop a heart outside our body, as we said yesterday, and what we thoroughly reflect upon will once more be permeated by what is full of inner depth and soul. We can make use both of the understanding bound up with our body and of our reason, in various directions, only if we do not draw upon what unites us most deeply with the spheres in which we live with our thinking. Through spiritual science we shall draw upon this, and in what we think we shall become, with our understanding and with our reason, men of truth, men wedded to the truth; and life has need of such men. What we let shine upon us from the sun of spiritual science grows together with us because we grow together with the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies. Then our thinking is not so constituted that like that solicitor we can apply it to either party in a legal case. We shall be men of truth by becoming one with those who are spiritual truth itself. By discovering how to grasp hold of our will in the way described today, we shall find our path into the very depths of things. This will not be by speaking of the will in nature as Schopenhauer did, but by living ourselves into things, developing our forces in them.

Here we touch upon something terribly lacking at the present time, namely, going deeply and with love into the being of things. This is missing today to such a terrible degree. I might say that over and over again one has to face, the bitter-experience in life of how the inclination to sink the will into the being of things is lacking among men.

What on the ground of spiritual science has to be over-come is the falsifying of objective facts; and this falsifying of objective facts is just what is so widespread at the present time. Those who know nothing of previous happenings are so ready to make assertions which can be proved false.

When a thing of his kind is said, my dear friends, is to be taken as an illustration, not as a detail without importance. But this detail is a symptom for us to ponder in order to come to ever greater depth in the whole depth that is to be penetrated by our spiritual movement. This spiritual movement of ours will throw light into our souls quite particularly when we become familiar with what today cannot yet be found even by those whose hearts are moved by the most grievous events of the times in which they are living, and who seek after the values of the spiritual world. Spiritual science must gradually build up for us the stages leading to an understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha—an understanding never again to be lost. This Mystery of Golgotha is the very meaning of the earth. To understand what this meaning of the earth is, must constitute the noblest endeavor of anyone finding his way step by step into spiritual science.

• 1. see..{"The Inner Nature of Man and Life between Death and Rebirth."
• 2. (*see Festivals of the Seasons)

My dear Friends,

I had intended to make a few remarks from the artistic point of view about the scenes from “Faust” which were to have been performed today. Since, however, on account of illness, the performance is not taking place and the lecture can therefore be independent of it, I shall arrange matters rather differently. My lecture will have to do with the scene to be given next Sunday, but I wish to stress the fact that I shall not be speaking from the standpoint of art, but from quite another point of view. It is more that to the presentation of the scene as Goethean achievement I shall add some Spiritual-Scientific observations that will also in some respect link up with what has already been said here during the autumn.

Anyone allowing this scene—“On the Upper Peneus as Before” to pass before his soul, has an opportunity to look deeply into Goethe's soul, in that this scene—as also the following one which leads to the phantasmagoria of Helen—specially shows how Goethe divined and felt the truths of Spiritual Science even though these truths did not yet come to him in clearly defined ideas. A poet whose understanding did not reach up to the truths of Spiritual Science would certainly never have created these scenes in the way Goethe has done. It would lead us too far even to speak briefly of the path by which Goethe arrived at his insight into Spiritual Science. I can do this some other time. I shall only say enough to make it clear to you that Goethe must have seen certain things in the spiritual world to be able to give this scene the form it has. It is true that what I was explaining to you a few days ago about the evolution of man as a physical-temporal being could not have been known to Goethe in definite ideas. Nor can it be said that there is anything in the course of Goethe's development pointing to definite knowledge that not until the middle of life man first gains, through his bodily organism, the capacity for self-knowledge. From our studies during the past weeks we know that it is only at about the end of his twenties that man, through the forces he develops out of his own bodily organisation, becomes capable of achieving self knowledge. If we wish to learn the truth about these matters, we have to bear in mind that man is really a complicated being. We only understand man by first becoming clear to what extent he is a creature—if I may use a term much assailed by modern science—and that this creature points us back to his creators, his spiritual creators.

Now, by a kind of spiritual chemistry, so to say, we can extract from man what he is solely by virtue of his dependence on his own particular spiritual creators, on those beings among the hierarchies of the cosmic order whose special mission in the universe reaches its culmination in the creation of man, on those beings with whom man, as man, must therefore feel himself quite specially connected. If we separate man out in this way—(we wish our understanding of these things to be exact) we can show him diagrammatically as follows:

Let us suppose that this circle represents man at a given point in his evolution; if we then trace the human being indicated by this circle backyards in the line of his emergence from his spiritual creators we have this stream which I will colour orange. Were we to go back and examine now man has evolved through Moon, Sun and Saturn ages and later through the Earth age, we should find the special characteristics of the several beings of the higher hierarchies, as they are made known to you in my book “Occult Science”. We should discover the working-together, the mutual relations, of these hierarchies; and were we to look deeply enough into this connection of man with the hierarchies, we should perceive how he is, in a sense, the goal of divine creation. I have shown how this is so in a conversation between Capesius and the Hierophant, in the first scene of the second Mystery Play, “The Soul's Probation.” I have also pointed out there the hazardous side of such knowledge for those who are insufficiently prepared.

But suppose we go on to ask what man would be like in the course of his physical development between birth and death if he were only subjected to the influence of these creators of his? He would then be the being who only becomes ripe for self-knowledge in the physical world at the end of his twenties. For these creative beings set themselves the task of so forming man that in the course of his earthly development he should attain what is to be attained on the basis of his bodily organisation, that organisation that is itself derived from the earthly and thus is akin to earthly substances and to the interplay of earthly forces. I mean that these divine beings intended to give man the opportunity through his bodily organisation to go through a period of sound, all-round preparation for self-knowledge and for the knowledge of the world derived from self-knowledge right up to the end of his twenties. Then, in the second half of his life, they intended to give him the opportunity to pursue this self-knowledge in a very different measure from that in which man, as he now is as earthly man, can pursue it. If man had only first awakened to self-knowledge at the time that the spirits of the hierarchies concerned with him intended, at the end of his twenties, it would admittedly have been late, but he would have attained self-knowledge and the world-knowledge bound up with it in enhanced splendour. He would have been able from his innermost being to give a solution to the question: What am I as man? This under ordinary conditions at the present time he cannot do. e would have had this self-knowledge as insight, as vision, he would not have had to acquire it through abstract concepts.

Neither of these things has come about. In the first half of life we do not find that state of subdued consciousness. If he had it, man, rayed through by higher intelligences and not by his own, in a life not of sleep but of twilight, would build up his bodily organisation in a very different way, in order then to awaken to self-knowledge. But such a twilight condition does not exist. On the contrary, a certain self-knowledge appears comparatively early in man, though not with the radiance originally intended by his creators. Again, the self-knowledge that arises after the middle of life is not the self-knowledge that man's creators intended. And when we ask where the blame lies for this, we come to the other currents influencing man. We come to a stream that does not actually belong to man's nature, but which is, so to say, for the time being associated with him; we come to the Luciferic stream (yellow in diagram), we come to that stream which makes it possible for man to have a certain self-knowledge in the first half of his life, although it is not the luminous self-knowledge just described.

As you know, there is another current which unites for a time with man somewhat later; it is the Ahrimanic stream (blue). This stream prevents man, as he is on earth at present, from attaining in the second half of his life that luminous self-knowledge to which his creators had destined him. According to their intentions, the consciousness of man should have been in a much more enlightened state than the one he actually enters upon during the second half of his life, which is dimmed by ahrimanic influences. Naturally we need not think that luciferic influences are present only in the first half, ahrimanic influences only in the second half of life; they both persist throughout the whole of life. But these two influences are respectively concerned at the times in human life I have mentioned, with what I have just been describing. At other periods they have to do with something else. It is very important that no wrong conclusions should be drawn from what has been said. For instance, no one ought to say he has been told here that in the first half of his life man is luciferic, in the second half, ahrimanic. That would be completely untrue. Such misunderstandings often arise and it is important that no one should be misled by them. That is why over and over again I emphasise that in Spiritual Science we shall strive to speak accurately. Much harm is done by the way in which accurately given information about Spiritual Science is then repeated in public in another form, changed through preference or carelessness.

Thus, man stands in a threefold stream, to only one of which he really belongs. The other two were not originally in human evolution but have united themselves with it for a time. We can even say exactly when these influences entered in; you will find it in my “Occult Science”—the luciferic influence in the Lemurian age, the ahrimanic in the Atlantean age.

Now we cannot say that Goethe definitely knew anything of that phase of development, peculiar to man, beginning in the middle of his life. But he felt, he divined—divined very clearly—that through impulses inherent in the world-order man is a different being in the second half of his life from what he is in the first. And if we look into Goethe's soul-life more deeply than modern superficiality generally desires to do, we see his intense longing to gain something quite exceptional for his own life from the culture of the south—the culture of Italy. And if we follow up what he himself records of the benefits he reaped from the Italian tour, for himself, for his knowledge, for his art, we begin to feel hoe Goethe wished to make the transition into the second half of his life fruitful for himself through a deeply penetrating influence which he believed it impossible to experience by always remaining in his old surroundings. Goethe was conscious that in the forties something takes responsibility for the human soul which throws a very different light upon the nature of man than a man can gain through the human forces of the first half of life. And this knowledge, so clearly divined, flowed into the creation of the second part of his “Faust”. It was always particularly difficult for Goethe to approach the question: How does one acquire self-knowledge? If we follow his development aright, we may see his struggle for self-knowledge in a most interesting, most significant light. And little by little—not in the beginning, when he was still writing the youthful part of Faust, but later, gradually—the creation of Goethe's Faust-figure, and the whole poem, acquired such a stamp that the struggle for human self-knowledge may be said to find in “Faust” its most outstanding expression.

It was in this connection that Goethe thought out the figure of Homunculus, As I said before, I am not speaking to-night from the artistic standpoint but am relating to “Faust” a few remarks out of the essence of Spiritual Science. Thus Goethe thought out the figure of Homunculus in connection with his endeavour to depict in Faust man struggling towards self-knowledge. And what did the Homunculus-figure become under the influence of this preoccupation? The answer is that it came to represent all that man knows about man. What can we know about man by collecting together that knowledge which we have about the substances and forces of the earth? How can anyone imagine that those ingredients of earth-existence surrounding us in the kingdoms of nature can combine to form man? How is it possible to think that? For Goethe this became a burning question.

Remember how, when Schiller made friends with Goethe, he wrote him a most significant letter. I have often quoted this letter because it is characteristic both of the friendship between Goethe and Schiller and of the whole character of Goethe's soul. Schiller writes

“Though from some distance, I have for a long time been watching, with ever increasing admiration, the nature and course of your spiritual life. And I have seen that you are striving, so to say, to gather together all that is offered by the rest of nature, in order at length in your mind to put together man out of the sum-total of nature's works. This is a heroic undertaking before which any other intellect would have quailed. Had you been born a Greek, or even an Italian, an imaginative force enabling you to think of man as made up of the various ingredients of nature would have lived within you from your earliest youth. Since, however, you were born as a Northerner, you have been obliged to produce a spiritual Greece in your soul, and to supply by means of your imagination what did not exist in your surroundings.”

Thus Schiller attributes to Goethe this striving to obtain a knowledge of man by piecing together all the details to be gleaned from a knowledge of the kingdoms of nature. And that is actually the ideal which Goethe had before him. What can man know about man? But then there came to him at certain times the thought that the knowledge of man possible to acquire by earthly science is in truth small, that'll is no scan that comes into being through,this knowledge—only a manikin, a Homunculus. And Goethe was often assailed by the burning, tormenting thought: “We are in the world as men, feeling, thinking and willing as men, but we really only know something about Homunculus, not about Homo. The ideas we form concerning man bear as little relation to what man is in truth as does a little manikin in a glass test-tube”.

And for Goethe this burning question was associated with another: How can that element in knowledge which does not correspond to nature, to cosmic existence, be quickened so that it may, in knowledge at least, grow near to what in reality man is—of which he knows so little that actually it only amounts to knowledge of a Homunculus. That is why Goethe makes Wagner produce this manikin, Homunculus. Then, in the further development of his poem, he undertakes to show what sort of experience a man can have whereby his knowledge of man is widened, so that out of Homunculus there may grow something at least approaching Homo.

Now it was a belief of Goethe's that the only ideas which could be acquired in his day, the ideas which could be acquired from the culture of the North, were not sufficiently pliant and flexible to carry the Homunculus-knowledge further. Goethe believed that one could do better by endeavouring to clothe the knowledge of man that it,was still possible to acquire in one's soul life in such ideas as existed in an age that was nearer nature—such as the Greek age. It, was Goethe's firm belief that, by entering into the style and the form of Greek thought, one receives a deep, significant and vivifying impression, one's ideas acquire an added truth. This feeling lies at the root of his taking Faust to Greece, of his wanting to take him to Greece, to live there as a human being and to acquire Greek culture. Had Goethe been asked to state on his honour—I put it thus strongly on purpose—what he believed the men of his circle actually thought and felt, or had thought and felt, about the Greeks, he would probably have answered: “Oh, I should think more rubbish! They talk of Greek life, but have no ideas with which to grasp it. All that our pundits”—this is the sort of thing Goethe would have said—“all that our pundits think, write and print about Helen of Greece in modern times is just philistine trash, for in spite of it all they know nothing of Helen, nor of any other Greek, man or woman, as the Greeks really were”. But that was precisely what Goethe was striving after—to get nearer Greece in his soul. Hence his Faust had to get nearer Greece and had to live as a man among Greek men. Helen—as a Greek and the most beautiful of Greek women, as an outstanding Greek about whom so much strife and discord had arisen—Helen only supplied the point of contact for this. It the heightening, widening, strengthening of the knowledge of man, of the conception of man, that Goethe wants to accomplish in Faust.

Now in that Goethe kept all this clearly before him, (but as a kind of dim apprehension that became at the same time a torment for him) he was conscious that the abstract, philosophical path to knowledge, the path of science, regarded by many as the only right one, is all the same only one way of knowledge, and he dimly felt that there are many ways,. And whoever believes that Goethe was a rationalistic philistine—as really all upholders of modern science must be, otherwise they would not be genuine scientists, for science in the modern sense is itself pedantic, philistine, and rationalistic—whoever believes that Goethe was this kind of pedantic, rationalistic, philistine, understands nothing of him. He understands nothing at all of Goethe, my dear friends, who believes that he could for a single instant have supposed that, through ordinary scientific reflection any real knowledge could be acquired of the nature of man in his fulness. Goethe knew well that the human soul cannot discover truth merely on the path of thought or even on the path of that activity which takes place on the physical place; he knew that the soul of man has to find its way into reality and truth by several paths. Goethe was well acquainted with that approach to truth which takes a deeper course than the ordinary life of waking consciousness. This conscious, waking life in which our bright ideas run round, this life so highly valued by all the pedants, lies fundamentally very far from all that lives and weaves in the world as the basis of existence. In a certain respect man approaches nearer what lives and weaves below the surface of existence if—but this must not be misunderstood—out of his subconscious he sees and feels the arising, however chaotically, however sporadically, of significant dreams. In former years I have often told you that the content of dreams is of little importance; what is of importance is the inner drama, the connection between dream-life and deep human reality.

In a pamphlet, called “Dream-Fantasy”, a philosopher, Johannes Volkelt, in the seventies of last century, ventured timidly to suggest that man in his dreams comes near the riddle of the worlds. If only he had not later rectified this terrible professorial error by respectable pedantic works on the theory of knowledge! But then he never would have become Professor Johannes Volkelt, nor been allowed to teach philosophy in Basle, Würzburg, Jena, Leipzig. For it is a heinous sin against modern science to hint such a thing as that during his sleep-life man sinks into a real, cosmic stream, and that out of this experience things emerge which to be sure show themselves only in pictures, chaotically, and are therefore not to be accepted in their immediate form, but which nevertheless reveal how man, in the weaving of his sleep, is in a sphere that brings him nearer to the fulness of the living and weaving from which the physically visible springs than do his waking moments.

Now when a man plunges into this world—a world that the man of today only comes to know through his dreams, which do interpret it for him, even if badly—his situation within the entire world-order is different from what it is in ordinary waking consciousness. Of course the dream-life alone does not enable us to perceive the difference between the life in waking consciousness and the life we live down there in the sphere whence the dreams arise. But spiritual science can guide us into this sphere. Down there even language ceases to have its correct significance. That is why it is so difficult to come to an understanding. Down there in that sphere the words which we have formed for use in the sense-world cannot be properly applied to what takes place down there. Take for instance what used to be called the elements. Today we call them physical conditions describing them rather differently, But we can quite well understand if the old names earth, water, air, fire or warmth are used. We know these things from “Occult Science”; we can call what is solid, a solid physical condition, the earthly; what has a fluid physical condition, water; what has such a physical condition that, when it is not enclosed, it expands, we call air; whereas what permeates these three substances we call warmth or fire. Yes, my dear friends, we may call them so when, from the point of view of our waking consciousness, we speak here about our surroundings, because, if I may so express it, the things we denote by these words—earth, air, fire, water—are present with us. But if we plunge into the world out of which dreams are working, there are no such things as earth, air, fire, water, they do not exist; these words applied in the same way as for the world in which we are with our waking consciousness, no longer have meaning. As soon as we enter a different sphere of existence, a sphere that has to be grasped by a different consciousness, we see at once the relativity of these things. There—the things regarded by the ordinary materialistic consciousness as absolute—no longer exist. There earth is not earth. It has no meaning at all to talk of such things when we immerse ourselves in the world that, although also a reality, must be grasped by a quite different consciousness. To be sure, there is something there which may be said to stand midway between air and water; it is experienced in this different consciousness, through quite different forms of thought. Air is not air, water is not water, but there is something midway between air, and water; we might call it a sort of watery vapour, (German – Rauch) still called Ruach in the old Hebrew language. It does not mean the physical vapour or the mist we have now, but this intermediary something between water and air.

And another intermediary thing is there between earth and fire. This you must picture as though our metals were gradually to become so glowing and fiery that at last they become actually nothing but fire, fire through and through. And these things—intermediary between earth and fire and between air and water—are down there in the world out of which dreams come whirling. As you will easily understand we could not exist in that world in our physical body, we could not breathe in that world; we have to enter it with our souls, between falling asleep and waking. With our physical body we could not breathe in that world for there is no air. I have pictured in one of my Mystery Plays (“The Guardian of the Threshold”) a being who can breathe in this world, a being having no need of air, for he breathes light. Such beings may indeed be pictured by one who knows them. But no man may take his physical body into this world, for he could not breathe there and would be consumed by the fire. Nevertheless, man is united with this world, from falling asleep to waking, and out of it spring dreams.

Now this world that man encounters beneath the threshold of his consciousness is quite unlike the world we see today during our waking hours but it is not so unlike those worlds from which the present one has evolved. Former worlds, certainly the Sun-world—and this you can gather from the description in my “Occult Science”the Sun-world was even so formed as a physical world that in it fire-earth, earth-fire and water-air whirled and simmered together, not conveniently separated as they are today. Thus, if we are to grasp world-evolution cosmically and historically, we must picture earlier conditions of our evolution as similar to what we find today when we dive down into the world to which we belong between falling asleep and waking.

These worlds, however, that were formerly physically present, just as now our world is physically present, can only be experienced today in sleep, and no one can penetrate to them unless he imagines what is no longer visible in our present world to be visible and manifest. You cannot think of water-air in the same way as today you have to think of water and air as existing side-by-side. Today you think of water and air as separate. That has come about because the water-air, substantially one in former times, has now been differentiated. Water-air is now separated into the two polaric opposites—water and air. Formerly it was a unity, water-air, but was permeated instead by another pole. Today, man has so to say descended, and has completely lost the other pole of the water-air, instead the water-air has itself separated into the two poles—water and air. If we want to get an idea of what the other pole of the water-air was, we must imagine something having reality also experienced in the world where man is between falling asleep and waking, the world from which dreams arise. But too if we go back to the old Sun-existence, we have to think of the water-air as having had side by side with it something of a spiritual nature, something of the essence of the elemental spirits. You still find the elemental spirits belonging to the water-air in mythology, where echoes of ancient truths still remain. And among the beings associated with the water-air are those that in Greek mythology—or indeed in any ancient mythology—are called Sirens. So that when out of real knowledge we say of the world we are referring to that there are in it water-air and Sirens—that it is composed of water-air and Sirens—we are speaking with as much truth as when we say of our external world that it contains water and air. Thus the Sirens belong to those elemental beings who are the other pole of water-air.

The other thing in the old Sun existence was earth-fire or fire-earth, Whereas today we have earth that has been pushed down below the level of the water, with fire or heat above it, formerly these two were one. And among those beings who were related polarically to the earth-fire as are fire or warmth to earth today, is that being whom Goethe, following the Greeks, called Seismos. By bringing Sirens into the relevant scene, Goethe points at the same time very clearly to their connection with water; not however with water as it is today, for that has grown denser and is only one pole of the old water-air. The Sirens feel themselves related to water only in a spiritual way. If we think of water as the old water-air, the Sirens belong to that water as air belongs to the water of today. And as the air produces chaotic sounds in the wind, so the spiritual element in the Sirens produces what belongs to water or water-air; the spiritual element is combined with water-air as air is with our water. And the activity of the Seismos, regarded as cosmic force, is the part played by fire in nature's economy. This is what the myth means, this is what Goethe means. And his presentation of the matter makes everyone acquainted with the reality feel that Goethe had a dim apprehension of these things. He knew that things are thus in the world we enter between falling asleep and waking, the world we find again if with understanding we turn our gaze back to the primal sources of our present existence.

But consider, my dear friends, what a shock you would have if you were suddenly in full consciousness—not as in dreams but quite consciously—transported into an element, into a sphere, where you had no solid earth beneath your feet, a sphere where everything that should be earth was fire, and where there was no earth! There you could even melt if you wished, and become hot or cold in the element of fire. And in the water-air, where you could not breathe but only experience alternations of light and darkness—think how alarmed you would necessarily be at first by the insecurity into which you had plunged, in all this surging and whirling. What then entered into man in those cosmic epochs when the earth solidified (as must once have happened, for at one time men had been living in this surging and weaving element I have described) so that he too could stand firm? What was it that took hold of man? The Sphinx-nature! This gives the firm centre of gravity in the surging element. The same force that gave to the earth the form whereby it has become this solid planet on which man can stand, at the same time wove into man what can be described, pictured, as the nature of the Sphinx.

Now in this scene Goethe introduces what can actually only be experienced between falling asleep and waking. And he believed this can best be presented not in the concepts of our modern waking consciousness, but in Greek concepts. He finds them more flexible and more suitable. Therefore he transfers the whole scene to Greece, thinking that with ideas taken from Greek nature he will be better able to characterise all that man experiences today between falling asleep and waking, all that he experienced in ancient times when air was not opposed to water, nor fire to earth, but when the Sirens formed the opposite pole to water-air, and some being like the Seismos formed the opposite pole to earth-fire or fire-earth.

So now he allows this world to make its appearance in his “Faust”. And why does he do this? It is all a question of proceeding from Homunculus to Homo, the point is that Homunculus should be given a prospect of not remaining merely Homunculus but of becoming Homo—of understanding enough to become man. Therefore his experience of the world has to be enlarged. And so aptly does Goethe bring this about that when he introduces Homunculus to this ancient cosmic world he at once places Sphinxes in it. “The Sphinxes have taken their seat”, and these form the solid element. There is a surging all around that, in these days, could not be suffered, for mortal terror would assail mankind. Everything is surging. But though the whole of hell break loose when the spirits behave as the Sirens and Seismos are doing it is pointed out that man has found his foothold—his centre of gravity:

“What a sickening thrill hereunder!”

Here is pictured the world of which I have been speaking,

“What a dire and dreadful thunder!
What a heaving, what a quaking,
Rocking to and fro and shaking,”

Were you to plunge into this world you would soon experience the ‘rocking to and fro’.

“What unbearable annoy.”

But now comes the reflection:

“Yet we” (the the Sphinxes) “budge not, though the nether
Hell should all burst forth together.”

Into the ideas of men something of such a conception perpetually flows. Men do not know it, but their ideas are influenced by what dwells at the foundations of existence. And this is the cause of many fanciful theories. The theory that the mountain ranges were formed by fire, is quite right for more ancient epochs of cosmic evolution, but this was earth-fire, fire-earth, not fire as we know it. This has introduced an element of confusion into modern ideas. And from a higher point of view, most modern ideas are confused. They can only be understood—however strange this may sound, my dear friends, it is true—these ideas, these theories can often only be understood if they are translated. They are heard in the ordinary, common-place, philistine language of men; they first begin to have meaning when translated into the language that must have been used between falling asleep and waking, for then it becomes clear that these theories bear within them faint indications of earlier earth-epochs. And the only way to understand the scene beginning here, is to realise that Goethe wanted to show the experience man would have were he conscious from falling asleep to waking, an experience that would develop in him a consciousness of a former cosmic condition of the earth.

Think how clearly Goethe must have foreseen the knowledge of Spiritual Science, to have presented these things so correctly. And that is not all. Homunculus is to be introduced to this world. Goethe seems to say—if once more I may be permitted to express it rather strongly—“Now when I turn to the ideas of philistine science, I naturally find nothing able to make a Homo of Homunculus; I can get nothing from that quarter. But if I make use of such ideas as can be acquired when a man consciously experiences the world he enters between falling asleep and waking, and, absorbing them into my soul, embody them into the scene of ‘Faust’, then perhaps I shall be more successful in acquiring, a wider knowledge of man, so that Homunculus may become Homo.”—Therefore Goethe makes Homunculus plunge, not into the philistine, scientific world experienced by man today, but into another world, introduced here, the world man experiences from the time he falls asleep to the time he wakes. In that world a man experiences so many things; curiously enough, he experiences something of how unequal in their evolutionary stages are the beings who live close to us in the cosmos. We understand nothing, literally nothing, of this world, when we consider these beings side-by-side, giving them all an equal value. When we observe ants or bees, or the whole unique insect-world in general, then, my dear friends, we arrive at the conclusion (I have put this before you at other times, in other places, as the view of Spiritual Science) that these are either forms left behind from former epochs, or forms anticipating what is to come later—like the bees, the hive of bees; they are beings projected into our epoch, though by their form they actually belong to another.

You see, when scientific nit-wits describe the world—as for instance Forel who made such a study of ants, then one finds most amazing things said. For if these people cling to their crude scientific methods, and never come to Spiritual Science, of course they are unable to give any explanation of what is really to be wondered at in this world—this world permeated everywhere by reason; not over the single ant, but over the ant-hill as a whole, over the whole ant-world, over the whole bee-world, cosmic reason, so much wiser than brain reason, is outpoured. And, in a certain respect these all really belong to a former world. Just think how aptly Goethe describes it when he brings in the ants, the emmets; and when he makes a mountain arise, as it was in an earlier cosmic evolution, and as one sees it in another sphere of reality, during the time between falling asleep and waking, he makes ants appear and begin to busy themselves with what the mountain has brought into existence. But, as companions for these ants, he makes other strange beings. For in fact the ants together with pretty well the whole of the insect-world constitute a race that does not properly belong to the earth as it is at present. This world of the ants feels itself as an anachronism in the present world. The ants have not much in common with it and have no real companions. The other animals are of quite another kind. There are tremendous differences between the soul-spiritual quality of the insect-race, for example, the ants, and that of other animals. The companions of the ants are actually not the physical animal-forms of today, but spiritual elemental beings that Goethe introduces as Pygmies, as dwarfs, as Dactyls; though the ants have succeeded in acquiring a physical nature on earth, the pygmies and the dactyls are more closely akin to them than to the beings of the present day. Thus, Goethe knows of this ant-race belonging to an ancient cosmic epoch, and introduces it covertly into this scene.

Now how has this world of ours arisen? As you know, its present condition has developed out of the old. We have now spoken of the old condition, and the present one only needs to be mentioned, for it is all that surrounds us on the physical earth. But this present earth has not come about without a struggle. It was through a mighty cosmic conflict that the old developed into the new. And the question arises: Can one observe this struggle? The answer is that we observe it when we can become conscious of waking from a very vivid dream to a condition of half-wakefulness; when we are aroused from a state of deep sleep to one less deep, and though not quite awake, are on the way to being so. We are approaching the sense-world but have not completely left the world below, and we find ourselves in a struggle closely resembling the conflict that went on when the old world was changing into the new. Again Goethe presents it all so faithfully that, while to express the old world-order he makes a dream arise, he also represents the waking from the dream by describing a struggle in the cosmos. The present comes into conflict with all that belongs to the past. The pygmies belonging to the old world come into conflict with the herons belonging to the waters of the present. The sight of this conflict as it takes place is at the same time an awakening. And Goethe makes it so clear that we are concerned with an awakening that he even alludes to what often happens on waking: one hears something that appears to be still in the dream spiritually, in imaginative picture form, and which then passes over into external reality—the coming of the cranes of Ibycus that appear in this scene. In the first part of the scene, Goethe shows us what can be experienced in dream-consciousness when it is fully developed, something which points to earlier earth-conditions; and this he believed he could more easily accomplish with Greek ideas than with those of the present day.

And now, for Homunculus. He has not yet got so far as this, for the man of today is not able to become fully conscious of what takes place in that lower sphere. Goethe intimates this quite clearly. Man today is hampered by fear, by anxiety, even though these may be unconscious. I have often spoken of this. Homunculus will not venture into that world and says so quite clearly. When he makes his re-appearance in the scene, he declares that he will not go in; he wishes to rise, that is, he wishes to become Homo, but into that world he refuses to enter.

“From place to place I flit and hover,
And fain would I in the best sense exist.
Impatiently I long my glass to shiver.
To risk me though I do not list
in aught I yet have seen. ...”

Thus it is a dangerous world into which Homunculus will not plunge. He would like to take the step from Homunculus to Homo in a less perilous world.

Now, had someone asked Goethe “Then you don't think much use can be made of the dream-world, the sleep-world, in changing Homunculus to Homo in the human head; but what about philosophy? Philosophers reflect upon the riddle of the world. What about philosophy? How would it be if Leibnitz or Kant were asked about true manhood?” Then Goethe would have put on a very sceptical expression—very sceptical indeed. He ascribed all kinds of good qualities to modern philosophers, but he did not believe them capable of penetrating into the being of man, of contributing anything to enable Homunculus to become Homo in a human life-time. Here too he thought one would get nearer by using Greek ideas. Goethe was well acquainted with the life of ancient Greece, with the times in which Anaxagoras and Thales lived. Their ideas came nearer the old Mystery outlook, they still retained some knowledge of those spiritual worlds from which for man only dreams arise. For this reason he makes Homunculus meet two ancient Greek philosophers, of whom the one, Anaxagoras, still knew a great deal of the old Mystery-wisdom, especially of the secrets of the fire-earth. Into the thinking, into the wise philosophy of Anaxagoras, ideas still rose up of the ancient Mysteries connected with what happened in the fire-earth.

With Thales, too, there were still recollections of old ideas, associated with the secrets of the water-air; but at the same time Goethe makes it clear that the conceptions of Anaxagoras though loftier, are becoming superseded, and that with Thales the new age is beginning. The history of the new philosophy, the history of philosophy in general, begins rightly with Thales. I have mentioned this in my “Riddles of Philosophy”. He is, it may be said, the original philistine, as Goethe's shows him here; he has to introduce the philistine outlook of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch that indeed in a certain, but only shadowy, way is connected with the secrets of the water-air.

Thus, in the first part of this scene in which he is describing things out of experiences of the dream-world,the world of Seismos, to which the pygmies belong, Goethe is describing all that is associated with the creative forces of Seismos. And the element of water that he uses to make the transition to the present time, describing it not as water-air, but as water, with herons and so on—this element of water he places in contrast to fire; water versus fire, actually water-air versus fire-earth. And water and fire come into conflict—pygmies versus herons. And it is the same battle, only in another sphere, transferred into the sphere of reason, that takes place between Anaxagoras, the philosopher of fire, and Thales, the philosopher of water, as has previously taken place between the pygmies as representing the earth or earth-fire, and the herons, as representing the water or water-air.

So good is the parallelism that, in this second stage of his representation, Goethe correctly shows how Homunculus, who has not ventured himself below into the subconscious element with a view to becoming man now takes refuge above in the conscious. He wants to learn how to become Homo from the philosophers, from those who would still preserve in consciousness much that should be experienced in the subconscious. But it turns out that, because the philosophers derive their impulses from different spheres of experience, they do not agree, and themselves come into conflict, the same conflict of ideas as those that lie at the foundation of cosmic conflicts. There is the same conflict between the views of Anaxagoras and those of Thales as between the pygmies and the herons—the very same.

And what is Goethe doing? He first pictures what goes, on down in the unconscious world, and then leads up to the world of consciousness but associates this world with the recollections arising from the unconscious, recollections specially clear in Anaxagoras. This is why Thales looks upon Anaxagoras as a visionary.

But we have already had to do with a second stratum, with the sphere in which the waking consciousness too is intermingled, albeit in a more or less spiritual fashion, or as I have described it, half-asleep and half awake. This is the second layer of experience that Goethe has shown. And it is very significant that he gives what is experienced in this sphere in a different form from that in which he gave the first. He makes the scene open with the Sirens. We are in the world of sleep, the world of dreams; to be in this world, there is no necessity to do anything; Goethe, therefore, simply places it before us. Then we wake up out of this world, and in waking come to our ordinary-consciousness. For a special reason Goethe has combined Lucifer and Ahriman into the one Mephistopheles. This waking he shows in the experience of Mephistopheles, and it is interesting that, as long as Mephistopheles represents the condition of being but half-awake, he is still down below, experiencing it through the Greek Lamiae. Then the scene rises into conscious life, But if Homunculus-Mephistopheles is now to enter fully conscious life, the life of reason, the man must rouse himself, he must pull himself together, and wake out of dreams to reality. Hence, when he wakes, Mephistopheles meets the Oread, who indicates very clearly in Goethe's language that this is so,

“Up hither,up; My mount is old,
And still loth keep its primal mould,
Honour the rude cliff-stair ascending,
Last-spur of Pindus, far extending.
Already thus firm-stablished
I stood as Pompey o'er me fled.
That fabric of a dream will fade
At cockcrow with the nightly shade.”

While sleep-consciousness is being shaken into waking consciousness, the Oread points out that a transition is now taking place from the world called the world of illusion—though in one way it is, as I have shown, a world of reality—a transition to the world where mountains stand firm, and everything does not rock up and down. And Goethe does not hesitate to indicate quite clearly how one wakes out of this world. Think how often we are wakened out of the world from which dreams surge by the crowing of a cock. Goethe makes it perfectly clear that we are coming up into the waking world where philosophers have to hold forth, where through what they have to say it is expected that Homunculus will become man.

There is much I could add, perhaps tomorrow. In the meantime I shall only draw your attention to the fact that, after we have done with this world, Goethe still points us to a third. And just as it was the mountain nymph, the Oread, who gave the first indication of this waking world, so now it is another nymph, that is, an elemental being, who does the arousing. The tree nymph, the Dryad, leads Mephistopheles to a third layer of consciousness, in which understanding and clairvoyance are united: unconscious, conscious, super-conscious. And, in a certain respect, Goethe already points to the world we also would point to through Spiritual Science. Only, he does so in a quite unique way. The beings whom Mephistopheles finds next are the Phorkyads.

From our coming performance you will see what pleasant, beautiful beings these Phorkyads are, and particularly what an impressive, heart-stirring language they speak! And yet, anyone realising what experiences a man must be prepared to meet, on consciously winning through to the spiritual world, will understand this meeting of Mephistopheles with the Phorkyads.

This matter cannot be completely dealt with in one lecture; we will speak further about it tomorrow.

Among the somewhat authoritative judgments that have been made in the present day about today's chaotic world situation, one of the most significant is undoubtedly that of the Englishman John Maynard Keynes, who, in his book The Economic Consequences of the Versailles Peace, offers such an assessment of the current general world situation. Keynes was undoubtedly led to such a judgment by his external circumstances. During the war, he was assigned to the English Treasury and was in a position to form a basis for such a judgment from the underlying facts that presented themselves to him there. On the other hand, he was among the envoys, among the collaborators of the Versailles Peace Treaty itself. However, he resigned from this position as early as June 1919. And this resignation, like the conclusions he reaches in his book on the economic consequences of the peace treaty, are precisely what sheds significant light on the way this personality relates to the current world situation. Keynes, too, was one of those who, when they first went to Versailles, probably still saw something of a prophet and organizer of the current world situation in the personality of Woodrow Wilson, who had come over from America and was received with such great glory. He has thoroughly changed his mind. And those of us who, even at a time when Woodrow Wilson was being declared a world liberator by an enormous crowd, including from this place here in Switzerland, has given his opinion that the empty and abstract arguments of Woodrow Wilson and his manifestos cannot contribute anything to the real reconstruction of the destroyed civilization, may well point to such an authoritative judgment today. In his book, Keynes describes, as far as personality is concerned, with an intense vividness — one might say. He describes how Woodrow Wilson arrives in Versailles, how he participates in the meetings, how slow his thinking is, how he, so to speak, always lags behind. While the others are already well ahead with their assessment of the situation, he is still far behind with something that was said five, six or ten sentences ago. He is a man who suffers from the slowness of his thinking. Much else is vividly described in relation to the personality of this alleged liberator of the world.

But Keynes also speaks about the other leading figures who were involved in this peace agreement, and speaks urgently. He describes how Clemenceau is a man who has actually slept through the whole development of European humanity since the 1770s, who actually wanted nothing more from this peace settlement than to reduce the world, in a sense, to what was available in Europe in the 1770s. And he then describes no less vividly and graphically how Lloyd George is actually superior to everyone else, how he has a certain instinct for sensing what is being thought and done and wanted by the personalities around him. And from all this one can see how difficult it is today, even for an astute observer like Keynes, to gradually arrive at a judgment through the force of the facts. That is what contributes more and more to the increasing chaos in the world today: that the leading personalities, the affairs that public life has brought to the surface in recent decades, are not at all up to the great demands of the present time. This is precisely what emerges from the book and its assessment. It shows that all the destructive forces at work in the world cannot be brought under any kind of judgment by those who have been called to leadership by public life. And since Keynes saw that nothing could come out of this conference that would lead to a healthy and prosperous further development of European civilization, he resigned from office right at the beginning of the negotiations. And the way he constructs his judgment is extraordinarily significant. In the present situation, one really only needs to construct something real on judgments that are based on such foundations. Keynes' judgment is, I would say, calculated. Only those personalities who have a certain sense and instinct for calculating the future with all sobriety from still existing forces in a certain way can really have a say in the present. They should be listened to with special attention, because the great majority of judgments made today are based on some kind of nationalistic or other prejudices, while only a few people are able to form objective judgments from the facts themselves. Keynes is one of them. He considers what might follow from what the three leading figures at Versailles have cooked up, especially in economic terms, and what would have to happen to the economic life of European civilization if nothing else occurred but the forces that were brought to bear at Versailles. And Keynes calculates – I say explicitly and I emphasize it very strongly – Keynes calculates that nothing other than the economic ruin of Europe can follow from this peace agreement. Of course, the intellectual and political ruin of Europe must be connected with the economic ruin.

Thus the book about the economic consequences of the Versailles Peace Treaty is interesting enough just because of its content. But in some respects it becomes even more interesting because of its conclusion. In this conclusion Keynes openly admits that he has no idea what should be done or wanted to get out of the chaos into which we are entering. And in making this confession, he says something that is actually extraordinarily significant, which he summarizes in a single sentence. He says that one can only hope that some salvation for European civilization will come from the combination of all the forces involved in a new state of mind and new imaginations.

My dear attendees, this is said by a man who has been immersed in the circumstances, who was called upon to participate, who, through his analysis, shows that he is a person who can calculate soberly in the broadest sense. A new state of mind, a gathering of all forces for a new view of the powers at work in the public life of humanity, where can these be found? How can we arrive at such a view?

Now, ladies and gentlemen, it will not take much impartiality to convince you that the first step in this direction is to examine the essentials of contemporary public life without any prejudice and to ask ourselves: What are the actual forces at work in contemporary public life? In earlier lectures, which I had the honor of giving here, I pointed out what kind of historical considerations should be used to arrive at the truly effective forces in human life. Above all, one must look for certain symptoms that vividly illustrate what is at work in the depths of human development. And so I would like to point out something that is perhaps one of the most outstanding forces that has worked with the forces of destruction. I would like to point out the basis of the world view of the present day, but in the way it has developed over the last three to four centuries. I do not wish to give the impression that a Weltanschhauung, founded in the solitude of a thinker, can now go out and influence every single soul, and that public affairs can, as it were, come into being out of such a Weltanschhauung. That is certainly not the case. But just as public affairs grow out of the will, out of feeling, out of the emotional life, out of the thoughts of the overall state of the human being, so too does the world view grow out of this overall state of human life, especially of the human soul. And one can see, as in a symptom, what the people of an age are like in their whole work and in their whole activity, when one, so to speak, considers the symptom of the world view, insofar as one wants to point to the world views that are decisive and have come into their own in the present. This determining factor is characterized, in particular, by the fact that everything that has not entered our world view through tradition from ancient times has developed out of the soil of natural science, which seeks to base its knowledge on external material observation alone. What does this natural scientific world view show, when looked at more deeply?

Perhaps only someone who can admire it can judge it correctly. And in earlier lectures, I have certainly expressed my admiration for the scientific world view strongly enough. These remarks, which I am developing here, are not meant to be a criticism of this scientific world view, which is certainly justified in its field. This scientific view, especially in its technical and economic consequences, has led to great fruits of civilization for humanity. But suppose there were some spirit today — it is hardly possible, firstly, given the vast field of scientific knowledge and, secondly, given its specialization — but suppose there were some spirit today that embraced the whole revolution of the scientific view from mathematics and from mechanics up to biology and up to what can be gained from biology for the science of the human soul: such a mind would undoubtedly be able to gain significant insights into certain areas of nature and being. But if such a mind were to ask itself with complete clarity the great and comprehensive human question: What is man in his own essence and in his whole relationship to the world? then the one who stands firmly on the ground of natural science, who is able to correctly assess the scope of scientific knowledge, would have to say: the scientific world view cannot answer these questions about the human being and about the relationship of the human being to the rest of the cosmos. This question remains unanswered, even by the latest physical scientific knowledge. There are already some great insights into how man has emerged in outward physical development from lower, animal-like forms to his present human form. But these insights have led man far away from what man is in his relationship to spiritual worlds. Those who cannot admit this to themselves without prejudice will also be unable to form an opinion about the inner impulses from which present-day humanity acts, whether it is organizing public affairs or destroying public organizations. For even if we are not always conscious of how we think consciously about the nature of man and his position in the world, even if we are not always conscious of the thoughts we entertain in this position, these thoughts, however unconsciously or instinctively they may be, they work in our feelings and in our decisions of will. They therefore become the creators of all public, spiritual, political and economic life. Anyone who wants to see things correctly will realize that economic interrelationships, since they are made by people, but since people in turn act out of their soul impulses, the economic interrelationships of the world are also a reflection of what people are able to feel about themselves and about their relationship to the world. Now we have to say: the scientific world view has grown large over all that is non-human. It cannot provide any answers about the human being itself. It is extensive when information is required about the sub-human realms. But how does the information that we, as human beings, acquire relate to what we should allow to flow into social life from our ideas and from our inner soul impulses, and in particular into the way we live together with other people and groups of people? Can we receive any impulses for human activity and human coexistence from those areas that lie outside of the human being? This is best shown by observing the relationship between the human being and language.

Language is basically the medium through which everything that leads from person to person comes to life. Through language, we also control economic life. Through language, we inaugurate external political and spiritual conditions. Now there is something most remarkable, which unfortunately is not often considered thoroughly enough. When we try to apply our language to scientific knowledge, we can never do anything other than extend the words, the phrases, and everything we use to express natural laws, those natural laws that we today so admire as the great progress of modern humanity, we can do nothing but extend to nature what we have formed in words as an expression of inner soul conditions or of conditions in man. Such subtle minds as Goethe's noticed this. That is why Goethe said: Man does not realize how anthropomorphic he is. -— When we say: an elastic ball pushes the other -, and we derive from it the laws of elastic' push in physics, then we basically start from what we have in the word meaning for the push that we carry out in our own organism. And anyone who really wants to investigate will see that everything that can be applied from language to natural science, which deals with the non-human, must be taken from the human being.

How did our language come to have content? It would have come to very little content if we could only imitate the mooing of a cow and other animal sounds. How did our language come to have such content? Those who can look impartially at the course of human development will find that all the content of language comes from the fact that, in times that were indeed behind our civilization, humanity had a certain instinctive-spiritual knowledge, I say: an instinctive-spiritual knowledge with the natural elementary empathy that arises in the human soul. With the impulses of the will, with pictorial imagination, which found expression in myth and mythology, spiritual insights came to man, and out of these spiritual insights he formed the content of the soul , which then became the content of his language in modern times, which is great in that it looked in a certain disdainful way at what instinctive spiritual abilities gave to man in an earlier time. In this modern time, in which one has become great primarily in relation to natural science, in this modern time our words have not been given any new content. And one thing is historically significant in the last two to four centuries: our language, all languages of our civilized world, have lost their old content. No new content could be poured into them because that which cannot provide such content, mere knowledge of nature, is that which has been developed in this very time. And in this time, which we must otherwise admire so much, there took place what may be called the emptying of civilized languages of their old spiritual content.

What did the civilized languages become as a result of losing their old instinctive content and natural science being unable to give them a new one? — They became that which has now reached a certain climax in the present day. They became that which developed into a phrase, and truly nothing that would only have a meaning in a limited area, but what is practiced today by those who exercise world domination is called a phrase. And the four to five years of horror that we have behind us have shown the world domination of the phrase at its peak. Today we live under the world domination of the phrase. What is the remedy for this world domination of the phrase? Only the acquisition of a new spiritual content, a conscious spiritual content. The old spiritual content, acquired by earlier humanity through instinct, which made language the sum of words, not phrases, is gone. Humanity that is truly attached to the present can no longer believe in it. A new conscious spiritual content must be conquered.

That, dear attendees, is what the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, which has its representatives in the Dornach building, is consciously striving for: to conquer conscious spiritual knowledge in addition to scientific knowledge, which provides such great insights into everything gives such wonderful insights into everything outside of the human being, to conquer with the same clarity of thought, logical rigor, and scientific conscientiousness, spiritual knowledge that can now provide information about the great question of the nature of the human being and the human being's place in the rest of the cosmos. However, before one can proceed to such knowledge, one must admit that, although the external scientific method must be imitated in its conscientiousness today by all knowledge, it cannot itself lead to spiritual knowledge. In order to arrive at spiritual knowledge, it is necessary that the human being of today, above all, brings to bear those inner abilities that are to arise precisely on the soil of the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science meant here. I have shown how man can come to such knowledge through his own soul life, for example in my book 'How to Know Higher Worlds' and in the second part of my 'Occult Science'. However, one thing is necessary - I have emphasized it here often enough - one thing is necessary for man, to which he now only surrenders with the greatest reluctance. It is necessary to have what I would call intellectual modesty. Modern man is so proud of his intellectual development. Intellectual modesty only asserts itself when, for example, one says to oneself: Suppose you give a five-year-old child a volume of Goethe's poetry. What will the child do with a volume of Goethe's lyric poems? It would probably tear it up or play with it. It certainly would not get from the volume of Goethe's lyric poems what an adult can get and what the volume of Goethe's lyric poetry is actually meant for. The abilities that can determine it, that can make it possible for him to let the volume of Goethean poetry take effect on him in the right way, must first be cultivated in the child bit by bit. For this development of childlike abilities, one surrenders a lot in human life today. But that a person, when he has grown up and is equipped only with the abilities that one can acquire in normal, external, sensual human life today, that he could then stand before the world itself as the five-year-old child stands before the volume of Goethe's lyrical poems, that he must first develop by taking his soul abilities into his own hands in order to extract from what what is presented to him in the world, something that can be compared to what the child first draws from the volume of Goethe's lyrical poems when he has grown up, in other words, what he does with the volume of Goethe's lyrical poems at the age of twenty-five – yes, to admit that, in his intellectual arrogance, the man of the present does not want to do that. But this must be asserted above all, that in order to truly know oneself, to finally fulfill the Apollonian saying “Know thyself,” it is necessary to take hold of the human soul faculties. How this is possible in detail will be the subject of tomorrow's lecture.

Today I would just like to emphasize in general terms that it is indeed possible for the human being to strengthen their thinking through a certain treatment of their thinking, which I will describe tomorrow. This enables their thinking to no longer passively , but that it is inwardly seized as by a will, becomes active, that it becomes more intense, that it occurs in such a way that the person knows through inner experience in direct perception: now thinking has become a spiritual-soul seeing. While in ordinary thinking one is dependent on one's thinking apparatus, on one's body, on the nervous system, and while, just when one develops thinking a little, one sees through this dependence, one also knows that when thinking is strengthened in the appropriate ways, which are described in the books mentioned, it becomes free from the body, it becomes an activity that is no longer guided by the instrument of the body. Certain meditations, to which one devotes oneself with the same objectivity with which one conducts an experiment in a chemical laboratory or observes the stars in an observatory, empower this thinking and free it from the tool of the body. It is only when this thinking is to be used for a real world-view that self-discipline of the will must be applied. When self-discipline of the will, together with inner meditation, develops into will-imbued thinking that is independent of the body, only then does spiritual knowledge arise, conscious spiritual knowledge, which in turn can give man what instinctive spiritual knowledge once gave him: content for speech, content for language. The moment man ceased to feel within himself the impulse to give content to his speech out of himself, the moment instinctive spiritual perception ceased and was replaced by external natural perception, which cannot give content to speech, the development of man in a certain respect came to a standstill. But man must recognize from the signs of the present that he must acquire self-knowledge and knowledge of humanity through conscious inner soul work, through the development of his thinking to soul-vision, and that only through this can arise what in turn gives content to our language, what can eliminate the world domination of the phrase.

But such knowledge also gives us the insight that the external world, as we observe it with our senses, is something we grow into in the course of our lives between birth and death, that these external observations cannot give us the actual spiritual, that this, the actual spiritual content, is brought into the world by us, that we bring it with us, in that we descend from spiritual worlds — as I said, we will talk about these things in more detail tomorrow — through birth into this physical world, that when we speak of the spiritual content, we must look at what people carry within, what they develop only through the instrument of their body, little by little, from year to year. It is not the ever-increasing wealth of the world's experience that brings the spirit into reality, but what we, as human individuals, bring into the world through our birth. Today people are only afraid of what man himself brings into the world. They are afraid because they believe that if he asserts it, it would lead to fantasy. But there are ways to avoid this fantasy. But anyone who realizes that, fundamentally, all spiritual content must come from human individuality will readily admit that a fruitful development of this spiritual life can only come about if the human being is given the full opportunity for human development, if he is not dependent in his spiritual development and in the expression and revelation of his spirit on any external powers that serve only here in the physical world. For with the rise of pure scientific knowledge, that knowledge which only provides information about what is non-human, there has also arisen, as organically connected with it, the dependence of spiritual life not on what the human being carries into the world through birth, but on what the external state life establishes, on what the economic life makes of the human being. At the same time as the natural sciences were coming of age, we saw the omnipotence of the state develop to the highest degree, with the state stretching its tentacles over everything that is intellectual life; it began to organize school life, and economic life, on the other hand, became decisive for the lives of those personalities who were able to enter precisely this intellectual field. But this has gone hand in hand with the fact that the human being has lost the ability to give birth out of himself a spiritual content, to give his words a spiritual content. Therefore, in the age of natural science, the dependence of spiritual life on political and economic powers has developed, and under this influence the world domination of phrase has developed.

This is the first link in the chain of present-day organizations that are working towards destruction: the world domination of phrase, of empty talk. If a person is incapable of investing words with the spiritual substance that he draws directly from his connection with the spiritual world, then words must become empty phrases; words must gradually become so ingrained in a person that he is, as it were, merely carried away by the mechanisms of language. And unfortunately we see this all too clearly emerging in modern times: that which breaks out with elemental force from the spiritual and soul inner being of the human being, which, as it were, only discharges into language, disappears. Life in the mechanisms of language becomes more and more intense, and it has reached its climax in recent years. Because people, by talking to each other about the civilized world, were talking directly or indirectly through the print of nothing, and by the words only taking place in their mechanism, that which was driven by chaotic forces to destruction developed.

I know very well that there is little inclination in the present day to go into these intimacies of human life when the causes of the present chaos are to be discussed. But no one will gain clear ideas and clear judgments about these causes if they do not want to go into these intimacies of the human soul. Not until this happens will harmony replace chaos in public affairs; not until spiritual deepening, through genuine spiritual science, gives rise in man to the urge to give his words full content. For that which certainly first appears in the scientific field, that which is born in the scientific field, it pushes its way into the other habits of life, it becomes the one that sets the tone in public life. And anyone who has an eye for observing life sees how, in the end, only the final consequences of what is ultimately present as the characteristic feature play out in everyday life, where worldviews are formed. Indeed, people have not wanted to properly survey the connections that arise there for a long time. Here in Switzerland, a blustering spirit once worked, I explicitly call him a blustering spirit so that you can see that I am not overestimating him, Johannes Scherr. He spoiled a lot with his blustering tone and his blustering judgment, which was also in the healthy thoughts that he had in what he said publicly. In the 1960s and 1970s, he made a very significant judgment based on a truly penetrating observation of historical and social life. He said: If the materialistic demon, which now only relies on that which man sees and experiences in the external world, continues to prevail, it will also enter into everything that man does in external public affairs; it will enter into economic and financial life, and a social structure will develop that will finally lead to the fact that one must say: Nonsense, you triumphed!

My dear audience! We don't like to listen to such people. This judgment of Johannes Scherr has also been ignored. But now, fifty years later, it must be said for those who look at everything connected with the so-called world catastrophe: the words of this world observer Johannes Scherr, which culminated in the sentence: You will have to say: Nonsense, you triumphed – the words have been fulfilled! For Johannes Scherr saw well how that which is spirit has gradually been squeezed out of human life, how the materialistic un-spirit has taken the place of the spirit, and he was able to turn this observation into a true prophecy. The world simply does not know that what is initially only a worldview, only a theory, that basically after two generations becomes moral, public action, becomes deed. Oh, the world should be much, much better at noticing certain connections! It should form a much more thorough judgment, a real judgment about certain things!

A philosopher, Avenarius, also worked here for a time. He is a kindred spirit of Mach, who in turn had a student work here in Zurich quite recently. These people have drawn the consequences in the field of world view from the current materialistic lack of spirit – I call it a lack of spirit because mere knowledge of nature cannot infuse our language with substantial content. They, the philosophers, Avenarius and so on, have drawn the consequences for their world view from the materialistic lack of spirit of the time. The philosophy they have gained, and the whole way in which people like Avenarius live, is good bourgeois. Of course no one will recognize in these people anything other than good citizens. But today something else should be recognized. Today, we should study the question based on the facts: What has become of the state philosophy of Lenin and Trotsky? What is the state philosophy of the Bolsheviks? It is the Avenarius-Mach school of thought! It is not just a matter of the temporal connection that a number of these people studied here in Zurich; it is the inner factual connection that what lives in the human soul as a world-view thought in one generation becomes action in the third generation. And in these deeds one can see the causes as they play out in the world. But today's humanity only wants abstract logical judgments and does not understand that something that is logically deduced is not yet a judgment of fact, that one must look with real spiritual insight into the real context, into the context of reality, and then seemingly most dissimilar, the bourgeois world view of Avenarius, which, however, emerged from a materialistic lack of spirit, is revived deep in that which fundamentally destroys all human society, which leads to the gravediggers of all European civilization.

At the same time, this indicates that this world domination of the phrase is not something that applies only to a narrow field. It is something that permeates our entire public life as a fundamental force, especially in the field of the spirit. And there will be no salvation until the spiritual life emancipates itself from that which has emerged as the basis for this phraseology, until the spiritual life emancipates itself from the external political or legal life, from the economic life, and to build only on what the spirit itself brings forth from itself, that is, what the individual human being produces from what he carries into the sensual world through birth from the spiritual world. To arrive at spiritual content is the only way to overcome the world domination of phrase. And there is something else closely associated with phrase. Because the phrase does not connect the context of the word with the content, the word very easily becomes a carrier of lies in the age of the phrase. And it is a straight path from the phrase to the lie. Hence the domination, the triumph of lies in the last four to five years, which in turn is so much a part of the process of destruction we are heading for if spirit is not called into the place of the un-spirit!

So much for the one area of public life, the area of intellectual life. But there are other areas as well. But all of them are dependent on the intellectual life to a certain extent. If the intellectual life is dominated by empty phrases and meaningless talk, then the feelings and perceptions cannot be given full expression. But that which develops in the feelings and perceptions in social life, that which is kindled in the interaction from person to person, as one person sympathizes with another, that is custom, that is what emerges from the social community into the realm of custom. And it is only from this customary practice that law can develop historically. But this law can only develop if the sentiments that arise in the interaction between people do not become imbued with empty phrases, if these sentiments are linked to words that are full of substance and to speech that is supported by thought. And in the age of empty phrases, the feeling between human beings cannot be kindled in the appropriate way either; only an external relationship between human beings can arise. The consequence is that in the age in which empty phrases develop in the field of social intellectual life, conventions develop in the field of social feeling instead of the direct substantial relationship between human beings. of man to man, which can at most be regulated by external treaties, that even between nations one raves about treaties because one does not come to the elementary living out of that which can be revealed from person to person. This age of convention makes a second area of our public life so empty of content: it deserts human coexistence, as the phrase deserts the spiritual life, the life of the soul.

This is what leads to the mere external man, not to the right born from within the man. For this right can only be ignited when the word borne by thought flows from the head to the heart. Just as real right, which can flourish in social life alone, belongs to the real spiritual life, which is filled with substantial spirit, so convention belongs to the spiritual life that lives in phrase. Thus we have characterized two areas of our public life in the present.

The third area from which public life emerges is human volition. A conscious will, a will that places a person in human society in such a way that this person brings something into society that flows from his or her own human nature, cannot come about unless it is driven by real, substantial, spiritual content. The phrase is unsuitable for evoking a real conscious will. Just as spiritual life becomes a mere phrase when it becomes dependent on the external life of the state or of the law, or on the external life of economics; just as the life of the law itself is absorbed in convention when it can only be nourished by empty phrases, so the sphere of economic life, the sphere of external human coexistence, is supported, not by the practice of real life but by mere routine, when the will is not inspired by the spirit. Therefore, alongside convention and empty phrases, we see the emergence in the age from which our present age has developed, in the sphere of life and in the outward expression of life, in the sphere of economic life, of routine everywhere.

What is meant by this: our economic life is dominated by routine – it may become clear from this if I say: a realistic consideration of our public life has shown that in the field of economic life, that chaos must end, which is prevalent in the present, where everyone only wants to acquire out of their own selfishness and no one is aware of the context in which their own production is placed in relation to the production of the whole. Only when we realize that this economic life, which has gradually descended into chaos, can only be healed by associating the most diverse professional and life spheres with one another, by people who belong together in different occupations really integrating with one another, so that associations arise from occupation to occupation, that associations arise between the consumers of a profession and the producers of the profession, in short, that our economic life acquires a structure so that the producers, by organizing themselves internally, join forces with their consumers, so that the individual who is a consumer or producer in a profession can see how his consumption and production into some economic cycle - only when the person lives in such an organization, when our economic life is based on association, only then does the individual see how he contributes to the economic process through what he produces or how he participates through what he consumes. Then the individual human being not only knows how to handle this or that in some routine of life, but he also knows that what he does belongs to the overall process of the economic life of humanity. Then he acts out of other impulses. Then what he does is not dominated by a superficial routine, but by a life practice that is only possible if one can connect an idea to it, if one places oneself economically within the overall organism of humanity. Because life has become dominated by empty phrases and because human interaction has become dominated by convention, people have not found the opportunity to associate with each other in this way. They have been turned away from the tasks they face and have become mere routine workers. And routine spread from the individual mechanical action to the mechanism of our entire organization and our entire financial system. The phrase-filled time became the time of the routiniers. And the routiniers brought about that catastrophe, which shows this or that on the surface, but which in its depths shows the causes that lie in the area that has just been characterized.

If we examine the things that dominate contemporary life with an open mind, without sympathy or antipathy, we have to say: in the field of intellectual life, empty phrases; in the field of legal life, conventions; and in the field of economic life, routine. Only the forces that I will describe tomorrow can lead to salvation. This is when the phrase is replaced by speech that is filled with a substantial spirit, with a spirit that has been contemplated, and that can only come about in an independent spiritual life that brings forth what man has to bring into the outer life, which does not want to dominate this spiritual life like the laws of nature, which are gained through outer experience. The conventions of what is externally established must give way to the living interplay that can arise when, on a strictly democratic basis, all mature human beings enter into that which is generally human affairs, which the human being does not bring in through his birth, but which can only develop in the human coexistence of mature human beings. Only when man arrives at such a world-view from the phrase-free, thought-filled word, can the true practice of life develop out of the routine that clings to ephemeral economic objects. that testify and reveal that what is achieved on the ground of economic life is more than what is accomplished by the machine, that it is a link in the overall process of human development on earth. We will not stop at this if we stand as a routine worker at our machine, in our factory, in our bank or anywhere else; we will only stop if the threads of association go from one person to the next, if one person learns from another how he or she is connected to the social organization closest to him or her through his or her consumption and production. What these people achieve together through their combined efforts and associations will be something more than what the human being can achieve in economic life. Man must work, but through his economic activity his whole human being rises out of the transitory and into the eternal. And he will experience from his economic life that precisely by becoming a practitioner in this life, he has a school of practice, the results of which he can carry even through death.

Thus it follows from an observation of the present life, which is more directed towards the spirit, from the three most characteristic domains, that of phrase, that of convention, that of routine, the necessity to work according to a threefold structure of social life, according to a recovery of our spiritual life through its independence, through a recovery of our legal life, which can only be freed from convention when living democratic interaction occurs between all mature human beings, and through a recovery of economic life in which the independence of economic life abolishes routine in favor of a real life practice. But this can only happen when people associate with each other, because it is only through this social interaction that something arises out of what the individual can produce, something that leads all of humanity beyond itself, from mere matter to spirit. Phrase means unspiritualness in the realm of spiritual life; convention means unspiritualness in the realm of the state and of the law; routine means unspiritualness in the realm of economic life. In place of unspiritualness, spirit must come. How it can, and with what forces it can, is what I will attempt to describe tomorrow. For only when, in place of empty phrases, there is again speech that is borne by thought, and only through this, when in place of convention there is the legal life that is imbued with human social feeling, and only through this, when in place of economic routine there is spiritualized economy , an economy ordered by the spirit and steeped in associations, only in this way will our entire public life be healed from what ails it in the present, one must say: what would destroy it if no healing process were to occur.

In the present, unfortunately, we only notice too much the phrase, the convention, the routine. We see the result: chaos. For the future we need the thought-borne word, the spirit filled with substance, the living law that results from the interaction of all mature human beings. That is spirit instead of un-spirit at this point. In the field of economic life we need the associations that arise from the spirit, we need the replacement of routine with the true, spirit-filled economy. In the economic field this means replacing the unspiritual spirit of the present with the spirit of the future. And only by doing so can we rise from pessimistic moods, which are all too justified today when we look at the world around us, to a certain hope for the future. We do not build on what could be thrown at us somewhere today as hope for the future, but that we build on our own human will, which wants to stake its power, its endurance, its fire, out of the present for the future, the victory of the spirit over the un-spirit.

[There follows a brief discussion).

Closing remarks

The first speaker in the discussion initially concluded his remarks by pointing out that an international language serves as a unifying element in humanity. I do not want to go into the pros and cons that can be asserted against such an international language, because this can only be decided through extensive discussion. But I will assume that those who strive to establish such an international language have a certain right. We know what has been tried and done in this direction. Well, it is not enough with the associative way in which such a language has been pursued so far, because such a language would still have to find completely different ways to people than it has found so far if it is to have a truly practical significance. But I do not want to speak out against such a language. Because, you see, on the one hand I know that what arises artificially in our time also bears the characteristic properties of all that our time can produce: a certain intellectualism, a certain intellectualism. And I cannot help but confess that it seems to me that precisely that which has brought us down today, intellectualism, the anti-elemental, was also essentially active in the construction of today's attempted international language. I can very well appreciate the view of those who say: what will ultimately become of that originality of human self-revelation in poetry, in speech, which is truly connected with the innermost being of man, if we pour an abstract language over all mankind? On the other hand, I have also heard some truly wonderful poems in Esperanto, and I must say that I have already tried to achieve a certain objectivity in this matter.

However, what I have presented today, ladies and gentlemen, is not at all affected by the question of such a language. Because, hypothetically speaking, if such a language were to be poured out on humanity, it would be unable to contain anything other than empty phrases if we did not come to a new revival of the substantial spirit. Whether we ultimately turn phrases in Esperanto or in English or in German or French or in Russian is irrelevant. What matters is that we find a way to bring substantial spirit into Russian, German, English, French and Esperanto. And that is one of the questions I have addressed today.

So, as I said, I do not want to say anything against the efforts of those who go for such an abstract language. I believe that perhaps the one point of view could be not entirely unfruitful if it were possible to have an international language for that which really lives in international economic life, for example, that then perhaps the possibility would be given for the actual spiritual life, which after all must always must always arise from individuality, to liberate the other languages. This can only happen if they can develop individually, just as the spirit must develop individually, if their development is not to be disturbed by the lust for conquest and domination on the part of political powers. I believe, however, that the hopes of the Esperantists and similar people are still on much weaker ground than the hopes of those who believe that if only a sufficiently large number of people can come together today to work towards a renewal of our intellectual life from the real spirit, then a better time could dawn, even if it is not perfect. Those who see reality as it is cannot belong to the group that hopes for an earthly paradise. I believe that the latter type of person is still more in touch with reality than those who hope for an international language.

What was said by the second speaker was essentially an interpretation of what I said in part of my lecture, and I would just like to note that when discussing such talking about such things, that it is necessary not to regard human beings as if one could simply approach them and make them better by teaching them. In public life I have often used the image for the pure teaching method: If I have a stove in front of me, then I can say: it is your stove duty to warm the room, it is your categorical imperative to warm the room. I can now preach on and on, with all Kant's insight I can preach on and on, it will not get warm. If I remain silent and just put wood in the stove and light it, the stove will warm the room without any preaching. It is the same with people. If the whole human being is in question, if not only that is in question which can, for example, provide a theoretical echo in the human being, if the whole human being is in question, preaching is of little use, because then one is dealing above all with the human being standing within a social totality. And the human being in a social totality is something different from the individual, unique human being. If we demand of the individual human being that he should somehow contribute to the betterment of humanity through a concentrated life of thought, then it must first be possible for such a concentrated life of thought to develop in a fruitful way. Ultimately, this is only possible in a free spiritual life. Further explanations can be found in the “Key Points of the Social Question”. The question today is not so much to examine what is good for the individual, but what must be brought about in the human social organism so that the individual can truly develop.

In 1894, during the nineties, I published for the first time my “Philosophy of Freedom”. In it, as a consequence of a spiritual world view, there is also a certain ethic that is built precisely on the individual human being. But there is a prerequisite, and this prerequisite must be made by everyone who grasps the problem of freedom in a serious and realistic sense: that, if it is possible to have intuitions that establish human freedom, then it must also be possible for that individual human being to bring forth something that can be built upon in social coexistence. But our attention must constantly be directed to this social life. Therefore I may say that in a certain sense my Philosophy of Freedom is supplemented by my Kernpunkte der sozialen Frage (Key Points in the Social Question). Just as my Philosophy of Freedom investigates the source of the forces that lead to freedom in the individual human being, so my Kernpunkte der sozialen Frage investigates how the social organism must be constructed so that the individual human being can develop freely. And these are basically the two great questions that must occupy us in contemporary public life. A real answer to this question will at the same time be able to shed some light into the chaos.

I would like to note that I have organized today's and tomorrow's lectures in such a way that today's lecture should, so to speak, be more of a critique of the times, pointing out what has been in the present so far, that this present has become what we see it as, drifting into chaos, equipped with tremendous destructive powers. Tomorrow I would like to explain what needs to be done to enable national life in the broadest sense and the life of civilized humanity in general to emerge from the chaos. I would like to show how the forces that already lie within man, and that lie particularly in human coexistence, can be unleashed, but how they are fettered today. Therefore, the positive, to which the last speaker obviously wanted to point, will be more in my tomorrow's lecture than in my today's. But it had to be pointed out, what we are suffering from, so that a knowledge of the will can be built on this knowledge of the present, which is necessary for a prosperous development in the future.

But I would like to mention one more thing in conclusion. Those who are serious about the great issues of the present must not think in a traditional sense, they must not be followers of something similar to a “thousand-year Reich” or the like, they must not think that we can establish a paradise on earth here, but they must think that every reality can only develop in accordance with its own conditions of existence, that within the life between birth and death one can only come to a 'yes' in this life if one is able to constantly supplement the imperfections of physical life with the prospect of a spiritual life: One of the greatest mistakes of our time is that a large number of people gradually want everything that makes life worth living to come from the mere external life. And this is how social questions are formulated today: How must the external life be designed to give people everything they imagine a paradise would offer? Those who ask the question in this way will never come to an answer. You can only come to a true, genuine answer if you are imbued with a sense of reality. And I will take the liberty of speaking tomorrow about what such a sense of reality can give as an answer to the great question of the present.

I didn't want to use several images as an introduction to my art history lecture today, but limit our observational introduction to only two images, both which will be placed into the newer historical development of mankind. We will then link these to the introduction of cultural epochs as we have done in earlier years.

Look at this first painting to which our primary observation will refer; a painting you know well, the so-called “Disputa” of Raphael.

Let us visualize the painting's content briefly: below, in the centre, we see a kind of altar with a chalice on it and the host, a sacramental symbol. To the left and right are religious individuals and we recognise them as teachers, popes and bishops according to their drapery. Opposite the middle, the group is seen as moving from left and right according to the hand gesture of a person directly right of the altar. According to this we observe that these individuals are taking part in something descending from above. As a result we see, by looking at the space close behind the altar where the group is positioned, into the landscape and directly above it—in the upper half of the picture—cloud masses accumulating. To some extent we see the infinite horizon within this space. From out of the middle of these cloud masses we see angelic genii rise, floating on both sides of the dove, bringing the Gospels, transported out of the undeterminable spiritual world. In the centre we can see the Holy Ghost depicted in the symbol of a dove. Above the somewhat receding Holy Ghost we have—clearly, the angelic figures carrying the Gospels are actually coming forward in perspective—the figure of Christ Jesus and above Him the figure of the Father God. Thus we have the Trinity above the chalice where the sanctuary is found. On both sides of the Christ figure we have corresponding groups; a heavenly group above, reflected below by the worldly group. On both sides of the central Christ figure appear Saints, the Madonna on his right and John the Baptist, followed by others: David, Abraham, Adam, Paul, Peter and so on. Still further up rising into the clouds are actual genii figures, spiritual individualities.

This image we have in front of us now—of course there are much better copies available—I would like to link this to the evolution of mankind.

Primarily we need to clearly distinguish between what is given here and what we can experience when we transport ourselves into the feelings of the time when this image was actually being painted. If we shift ourselves into the 16th Century and compare it with the complexity of sensations a painter would paint in, today, we need to say: at that time, in Rome, when Pope Julius II reigned and what worked in him as Julius II in the middle of his twentieth year to call Raphael to Rome, was at that time, and in every town, the human experience of something which lived as a deep truth depicted in this painting. Today of course something similar could be painted; but if it was to be similar to this painting in the scene design, it would not depict any true reality.

Such things need to be made completely clear otherwise one will never arrive at a concrete observation of human history but forever remain in abstract observations of a legend—a bad saga—which is called the history today in schools and universities. Every detail which we can lay our eyes on in order to understand this painting, to really understand it artistically, means every small detail has a certain meaning. Just think how Raphael, this extraordinary individuality Raphael, about whom we have often spoken, how he arrived in Rome. He too was in a body of a twenty year old and one can easily conclude that while he was mainly painting this picture, he was approaching the end of his twenties. At the time he was completely under the influence of two old people who had already experienced two great battles in life and who had plans and ideas, ideas who everyone, one could say, considered as most far-reaching.

Let us be completely clear: under the papal predecessors before Julius II, Rome was at the time basically completely different than during Julius II's reign. The most remarkable here, as predecessors, were the Borgias. One could say that during the time of Alexander VI Rome was gradually being developed as overlapping the old ruins and rubble work of the ancient world where the Church of St Peter almost expired and became impractical. Admittedly these people were filled with a certain nostalgia for the artistic immensity of antiquity and wanting to enliven it again. However, a strange incident happened between the Borgias and Julius II, just at the turn of the 15th into the 16th century. Beneath the room and hall which belonged to the Camera della Segnatura, Alexander VI had two frescoes painted which we want to talk about today. It is surely extraordinary that Julius II, the patron of Raphael, had shunned this lower room which had been the ordinary residence of his predecessor, as if ghosts of cholera and the plague circulated there. He shunned this completely, could not be bothered with artistic or any other events which had taken place there before. On the contrary he decided, according to his ideas for the rooms and halls in the upper storeys, to spruce them up as we can still see them today. We must just think of the mind-set of Pope Julius II in connection with the beginning of the 16th Century and how his mind worked quite differently to those of his predecessors.

The other patron of Raphael was Bramante. He had a plan in his head for the new St Peter's Church. Both Julius II and Bramante were already old people, as I said, who had the storms of life behind them. They called youthful individuals like Raphael to Rome to serve them, bring to expression picturesquely the new ideas powerfully rumbling in their heads, new impulses which they thought should penetrate humanity. One should look more closely at these impulses that originated in Rome and were to penetrate humanity from the beginning of the 16th Century onwards. These impulses depended from the one side on the close connection of the development of the outer Christian ecclesiastical world and then again, what the establishment of the Christian ecclesiastical world would relate to. On the other side it relates to the entire historic development of the western world. Just think for once, that today's human being has great difficulty in transporting his feelings and thoughts into a time, as it were, that have developed out of this image, so often named the “Disputa”. Even more difficult it is for contemporary mankind to transport themselves into centuries further back when Christianity already had power. I have often mentioned that people today have the impression that mankind were always as they are today. That is not quite the case, particularly in relation to their soul life, they were not like now. Just as with almost two thousand years before the Mystery of Golgotha something had been inserted into human evolution beside this Mystery which has spread into the breadth of social evolution, so something quite different to the Mystery of Golgotha came forth which we understand in a different way today. People imagine far too vaguely that at the time when this image was created, mankind was subjected to the discovery of America towards the end of the 15th century; secondly the entirely different social understanding came about through the invention of printing which finally, through Copernican and Kepler viewpoints established a new science.

Just look at this painting. I want to say: if a painter would paint it today it would not in the same sense of truth be what it was then, it can't be; because today one couldn't find the soul who would paint this image in the same sense as at that time when it was actually painted, who would objectively with such an imagination for the earth have been thus, as if America hadn't yet been discovered. These would be souls who look at up at the clouds with true faith, who imagine the spiritual world in the clouds as we imagine it today, who to a certain extent imagine the clouds as real spatial bodies. Such souls are no longer to be found today, not even amongst the most naive. However, we imagine the souls of those times incorrectly if we don't believe that the content of this painting was something directly reflected by them. Let us consider—what exactly is the content of this painting? Out of today's scientific viewpoint we could identify the content of this image: we are accustomed to say that Imagination is the first step to looking into the higher worlds. If we say: up to the 16th century mankind had a view regarding the world and cosmic space in relation to the earthly world, which depended on imagination, then this is the actual truth. Imaginations were at that time something lively; and Raphael painted lively representations of soul experiences. The view of the world, the world image, was still at that time something imaginative.

These imaginations were dispelled by the caustic power of Copernicanism, the discovery of America and the art of printing. From this time mankind took the place of imagination, what we call imaginative knowledge and imaginative perception, and replaced it with outer representational images of the world's construction in totality. Thus, while presently we imagine the sun, the circling planets around it and so on, the people then couldn't do so at all; when they wanted to speak about something similar, they spoke about imaginative images. A representation of such an imagination is this painting. In the centuries in which imaginative cognition developed gradually to allow such paintings like those Raphael made, came to a certain cessation in the 16th Century, these centuries are thus the 16th, 15th, 14th, 13th, 12th, 11th, 10th right back to the 9th Century, but no further back. If we want to go yet further back we won't find any real imaginative representations any longer if we ourselves want to experience imaginative art, as people did in these mentioned centuries, which we find difficult enough to raise in the soul today, imaginatively.

If we wish to experience what Christianity was before the 6th Century we need to imagine the Christian experience as far more spiritual than we tend to do usually. Augustine extracted only what he could use from the Christian imaginations. Yet by reading Augustine today one gets quite a different feeling for what else lived as a world view and as an image of the interconnections of the world with humanity at that time, so different from now. Of particular importance are the ideas which you find on reading Scotus Erigena, who taught at the time of Charles the Bald. One might say that these ancient centuries before the 9th were permeated with Christian thoughts experienced by those who at least elevated their thoughts to permeate their Christian thinking with highly spiritual imagination. One might say when humanity created a world view during these ancient times they included really very little of their direct sense experiences. From their world view they included much more of that which did not result from sense experiences but had been brought about by old clairvoyant sight of the world. When we go back to the first centuries after the Mystery of Golgotha and follow the Christian ideas then we find that these ideas are such than one would rather say—these people were interested in the heavenly Christ, the Christ as He was in the spiritual worlds, while what He became on the earth below they considered more as supplementary. To search for The Christ amidst spiritual beings, to think of Him in relation to super-sensory spirituality was their essential striving, and that came out of the old spiritual—then the atavistic—world view. This world view filled the ancient culture right down to the third post-Atlantean age. At that time it was thought that the earth really was some kind of supplement to the spiritual.

One should familiarise oneself with an imagination which is entirely essential if one would understand, would want to comprehend, how humanity actually developed from that time to now. With this imagination we must acquaint ourselves with the idea that the Europeans had by necessity to drive back spiritual imagination for the unfolding of their culture. This should be dealt with in sympathy and not antipathy—this should in no way be judged with a critical mind but the facts should simply be taken as they are presented: it was simply the fate, Europe's karma to acquire their culture in a way they had to. It was Europe's fate: pushing back spiritual ideas, curbing it so to speak.

Thus it became ever clearer and more meaningful that from the 9th Century Europe needed Christianity while spiritual ideas were being suppressed. A result of this necessity was the splitting of the Greek- oriental and the Roman Catholic Church. At that time it split the East from the West. This is very important. The West had the destiny to push spiritual impulses into the East. There they remained. One can really not understand what happens in the becoming of being human beings when one doesn't have a clear understanding of the need to repel spiritual impulses towards the East—to what is connected to Asia and to Russia as a European peninsula—from the 8th and 9th Centuries. These impulses were pushed together and developed independently from western European and central European life, and propagated into the present Russia.

This is very important. Only once this was properly established. Today there is a tendency not to consider things through relationships. As a result an event such as the Russian revolution apparently developed in a few months—someone or other came to this idea—while the truth pre-empting it lay in the background as a result of the specific course of events through the centuries, while spiritual life became invisible, impractical and pushed back towards the East and being stuck, yet still working in a chaotic, indefinable way made people stand right within events in the East. Yet this standing within it was really hardly living within it just like people who swim in a lake—if they have not exactly drowned—have seawater surrounding them. Likewise, what worked as spiritual impulses superficially in the East, still existed spiritually. People swam inside it and had no clue what pressed in on the surface from the 9th Century and which was then pushed back to the East, so that it could be safe guarded to survive and enter evolution later. People who originated in the East and who gradually developed from migration and similar relationships, into their souls the spiritual impulses were introduced which couldn't be used in the West, South and Central Europe.

The West retained something extraordinary. The East, without knowing—most important things run their course in the subconscious—the East, without knowing, remained steady on the basic saying of the Gospels: “My Kingdom is not of this world”. Hence in the East the leaning within the physical plane is always upwards, towards the spiritual world. The West depended on reversing the sentence: “My Kingdom is not of this World” by correcting it to make the Kingdom of Christ in this world. As a result we see Europe had the fate of constituting the realm of Christ outwardly as an empire on the physical plane. One could say from Rome the law was proclaimed since the 9th Century: break away from the sentence “My Kingdom is not of this World” by actually constituting a worldly kingdom, a kingdom for Christ Jesus on earth, which would be on the physical plane.

The Roman pope gradually became the one to say: My Kingdom is the Kingdom of Christ; but this Kingdom of Christ is from this world; we have constituted it in such a way that this Kingdom of Christ is of this world. However a consciousness prevailed that Christ's kingdom was not one which could be based on the 13 ground rules of external natural existence. People were aware that when they looked out into nature, lit by the sun's morning redness and the sunset's glow, by the stars, then it is not only a matter of what the eyes saw, what the ears heard or the hands could grip, but in the widths of infinite space at the same time existed something of the spiritual kingdom. Everything visible in the world is to some extent the last outflow, the last wave of the spiritual world. This visible world is only complete when one is totally aware that it is the outflow of a spiritual world. The spiritual world is real; humanity has but lost their sight of this spiritual world. It is hidden yet it is a reality, an actuality. When a person enters the gate of death and is particularly blessed, he or she steps into the spiritual world. In times past people were far more lively in their thoughts than we can imagine. When the blessed ones who had died went through the gate of death, they entered a world which we can imagine in the very present time—permeated with clouds, permeated with stars, piercing the orbit of the planets. It was something so concrete that the souls of the dead could create the upper group depicted in the painting. The souls of the dead combined what existed for them out of the past to depict this concrete mystery, this concrete secret of the nature of the Trinity in their midst: as the Father God—out of the character of the present: the Christ Jesus—and out of the reality of the future: the Holy Ghost.

In the reality of that present day world, if the physically sensed world did not appear as a mere illusion to people and let them live like animals, what differentiated itself in the reality of time had to appear on the physical plane in sighs, as a reference to the invisible spiritual world weaving and living above the clouds. Future generations have to have living signs for those not yet born and for those who are now passed over souls and are in possession of direct sight.

On the altar stands the Chalice with the Sanktissimum, the host. This host or wafer is no mere bit of external matter for people who stand on the right, left and around it, but this host is surrounded by its aura. Within this aura of the host forces work which pour down from the Trinity. Such imaginations experienced by the heads of church fathers, bishops and popes regarding the sanctity of an altar are incomprehensible by present day humanity. This imagination has elapsed in the course of time. A moment is eternalized in this painting by the people below the altar rising: here is the mystery which is positioned on the altar: something surrounds the host. This something can be seen by those who have died, namely the blessed ones: David, Abraham, Adam, Moses, Peter and Paul—these departed ones look upon this in the same way we on the physical plane would observe things in the sense world.

When we look at what is below, under the central sacred sacrament, we have to some measure an image in the lower layers of the painting of which a person like Pope Julius II said: This, in its great glory, I want to establish on earth in Rome if at all possible; such a kingdom, such an empire—not a state but an empire—in order for things to take place in this empire and be so enveloped by these auras that the past and its impulses live on in these auras. An empire that exists in this world but which, because it is of this world, contains signs and symbols for what lives in the spiritual world.

Ideas of this kind Julius II incited first in Bramante and then in youthful Raphael. Thus it came about that the young Raphael could compose this painting. In a way Julius II wanted this painting in his study, have it constantly before him like a holy saying on which Rome had to be based because it contained the most important things in the mysteries. However this empire had to be on this earth, of this earth with a spiritual inclusion.

If one allows all these experiences we have spoken about to work on one's soul, from its impression one might say: the spiritual world has been pushed back into the East since the 9th Century as is shown by the clouds driven backward and up, waiting for their time to come.

In contrast there were preparations being made in the West for the 5th post-Atlantean epoch in which we are all still living and in which we will live for a long time, which exists under the signature: My kingdom is of this world and this kingdom will increasingly become more of this world. However this kingdom which is of this world was founded nearly from the beginning of the 5th post-Atlantean epoch under the influence of old people like Bramante and Julius II, but also the youth Raphael. The most important historical things happen subconsciously and from this subconscious yet wise basis Julius II called Raphael. We know that humanity was becoming ever younger through the centuries; we know that since the beginning of the 5th post-Atlantean epoch the age of the twenty eight had been reached and it was now “27 years old”. Certainly Bramante and Julius II were old people but they were not as directly placed in the world as could the youthful Raphael in his young body with youthful forces of twenty-eight when he painted this way. This is an important spiritual background in the development of humanity.

We can recall how Raphael painted in the characterized thought (explained above) of Rome at the time; he painted to a certain extent in protest against the 5th post-Atlantean epoch for the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. This was not the case but let us hypothetically argue that it was thus in Raphael's soul: we can imagine that in his soul, in his subconscious soul lived knowledge which would be coming out of the 5th post Atlantean time. Out of this godless, spirit-robbed world of the 5th post-Atlantean time humanity's thoughts would be permeated with bare, barren and icy space where sun and spiritless planets depict the dreary space, spiritlessly imagining the world and try, according to spiritless laws of nature, construct the unfolding of the world. Let us imagine what had been presented to Raphael's soul: the reality of the spiritual emptiness of the 5th post-Atlantean epoch. Raphael's soul had counter acted: It should not be like this, I will throw myself against this mindless epoch with its imposed notions in frozen space with mindless mist in the form of the Kant-Laplace theories, with my lively spiritual existence. I want to permeate the imagination as much as possible in this dreary existence with true imagination which offers itself to clairvoyant understanding of the world.—Suppose this is what Raphael's soul depicted. Thus it appeared in his subconscious soul; it had even appeared in the same way in the soul of Julius II.

Our age really doesn't need to despise great minds like Julius II or even the Borgias as is done with historical winners, because history still has to reduce some judgements regarding our contemporaries—the greatest ones of our times—just as it did with the Borgias or Julius II and will be the case of individuals in the future. People present at that time just did not have a distance to it.

Raphael was born at the start of the 5th post-Atlantic epoch, one could say, as a child of the 5th post-Atlantic epoch. He was really born out of this 5th post-Atlantic epoch but as a lively protest against his age—he wanted to stand within its beauty which this epoch no longer experienced as real; this epoch strived to insert sensible spirituality into de-spiritualized certainty and impose that on the 5th post-Atlantean epoch, as has been discovered from spiritual research. Raphael's aim was more or less to depict clear images visible in the spiritual realm, imported from that realm into this world, in a painting filled with signs of the supersensible, thereby creating another world. As a result this image is through and through a true picture because it has originated in a lively experience arising from that time.

Just consider this particular time when the child of the 5th post-Atlantic epoch drew the entire imaginative, spiritual imagery of the 4th post-Atlantean time into the 5th. Roughly at this time, during nearly the same year, a Nordic personality slipped up the penitent's stair in Rome, the stairs acclaimed for their ability to be equated to godly work according to the number of stairs climbed, because the number of steps taken on the stairs meant the same number of days relieved of hell fire. While Raphael was painting in the Vatican the Camera della Segnatura and similar images, this Nordic person, so devoted, in full of belief, so concerned for his soul's salvation, ascended the stair—so many stairs for so many days free from purgatory, doing work to please God. While he was thus climbing the stair, he had a vision—the vision showed him the futility of such holy work rushing up the stairs—a vision which ripped open the veil between him and that world which Raphael as a child of the 5th post-Atlantean time was painting as a testament of the 4th post-Atlantean time.

You can recognise this person as Luther, the antitheses of Raphael. Raphael, even when he was looking around in the outer world, would see colour and form, all kinds of spiritual images, everything as expressions of the supersensible world yet reflected, expressed as sensual colour, forms and gestures. Luther was at the same time in Rome, filled with song and poetry, yet amorphous, formless in his soul, rejecting everything in this world which surrounded him in Rome. Like the spiritual world was pushed back in the 9th century into the East, it was now a testament of the 4th post-Atlantean epoch in Europe. Luther pushed it all back. Thus in the future the threefold world presented itself: in the East spirituality was pushed back, in the South it was somewhat divided as the testament of the 4th post-Atlantean epoch and again became pushed back and rejected. The musical element of the North took the place of the colour and form-rich testament of the South. Luther is really the antithesis of Raphael. Raphael is a child of the 5th post-Atlantean epoch, his soul however contained everything which lived in the 4th post-Atlantean time. Luther is a late-comer of the 4th post-Atlantean time, he doesn't belong in the 5th post-Atlantean epoch; one might say he was transferred from the 4th into the 5th. In his frame of mind Luther was completely within the 4th post-Atlantean time. His thoughts and feelings were like a person living in the 4th epoch but he was transferred into the 5th and lived now out of an echo sounding into the 5th epoch with its blatancy, its obvious natural history and ice fields of barren spirituality. Raphael had the soul content of the 4th post-Atlantean time; Luther, even though he was transferred out of the 4th into the 5th, had a soul standing right in the 4th post-Atlantean time but rejected everything external, he wanted by contrast to create everything which had nothing to do with external work and external human activities—a soul based solely between the formless inner connection of the human soul and the spiritual world, dependant on faith only.

Just think for a moment how a painter like Raphael would have painted out of southern Catholicism, and compare how it could be painted from a Lutheran standpoint. What would he paint? He would paint a Christ figure somewhat like Albrecht Dürer's; or he would paint a religious person in whose physiognomic expression one would recognise a soul with nothing in common regarding the material surroundings and the objects within this environment into which it has been imposed.

Thus one age connects to another. In the present time mankind has quite different ideas. This you see in paintings where Christ is depicted as a person amongst the people: “Come, Master Jesus, be our guest”—as human and equal as possible:

In our painting we have a group of Bishops, learned church fathers, and in the middle the obvious sign, the symbol. This points to the supersensible world; the Trinity is concretely included.

Let us lift out this “Trinity” in particular. We have another painting which represents this Trinity on its own.

At the top we see the Father God, below that, Holy Ghost and the Son. You behold these members as concrete content of the future, the present, taken out of the past. It would not have been appropriate in the world view of that present time to mix the blessed souls of the dead directly with the observation of the outer visible world. However Raphael used, in the sense of the imagination of that time, what he observed as the truth, the free view in the widths of natural realms. To a certain extend he had to express the blatant obviousness that filled the space was not the truth; but the truth places them within the space. Thus we have at the bottom—you still notice the line of the horizon—the width, infinity within the expanding perspective. To a certain extent protest is expressed against representing nature at present as a purely sense perceptible image.

Raphael didn't simply arrive at this image and hit upon the composition. In order for it to become clear, let us consider two of Raphael's preliminary sketches towards the painting's gradual development:

Imagine the entire story, from the time Raphael came to Rome roundabout the time Julius II called him to execute the commission in 1507, 1508, and try include this into the painting which he had in his imagination. Gradually he was first instructed by Julius II; gradually a relationship developed in him between space, nature and the supersensible and sensible aspects in the human group, how it had to be.

Also the other sketch refers more to the lower part than the first sketch, with still incomplete indications. You see it hasn't come into its own. What Raphael came to was this: he had to really imagine himself into that time and the relationship between the spiritual world and nature. In olden times, still up to the 9th Century, there was still a clear imagination of the relationship between the human past and the natural present. The people before the 9th Century—as grotesque as it may sound to mankind today—didn't think that when something was happening to them, it was by chance; no, they knew that when something happened to them it was because of the events into which they were being spun was where the dead were living, connected to them through karma. Before the 9th century the events which surrounded us place the dead before us. Such images diminished gradually and remained in the past as I have characterised for you in the 16th Century.

Returning once more to the 9th Century we arrive at an imagination which needs consideration: a timely separation between the natural- and the spiritual world was not apparent for these ancient folk. Nature was at the same time a continuation—before the 9th Century, mind you—a continuation of the spiritual world. Already during the Greek times the human being had introduced their own I into their world view, by using thinking. Raphael was painting—he expressed this in the upper part of the canvas in the image later called “Disputa” even though certainly nothing was being disputed—and introduced a female figure out of the symbolism of that time with the motto: DIVINARUM RERUM NOTITIA = divinely written comment. Basically before the 9th Century the world view included the “divinely written comment” and nature was like a wave of the godlike world extending below to where mankind found itself.

This entire notion, as I've mentioned, was pushed back to the East and the echo remained within the imagination, like a testament painted by Raphael from the 4th post-Atlantic epoch. In those days it was deliberated from the south to establish the kingdom of Christ on the physical plane itself as a real empire of power. Pope Julius II had even, like other similar personalities, written on his flag what he really wanted. He wanted to really establish this which could not happen because Luther came along, as did Calvin and Zwingli. He wanted to create the foundation for Christ's Empire in this world. He dared not say so. One can usually see this in such personalities as something esoteric. Julius II did not dare go through Italy as a commander in order to harness the Italians to his empire. He said it differently. He said he was going through Italy as a commander in order to free the Italian folk. This is what was said. In later times it was said something or other should be done to free the folk while this only hid the real goal. At the time however, many believed Julius II went through Italy to free the separate Italian nations. It didn't occur to him, just as little as it occurred or could in anyway occur to Woodrow Wilson, to set some or other folk free.

Now, you see, here we have this immense border, one might say, between the two time periods: the backward push to everything southerly. Retained from this is the division in the world view in the Greek time. It was clearly as follows: What had streamed through nature as deeds of the dead was no longer present when people developed spiritual powers in themselves, unfolding it in their souls; it then doesn't become DIVINARUM RERUM NOTITIA, not something “written up as godly things” but becomes CAUSARUM COGNITIO—and attains “direct knowledge of causes in the world”. Here care should be taken not to want an interpretation of nature in its totality as an outcome. To come to an idea of nature—this Julius II felt compelled to shout in thunderous words—an imagination was to be made to show that the sun rises, the morning- and evening glow exists as do the stars, and just as people did in the 5th post-Atlantean epoch, it meant lying. In fact one denied that the souls of the dead were within the Trinity which was really something capable of imaginative expression by looking back to the dead souls, David, Abraham, Paul, Peter and express the Holy Trinity. Julius said: Leave away nature and the old Eons, only depict the youngest Eons! Do you want to rely on yourselves? If you want to develop through only human forces, depend only on what is inherent in the physical body, then you arrive at an external science regarding the outer nature of people, a science only in so far as the human being has no connection with the endless expanse of the world, but is hemmed in, interwoven within the boundaries it sets itself.

This is roughly what Julius II told Raphael: If you want to paint what the human being through his own soul faculties know about humanity then you must not paint the people out of an endless perspective in nature, but include the people, whether genial or wise, in their self-made borders. You must include them in halls to show: from these rooms where the world is governed—because Julius wanted to have the world depicted as it would have become had no Luther arrived, nor a Zwingli, or any Calvinist.—If you want to paint the world as it is governed from these rooms, then paint on the one side the reality existing in the breadth of nature and on the other side, what people can find if they only sought forces from within their own souls. Then you may not paint nature but paint the people in their self-imposed borders.

This is what we have when we allow the contrasting aspects in the image to work on us ... the so-called “School of Athens”.

This painting, later becoming known as the “School of Athens”, was often painted over in the course of time and so the man standing in the middle had his book painted over with “Ethics” then later with “Time”—that was painted even later. The painting is in many ways ruined and one can't find the true image of the original painting today in Rome. In Raphael's time it was never called “The School of Athens”, this only happened later and then theories developed about it. We can imagine it essentially thus: truly the world is measured through the changed painting (197) when we peer into the endless realms of space and imagine nature not with obvious senses but permeated with everything existing in eternity and temporality, permeated with that which has gone through the gate of death. Taking knowledge from within one's own soul and representing it in everything coming together, like these wise men, here (202); the heavenly knowledge which can only be found built up within oneself, is represented in a personality which points upwards (203). No inartistic stupidity is needed to see Plato in this figure. (See below)

You can imagine the following: the gesture of the rising hand represents the word being spoken by the figure on the right. The personality on the right begins to speak as if his expression is translated into words. Everything originating by itself in the human soul can only be truly imagined if it is contained within an enclosed space, where one remains within oneself. If one searches within for an image of nature then nothing other than an abstract image of nature will be found, much like the Copernican world view represents which is not a picture of concrete nature.

Thus Raphael took the task from Julius II and placed it before the godly experience which could live by itself in the human soul in the beginning of the 5th post-Atlantic epoch. Here everything of worldly science is grouped, but worldly science raised up to divine concepts, to intellectual understanding of the godly. On analysis the seven free arts appear: grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, geometry, arithmetic, astronomy and music.

Up to the culminating expression you can find the whole of worldly science applied to the divine and how this is expressed by the human word—here the opposites of looking and speaking are alive—expressed in the image itself. Un-artistic, amateurishly learned chitchat saw the entire Greek philosophy in the same image. That is unnecessary and has no relevance to the artwork we have been speaking about and of which we finally want to point out: it shows us how this painting, in the sense of that time, represents a true human experience—an experience which the soul discovers when it is allowed to find wisdom within itself regarding mankind.

We have more details of this painting which I want to show you:

If you allow yourself to be drawn in more you will recognise the right sided figures are linked to the central main figure who is entering into speech; here on the right (205) we have everything which depends more on Inspiration, and to the left, (204) it touches more on Imagination and its equivalent.

We have one more image of the central figures:

The opposite of looking and speaking is presented. Let us be clear about it—the present time can only be understood if we try to throw more and more of such glances into the past which we can do by experiencing such paintings in an artistic sense. Our time is the time in which something returns to itself. In our time there is a return in Europe—Central Europe, Northern Europe and in certain moods in Western Europe—of karmic connections with the European development of the 9th Century. This hasn't become particularly observable to most people, actually in fact, not at all. What happens today takes place out of necessity, the opposite manner used to spiritually grasp what Europe's destiny had to be in the 9th century. What had been pushed back to the East at that time was the spiritual world, so now it has once again to be manifested on the physical plane. The moods of the 9th Century after Christ are now reappearing in western European, in Central and Northern Europe. Out of Europe's east will develop something like moods out of the terrible chaos, spreading out in something like moods which will mysteriously remind us of the 16th Century. Only out of the combined harmonising of the 9th and 16th Centuries will mysteries originate which to some extent can give a degree of clarity for present day humanity who wants to rise to its own understanding of evolution.

It is remarkable to see how in the 16th Century everything most secret and mysterious in nature, man and God, was visibly represented outwardly in art. The holy secret of the Trinity we have found in the most meaningful images of the world set before our souls. The opposite appears at the same time—the Protestant-Evangelistic mood which totally denies these holy secrets being able to share this historic period. At intervals Herman Grimm, a truly northern Lutheran spirit, speaks about the thoughts his contemporaries have regarding Christ, thoughts they treasure as wholly good within their souls—the exact opposite in Raphael's mood when he painted the world.

You see, at the beginning of the 16th Century the Reformation brought evolution further which became the world's lot, even in Rome, in the sphere of Julius II, of the popes. But how? It became the lot of the world that people wanted to reflect about the supersensible worlds as if they were visible but visible through human development. As a result—this Herman Grimm discovered rightly—the Pauline Christianity became a particular problem for Raphael and his contemporaries—yes, even the figure of Paul himself. It can be said that up to the 16th Century Christianity was far more permeated by what one could call the Peter Christianity—Peter who saw the supersensible and sensible worlds as undivided, experiencing in the sensible world the supersensible within it, finding the supersensible in the sense perceptions. The extrasensory world disappeared from it. People were aware of this right up to the 16th Century. The experience of the Damascus secret living in Paul as a seer, and the figure of Paul himself, became a problem. As a result Raphael tried in his later development to depict, and include, Paul's figure in various paintings. It can be said: from the south a Reformation wanted to be established with the aim to depict the Pauline vision in the world in such a way as I set before you now, as it lived in Raphael's paintings which originated through the inspiration of Julius II.

Paul was a problem for him. You appreciate this when you research Paul's form in Raphael's other paintings. You see a visual expression of the music of the spheres in the “Saint Cecile”.

Naturally it is inaccurately expressed. Left, in the corner, is the practical shape of Paul. Raphael made a study of Paul in a painterly way. Repeatedly Paul posed a problem. Why?—Because Paul's quest originates from within him as a human individuality through which he strives to have sight, penetrate into the sight. Here we see it in his whole attitude, in his gesture: Paul as he participates in something self-evident to others as a seeker. He develops both sides, therefore if it comes down to him, he shows Christian revelation differently. As Paul understands—you see it here, how Paul teaches—it became a problem for Raphael.

Now we have another painting: Paul speaking in Athens.

You can see Raphael studied Paul. What did Paul become for him?—The hero, the spiritual hero of the Reformation who should have succeeded from the south, but did not succeed. This impulse was pushed back and later Jesuitism from the South was put in the place of the Reformation—more about that at another time. Paul should have established the Kingdom of Christ on earth as foreseen by Julius II.

Now characterise for yourself the two Paul heads, which we have before us now and allow it to really work on us.

These are heads studied by Raphael in which he wanted to depict through the physiognomy a gaze penetrating the secrets of the spiritual Christian world, into the spiritual secrets enabling words to outwardly pronounce these secrets; we have in Paul the binding link between the world of causes and the world into which only those with blessed vision have access, the supersensible world. Paul is looking and teaching, the connecting link between the world of the 5th post-Atlantean epoch and the ancient spiritual time. Remind yourselves of your consideration of the Paul physiognomy, the Pauline gestures right up to the movement of the fingers—here only the arm is lifted—and be reminded of that ...

... consider these and then look once more at the figure in the so-called “School of Athens”:

... and compare that to the two heads of Paul which we have looked at (235, 236) with the heads here (203) on your right and you have such a personality in whom seeing has become words, one might say: because Paul, who grew out of seeing the results of the Mystery of Damascus and became the orator of Christianity, made his pact of compromise with what can be found in the Causarum Cognitio when the experience of the physical causal world is elevated into a relation of possible experiences of divine things. As a result you will experience something like the constant “Signatur” which wafts through the “Camera della Segnatura” when you look over the image which later was called the “Disputa”, to what is called the “School of Athens”. In the “Disputa” is the truth, the spiritual truth in a nature filled space; glancing over to the other, opposite wall, so companions and visionaries encounter Paul the teacher who points to the worldly learning from which everything can arise which the human soul can find within itself. Looking at the fresco, which is the so-called “School of Athens”:

...so one finds a soul living in the central figure with a content which is painted in the opposite fresco:

... then one roughly has the connection. Take the one wall—everything that is within the soul, all one does not see except as the outer bodily aspect, that very aspect is revealed on the opposite wall, on the fresco of the so-called “Disputa”.

I would like to say: if you could see into the souls of these two people painted on the one wall, then you will see what lives in the souls of these two people on the opposite wall, on the fresco. More about this later.

Today it is my task to speak about a topic that has millions of enthusiastic followers in the world, on one side, that has found the most violent adversaries, on the other side, not only adversaries who combat this field of the so-called spiritism the sharpest, but also those who ridicule it who lump together it with the darkest superstition or what they call dark superstition; adversaries who want to ignore it only with empty words of joke and scorn.

It may be not easy to speak just in our present about such a topic where as a rule with the “pros and cons” the most violent passions are aroused straight away. I would like to ask those listeners among you who may be enthusiastic followers of spiritism not to roundly condemn me immediately, if to you any of my explanations seems to correspond not completely to your views, because we representatives of theosophy, nevertheless, are combined with the spiritists in one matter in any case: we have the intention to investigate the higher spiritual worlds, those worlds which are beyond the everyday sense-perception. We are in agreement on that. However, on the other side, I would like to ask the scientists also to realise that that movement in whose name I myself speak has not chosen the slogan only like a signboard, as a phrase, but in the most serious sense of the word: no human opinion is higher than truth.—I would also like to ask the scientist to keep in mind that he may take into consideration that the views of science were subjected to change in the course of times, and that is why the scientific views of today cannot be regarded as being fixed.

Let me now outline the development of the spiritistic movement without taking sides, because no human opinion is higher than truth.

I would like to emphasise above all that the founders of the theosophical movement, Mrs. Helena Petrowna Blavatsky, and the great organiser, Colonel Henry Steel Olcott, went out from the spiritistic movement. They were experts of the spiritistic movement and turned to the theosophical movement only, after they had vigorously searched for truth before within the spiritistic movement, but had not found it.

Theosophy does not want to combat spiritism, but to search for truth where it is to be found.

I would like to emphasise something else that will surprise some of you, however, that will not at all surprise others who are in the know. Allow me to express it: you can never hear the last word about spiritism and similar matters from people like me who are forced to speak about that. You know that there is in any science a rule which is simply justified by the scientific methods, and the rule is that one shows the results of science before a bigger audience in popular way. If one wants to do more intimate acquaintance with these results, if one wants to get to know the more intimate truth, then a longer way is necessary: a way using the different methods in any detail. As a rule the researchers are not able to report in popular talks what takes place inside of the laboratories, of the observatories. That applies to the physical science. On the other side, in the great spiritual movements of the world somebody who is reasonable and allowed to express the words with regard to the spiritual views has to withhold the last word because the last words are still of quite different kind. They are of such a kind that they can hardly be discussed publicly. That is why you can never hear the very last word of this matter from an occultist—unless you are able and want to go his ways most intimately. But to those who are in the know of the matter something becomes clear from the way how a matter is said, what is said not only between the lines, but perhaps also between the words.

After this introduction I would like to move on the topic which certainly has a tremendous cultural-historical significance even for somebody who wants to make it ridiculous. I would like to speak about the matter in a sense which really throws light from this point of view: what does spiritism search for today? Does it search for something new, or is it something ancient that it searches? Are the ways on which it looks absolutely novel, or has humankind gone on them since centuries or even since millennia?—If anybody puts these questions to himself, he reaches his goal concerning the history of spiritism the fastest. What the spiritists search for is at first the knowledge of those worlds which are beyond our sensory world, and secondly the significance of these worlds for the goal, for the determination of our human race.

If we ask ourselves: were these problems not the tasks of humankind, since it strives on our earth and wants anything?—Then we must say to ourselves: yes. And because they are certainly the highest tasks, it would already appear as something absurd from the beginning if in the world history something absolutely new had appeared with regard to these questions. It seems if we look around in the old and new spiritistic movements, as if we deal with something absolutely new. The strongest adversaries refer to the fact that it has brought something absolutely new into the world, and other adversaries say that the human beings had never needed to combat this movement like nowadays. There a change must have happened in humankind with regard to the way to look at the case. This is illuminated to us like lightning if we get clear in our mind that humankind has behaved in three different ways to the questions which we call spiritistic today.

There we have one way which we can find in the whole antiquity, a way which changes only in the Christian times. Then we have the second way to position ourselves to these questions, the whole Middle Ages through, till the 17th century. Only in the 17th century spiritism basically starts taking on a certain form that one can rightly call spiritism today.

The questions that the spiritist wants to answer today were the object of the so-called mysteries the whole antiquity through. I try only to characterise with few lines what one has to understand by mysteries. It was not the custom in antiquity to announce wisdom publicly. One had another view of wisdom and truth. One believed the whole antiquity through that it is necessary to train super-sensible organs to the knowledge of the super-sensible truth at first. One realised the fact that in every human being spiritual forces slumber which are not developed with the average human being, that spiritual forces slumber in the human nature which one can wake and develop by means of long exercises, through steps of development, which the disciples of the mysteries describe as very difficult. If the neophyte had developed such forces in him and had become a researcher of truth, one was of the opinion that he is to the average human being in such a way as a sighted is to a blind-born. This was also the goal within the holy mysteries. One aimed to achieve something similar in the spiritual field as today the doctor aims to achieve with the blind-born if he operates him that he becomes sighted. One was clear about the fact that—like with a blind-born who is operated the colours of the light and the forms of the things appear—a new world appears to somebody whose internal senses are woken, a world which the everyday reason cannot perceive. Thus the follower of the mysteries tried to develop a human being of lower level to one of higher level, to an initiate. Only the initiate should be able to recognise something of the super-sensible truth by immediate beholding, by spiritual intuition. The big mass of human beings could get the truth by means of pictures. The myths of antiquity, the legends about gods and world origin, which simply appear today—indeed, in certain sense rightly—as childish views of humankind, they are nothing but disguises of the super-sensible truth. The initiate informed people in pictures of that which he could behold within the temple mysteries. The whole Eastern mythology, the Greek and Roman mythologies, the Germanic mythology and the mythologies of the savage peoples are nothing but metaphorical, symbolic representations of the super-sensible truth. Of course, only somebody can completely understand this who occupies himself not in such a way as anthropology and ethnology do it but also with their spirit. He sees that a myth like the Hercules legend shows a deep inner truth; he sees that the conquest of the Golden Fleece by Jason shows a deep and true knowledge.

Then another way came with our calendar. I can indicate only roughly what I have to say. A certain basis of higher, spiritual truth was determined and made the object of the confessions, in particular of the Christian. And now this basis of spiritual truth was removed from any human research, from the immediate human striving. Those who studied the history of the Council of Nicaea know what I mean, and also those who understand the words of St. Augustine who says there: I would not believe in the truth of the divine revelation unless the authority of the church forces me.—Faith that determines a certain basis of the truth replaces the old mystery truth which retains it in pictures. Then follows the epoch when the big mass is no longer informed about the truth of the super-sensible world in pictures, but simply by authority. This is the second way how the big mass and those who had to lead them behaved to the highest truth. The mysteries provided it to the big mass on account of experience; it was provided by faith and fixed by authority in the Middle Ages.

But beside those who had the task to retain the big mass by faith and authority were also those in the 12th and 13th centuries—they existed at all times, but they did not appear publicly—who wanted to develop by immediate own beholding to the highest truth. These searched for it on the same ways on which it had been searched for within the mysteries. That is why we find in mediaeval times beside those who are only priests, also the mystics, theosophists and occultists, those who talk in an almost incomprehensible language hard to be understood by modern materialists and rationalists. We find people who had reached the secrets on the ways which avoid the senses. In an even more incomprehensible language those people spoke who had the guidance of the spirit as mystery priests. So we hear from one that he had the ability to send his thoughts miles away; another boasted that he could transform the whole sea into gold if it was permitted. Another says that he could construct a vehicle with which he would be able to move through the air.

There were times when people did not know how to do with such sayings, because they had no notion of how they were to be understood. Moreover, prejudices flourished against such a kind of investigation since the oldest times. That becomes clear to us at once where these prejudices came from. When in the first centuries of our calendar the Christian culture spread over the countries of the Mediterranean Sea, it appeared that the cult actions and the ceremonies of Christianity and also most of Christian dogmas agreed with ancient pagan traditions, and were not so different—even if in a watered way—from that which had took place in the old pagan Mithras temples. There said those who had the task to defend the reputation of the church: bad spirits gave the pagans these views; they aped within the pagan world what God revealed to the Christian church.—However, it is an odd imitation which leads the way of the original! The whole Christianity was aped in the pagan mysteries—if we apply the word of the accusers, what the church has later found! It is comprehensible that every other way than that of the authoritative Christian faith, as Augustine characterised it, was wrong and in the course of time it was regarded as such which was not given by good powers; since the church had to provide the good powers.

Thus these traditions continued through the whole Middle Ages. Those who wanted to come on their own ways, independently to the highest super-sensible truth were regarded as magicians, as allies of the bad or of the bad spirits. The mark stone is the Faust legend. Faust is the representative of those who want to get by own knowledge to the secrets. Hence, the bad powers must have captivated him. One should only do research in the writings handed down from earlier times, only the trust in authority should lead to the super-sensible powers. In spite of that, initiated minds realised—even if they were defamed as magicians and were prosecuted—that the time must come again when one has to progress to truth on own, human ways.

Thus we see occult brotherhoods originating in Europe from the middle of the Middle Ages on which led their members on the same ways as the old mysteries had done this to the development of higher intuitive forces. So that within such occult brotherhoods the way to the highest truth was taken like in the mysteries—I mention only that of the Rosicrucians, the deepest and most significant one, founded by Christian Rosenkreutz. This way can be investigated strictly historically till the 18th century. I cannot explain in detail how this happened; I can only give one example, the great representative of the occult science of the 16th and 17th centuries, Robert Fludd. He shows for those who have insight into these fields in all his writings that he knows the ways how to get to truth that he knows how to develop such forces that are of quite different kind than the forces in us which see any body of light before themselves. He shows that there are mysterious ways to get to the highest truth. He also speaks of the Rosicrucian Society in such a way that the relationship is clear to any initiate.

I would like to present three questions only to you to show you how these questions were discussed in veiled form at that time. He says of them that everybody who has arrived at the lowest level must be able to answer them with understanding. These questions and also their answers may appear quite futile to the rationalists and materialists. The first question which anybody must answer who wants to rise in worthy way to higher spiritual spheres is: where do you live?—The answer is: I live in the temple of wisdom, on the mountain of reason.—Understanding this sentence really, experiencing it internally means already to have opened certain inner senses.

The second sentence was: where truth comes from to you?—The answer is: it comes to me from the creative , and now there comes a word which cannot be translated at all into German: from the highest ..., mighty all-embracing spirit who has spoken through Solomon and wants to inform me about alchemy, magic and the kabala ...—This was the second question.

The third question is: what do you want to build?—The answer is: I want to build a temple like the tabernacle, like Solomon's temple, like the body of Christ and ... like something else that one does not pronounce.

You see—I cannot go into these questions further—that one veiled the super-sensible truth in a mysterious darkness for all non-initiates in such brotherhoods, and that the non-initiate should make himself worthy at first and had to get to a moral and intellectual summit. Somebody who had not stood the trials who did not have the force in himself to find the experiences inside was not judged as worthy, was not admitted to the initiation. One considered it as dangerous to know this truth. One knew that knowledge is connected with a tremendous power, with a power as the average human being does not suspect at all. Only somebody is able to possess this truth and power without any danger for humankind who has got to that moral and intellectual height. Otherwise one said: without having reached this height he behaves with this truth and power like a child that is sent with matches into a powder magazine.

Now one was of the opinion in these times that only somebody who is in the possession of the highest super-sensible truth can explain the phenomena as they are told everywhere and since millennia in a popular way—phenomena which the modern spiritism shows again. The matters were nothing new but something ancient that spiritism recognises today. In ancient times one spoke about the fact that the human being can have such an effect on the human beings as it is not the case, otherwise: certain human beings cause that knocking sounds are to be heard in their surroundings that objects move, contrary to the laws of gravitation, with or without touch that objects fly through the air without applying any physical force et cetera. Since the oldest times one knew that there are human beings who can be transported into certain states, today we call these states trance states, in which they speak about things about which they can never speak in the waking consciousness that they also tell about other worlds not belonging to our sense-perceptible world. One knew that there are human beings who communicate by signs about that which they see in such super-sensible worlds. One also knew that there are human beings who are able to see events which are far away from them and also to report about that; human beings who could foresee and forecast future events with the help of their prophetic gift. All that—we do not verify it today—is an ancient tradition. Those who believe to be able to accept it as truth consider it as something natural. Such not physical, not sense-perceptible phenomena were regarded as true through the whole Middle Ages. Indeed, they were considered by the church of the Middle Ages in such a way, as if they were caused by means of bad skills, but this should not touch us. In any case, the way to the super-sensible world was not searched for on the way of these phenomena in the time of the 17th and 18th centuries. Nobody claimed till those times that a dancing table, an anyhow appearing ghost which is seen with eyes or in any way in trance could reveal anything of a super-sensible world. Even if anybody told that he saw a blaze in Hanover from here, one believed it; but nobody saw anything in it that could seriously give information about the super-sensible world. Reasonable people considered it as a matter of course that one could not look for the super-sensible world that way. Those who wanted to get to super-sensible perception searched for it by developing inner forces in the occult brotherhoods.

Then another time came in the development of the West, in which one started looking for truth scientifically. There came the Copernican world view and the researches of physiology; technology, the discoveries of the blood circulation, of the ovum et cetera. One attained insights into nature with the senses. Somebody who does not approach the Middle Ages with prejudices but wants to get to know the world view of the Middle Ages in its true form, convinces himself soon that this medieval thinking did not imagine heaven and hell as localities in space, but that they were something spiritual to it. In mediaeval times no reasonable human being thought to advocate that world view which one attributes to the medieval scholars today. Copernicanism is nothing new in this sense. It is new in another sense; in the sense that since the 16th century sense-perception became decisive for truth; what one can see what one can perceive with the senses. The world view of the Middle Ages was not wrong as one often shows it today, but it was only a view which was not got with bodily eyes. The bodily sensualisation was a symbol of something spiritual. Also Dante did not imagine his hell and his heaven in the earthly sense; they were to be understood spiritually.

One broke with this point of view. The real psychologist of the human development finds out this. The sensuous was raised, and now sensuality conquered the world gradually. However, the human being got used to it without noticing it. Only the searching psychologist rushing behind the development is able to make a picture of it. The human being gets used to such changes. With his feeling, with his senses he looks at everything, and accepts the sensuous only as true. Without knowing it, people considered as a principle of the human nature to accept only what they can see in any way of what they can convince themselves by sensory inspection. People did not think much of such circles that spoke of an initiation and led to super-sensible truth on occult ways; everything had to be sensually shown.

What about the super-sensible view of the world? How could one find the super-sensible in the world in which one wanted to seek for truth only in the sensory effects? There were rare, so-called abnormal phenomena which were not explicable by means of natural forces known till then; phenomena that the physicist, the naturalist could not explain, and which one simply denied because one wanted to accept the sensually explicable only. There were these phenomena which were handed down through millennia to which the human being sought refuge now: now one went to them. Simultaneously with the urge to keep only to the sense-perceptible appearance the urge for the super-sensible resorted to such phenomena. One wanted to know what scientific criticism could not explain; one wanted to know how it is. When one started searching for evidences of another world in these matters, the birth of modern spiritism took place. We can give the hour of birth and the place where it happened. It was in 1716; there a book was published by a member of the Royal Society, a description of the western islands of Scotland. Everything was collected in it that was to be found out about the “second sight.” This is that which one cannot perceive with the usual eyes, but what one could find out only by super-sensible research. Here you have the precursor of everything that was later done by the so-called scientific side to the investigation of the spiritistic phenomena.

Now we also stand already at the gate of the whole spiritistic movement of the newer time. That person from whom the whole spiritistic movement started is one of the strangest of the world: Swedenborg. He influenced the whole 18th century. Even Kant argued with him. A person who could bring to life the modern spiritistic movement had to be disposed like Swedenborg. He was born in 1688 and died in 1772. In the first half of his life he was a naturalist who stood at the head of the natural sciences of his time. He encompassed them. Nobody has a right to attack Swedenborg as an illiterate man. We know that he was not only a perfect expert of his time, but he also anticipated a lot of scientific truths that one discovered on the universities only later. So he stood in the first half of his life not only completely on the scientific point of view which wanted to investigate everything by the appearance to the senses and by mathematical calculations, but he also was far ahead of his time in this regard. Then he completely turned to that which one calls visionariness. What Swedenborg experienced—you may call him a seer or visionary—was a particular class of phenomena. Somebody who is only somewhat initiated in these fields knows that Swedenborg could only experience this class of phenomena.

I only give a few examples. Swedenborg saw a conflagration in Stockholm from a place which was removed sixty miles from Stockholm. He informed the guests, with who he was in a soirée, about this event, and after some time one heard that the fire had happened in such a way as Swedenborg had told it. Another example: a high-ranking person asked for a secret which a brother had not completely told before his death because he died before. The person turned to Swedenborg with the strange demand whether he could not discover him and ask what he wanted to say. Swedenborg ridded himself of the order in such a way that the person in question could have no doubt that Swedenborg had penetrated into this secret.

Still the third example to show how Swedenborg moved within the super-sensible world. A scholar and friend visited Swedenborg. The servant said to him: you have to wait for some time, please. The scholar sat down and heard a discussion in the next room. However, he heard always only Swedenborg speaking; he did not hear answering. The case became even more noticeable to him when he heard the discussion taking place in wonderful classical Latin, and particularly when he heard him intimately talking about states of the emperor Augustus. Then Swedenborg went to the door, bowed before somebody and spoke with him but the friend could not see the visitor at all. Then Swedenborg came back and said to the friend: excuse that I let you wait. I had lofty visit—Virgil visited me.

People may think about such matters as they want. However, one thing is certain: Swedenborg believed in them, regarded them as reality. I said: only a person like Swedenborg could get to such a kind of research. Just the fact that he was expert naturalist of his time led him to this view of the super-sensible nature. He was a man who got used to accepting nothing but the sensuous, the sense-perceptible in the time of the dawning natural sciences. Everybody knows it who knows him; the reasons become clear in the talk which I hold next time here about the topic “Hypnotism and Somnambulism”—and that is why he also depended on it as such a man who sees the spiritual in the world. As well as he insisted to recognise only as right what he could calculate and perceive with senses, the super-sensible was brought by him into the shape which it had to have for him; the super-sensible world was pulled down to a deeper sphere under the influence of the ways of thinking of natural sciences. Because it approaches us in such way like the views of the sensory world, I cited the reasons. We hear next time how such a thing comes about. However, the preconditions are given by the own spiritual development of the human beings who got used to the sense-perceptible.

I do not want to speak now about the significance and core of truth of Swedenborg’s visions, but about the fact that somebody sees—as soon as he enters this field which forms the basis of Swedenborg's views—his dispositions in this area, what he has developed in himself. A proof of it may be a simple example.

When the wave of spiritism spread in the second half of the 19th century, one also made experiments in Bavaria. It became apparent there that with the experiments at which also scholars were present and took place at different places quite different spiritual manifestations happened. In such an event one asked whether the human soul is received via heredity from the parents, so that also the soul is hereditary, or whether it is made new with every human being. In this spiritistic séance it was answered: the souls are made new. Almost at the same time the same question was put in another séance. The answer was: the soul is not created, but is passed on from the parents to the children.—One thought that at one séance followers of the so-called creation theory were, and at the other séance some scholars were present who were followers of the other theory. In the sense of the thoughts which lived in them the answers were given. Whichever facts may be there, whichever reasons of these facts may be there, it became clear that the human being receives as a manifestation what corresponds to his view. It is irrelevant whether it faces him only as an intellectual manifestation or as a vision; what the human being sees is founded in his own dispositions.

This search for sensuous-extrasensory proofs became just a child of the natural sciences of the materialistic time. The principle was actually drawn up that one had to seek for the extrasensory world as one had to seek for the sensuous one. Just as somebody convinces himself in the laboratory of the reality of forces of magnetism or light, one wanted to convince oneself of the super-sensible world by the appearance to the senses. People had forgotten how to behold the spiritual in purely spiritual way. They had forgotten how to develop the belief in super-sensible forces and how to learn to recognise what is neither sensuous nor analogous to the sensuous, but what can be seized only by spiritual intuition. They had got to be used to get everything on the sensory way, and that is why they also wanted to get these matters on the sensory way. Research moved on this way. Thus we see Swedenborg’s direction going on. What appears offers nothing new to us; spiritism offers nothing new! We take an overview of this later and understand it then also better.

All the phenomena which spiritism knows were explained that way. There we see the South German Oetinger who elaborated the theory that there is a super-sensible substance which can be seen as a physical phenomenon. Only, he says, the super-sensible matter does not have the raw qualities of the physical matter, not the impenetrable resistance and the row mixture. Here we have the substance from which the materialisations are taken.

Another researcher of this field is Johann Heinrich Jung called Stilling who published a detailed report on spirits and apparitions of spirits and described all these matters. He tried there to understand everything in such a way that he did justice to these phenomena as a religious Christian. Because he had tendencies to be a religious Christian, the whole world seemed to him to manifest nothing but the truth of the Christian teaching. Because at the same time natural sciences made claims, we see a mixture of the purely Christian standpoint with the standpoint of natural sciences in his representation. Esotericism explains the phenomena by the intrusion of a spiritual world into our world.

You see all these phenomena registered in the works of those who wrote about spiritism, demonology, magic et cetera in which you can also find something that goes beyond spiritism, like with Ennemoser, for instance. We see even carefully registered how a person can enable himself to perceive the thoughts of others who are in distant rooms. You find such instructions with Ennemoser, also with others. Already in the 19th century you find with a certain Meyer who wrote a book about the Hades from spiritistic standpoint as a manifestation of spiritistic manipulations and stood up for the so-called reincarnation theory. You find a theory there to which theosophy has led us again, and which shows us that the old fairy tales are expressions of the higher truth prepared for the people. Meyer got this view on account of sensuous demonstrations.

We find all the spiritistic phenomena with Justinus Kerner. They are significant because of the moral weight of the author. There we find, for example, that near the seeress of Prevorst things—spoons et cetera—are repelled by her; it is also told that this seeress communicated with beings of other worlds. Justinus Kerner registered all the communications which he got from her. She informed him that she saw beings of other worlds which went through her, indeed, but which she could perceive and that she could even behold such beings which came in along with other people. Some people may say about these matters: Kerner fantasised and was fooled a lot by his seeress. However, I would like to say one thing: you know David Friedrich Strauss who was friendly with Justinus Kerner. He knew how it stood with the seeress of Prevorst. You also know that that which he performed goes in a direction which runs against the spiritistic current. He says that the facts of which the seeress of Prevorst reports are true as facts—about that cannot be discussed with those who know something about it, he considered the matters as being beyond any doubt.

Even if a bigger number of human beings existed who were still interested somewhat in such things, the interest decreased, nevertheless, more and more. This could be led back to the influence of science. It refused to look at such phenomena as true manifestations in the time of the forties when the law of energy conservation was discovered forming the basis of our physics when the cell theory was drawn up when Darwinism prepared. What came up in this time could not be favourable to the pneumatologists. Hence, they were strictly rejected. That is why one forgot everything that these had to say.

Then an event took place which meant a victory for spiritism. The event did not happen in Europe, but in the country where materialism celebrated the biggest triumphs in that time where one had made oneself used to consider only as true what hands can seize. This happened in America, in the country where the materialistic way of thinking intimated by me had strongly developed. It went out from the phenomena which belong in the broadest sense to those which one has to call abnormal but sensual. The well-known knocking sounds, the phenomena of moving tables and the knocking through them, the audibility of certain voices which sounded through the air accompanied by intelligent manifestations for which no sensuous reason existed—they pointed to the super-sensible so clearly in America, in the country where one attaches much value to the outer appearance. Like by storm the view gained recognition that there is a super-sensible world that beings which do not belong to our world manifest themselves in our sensory world. Like a storm this went through the world.

A man, Andrew Jackson Davis, who concerned himself with these phenomena, was called upon for explaining these matters. He was, in similar way as Swedenborg, a seer; he only did not have the deepness of Swedenborg. He was an unlearned American grown up as a farmer boy and Swedenborg was a learnt Swede. He wrote a book in 1848 (?): The Philosophy of Spiritual Intercourse. This work arose from the most modern needs which had originated within the modern battle in which one wanted to accept the sensuous only in which everybody wanted to put his personal egoism forward, in which everybody wanted to grab so much to himself, wanted to become as happy as he only was able to. In this world one was no longer able to have sense for a faith which leads beyond the sensuous world, according to the ways of thinking which were tied to the material only. One wanted to see and one wanted to have such a faith which satisfies the needs and desires of modern humankind. Above all Davis says plainly that modern people cannot believe that a quantity of human beings is blessed, another quantity condemned. It was this what the modern could not stand; there an idea of development had to intervene. Davis was informed of a truth which shows an exact image of the sensuous world. It may be characterised by an example. When his first wife had died, he had the idea to marry a second wife. However, he had doubt, but a super-sensible manifestation caused that he gave himself the permission. In this manifestation his first wife said to him that she had married in the sun-land again; that is why he felt to have the right also to marry a second time. In the beginning of the first part of his book he informs us that he was educated as a farmer boy like a Christian, but he realised soon that the Christian faith can deliver no conviction, because the modern human being must understand the what, the why and the where to of the way.

I was sent out—he tells—to the field by my parents. There came a snake. I attacked it with the hayfork. But the tooth broke off. I took the tooth and prayed. I was convinced that the prayer must help. But ... [gap in the transcript]. How can I believe in a God who allows that I experience such a thing? He said to himself. He became an unbeliever. By the spiritistic séances in which he took part he got the ability of trance and became one of the most fertile spiritistic writers. He emphasises that the appearance of that world is approximately the same as that of the sensory world. It would be an unbelief that a good father does not care for his children, because the father makes long journeys for this purpose et cetera.

You see that the earthly world is transferred to the other world. Therefore, this way of thinking spread like a wildfire all over the world. In short time one could count millions of followers of spiritism. Already in 1850 one could find thousands of media in Boston, and one could also pay 400,000 $ in short time to construct a spiritistic temple. You will not deny that that has a great cultural-historical significance. However, with regard to the modern way of thinking this movement had only prospects of success if science took hold of it, that means if science believed in it.

If I held a lecture about theosophy, I could speak in detail of the fact that still quite different powers stand behind the staging of the spiritistic phenomena. Behind the scenery deep occult powers are at work. But this cannot be my task today. I tell another time who is, actually, the true director of these phenomena. But this is certain: if this occult director wanted to presuppose that these phenomena convinced the materialistically minded humankind of the existence of a super-sensible world thoroughly if it should believe in it in the long run, the scientific circles had to be conquered. These scientific circles were not so hard to conquer. Just among the most reasonable, among those who could think thoroughly and logically were many who turned to the spiritistic movement. These were in America Lincoln, Edison, in England Gladstone, the naturalist Wallace, the mathematician Morgan. Also in Germany was a big number of excellent scholars, they were experts in their fields, and were convinced of the spiritistic phenomena by media, like Weber and Gustav Theodor Fechner, the founder of psychophysics. Friedrich Zöllner also belongs to them about whom only those who understand nothing of the matter can say that he became mad when he did the famous experiments with Slade. Then, however, also a personality who is yet underestimated: this is the Baron Hellenbach, deceased in 1887. He presented his experiences in spiritistic fields in his numerous books in such a brilliant way. For example, in his book about biological magnetism and in the book about the magic of figures, so that these books are true treasure troves to study which way this movement has taken—in particular in more inspired heads—in the second half of the 19th century.

A European impulse came to the American movement and this went out from a man who stood in the European culture, from a disciple of Pestalozzi, and it originated at a time which is already significant because of its other discoveries. This spirit is Allan Kardec who wrote his Spirits’ Book in 1858, in the same year in which many other works appeared epoch-making for the western education in different fields. We only have to call some of the works to indicate the significance of the mental life in this time. One is Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection; the other is a basic work about the psycho-physical field by Fechner. The third one is a work of Bunsen which familiarises us with spectral analysis and which gives the possibility to discover something of the material composition of the stars for the first time. The fourth one was the work of Karl Marx: The Capital. The fifth one was a work of Kardec, a spiritistic work, but of quite different kind as the American works. He represented the idea of reincarnation, the re-embodiment of the human soul. This French spiritism had as numerous supporters as the American one in short time. It spread over France, Spain and especially also over Austria. It was completely in accord with the ancient teachings of wisdom of theosophy. Also spirits like Hellenbach, an Austrian politician, could accept it. He represented the scientific form of spiritism Kardec had founded. Hellenbach played a prominent role in important political matters of Austria in the sixties and seventies of the last century and proved to be a clear and keen thinker at every step. Spiritism got a scientific form in Germany that way. Also such spirits founded the scientific spiritism in Germany who did not want to speak like Hellenbach or Gladstone, Wallace, Crookes who assumed angelic spirits of the old Christendom but who wanted only to speak about the reincarnation of the human being and the intrusion of beings unknown to us whose forms Hellenbach leaves open. But also those who generally do not want to know anything about a yonder world were no longer able to not accept the facts as such. Even people like Eduard von Hartmann who wanted to know nothing about the theories of the spiritists, however, said that the facts could not be denied. They let themselves not be swayed during the period of the exposures. The most famous one was that of the medium Bastian by the Crown Prince Rudolf and the archduke Johann of Austria. The media, which had convinced our scientific circles, were exposed with the medium Bastian. Everybody who simply has some insight in this field knows that Hellenbach is right when he says: nobody will claim that there are no wigs. Should one also believe that there is no real hair because one has discovered wigs?—To somebody who works in occult fields the sentence applies that one can prove to many a bank that it is a corrupt bank; yes, but did not this bank do also honest banking business once? The assessment of the spiritistic truth hides behind such comparisons.

We have seen that the scientific and materialistic ways of thinking since the 18th century—we can call 1716 the natal year of spiritism—have completely adapted themselves to the modern thinking, also to the materialistic views. A new form was sought for to be able to approach the higher, super-sensible truth, and everybody who faced these facts tried to understand them in his way. The Christian faith found a confirmation of its ancient church faith; also some orthodox have accepted it to find favourable proofs of their case. Others also found confirmation from the standpoints of the material thinking which assesses everything only according to the material relations.

Also those who were thorough scientific researchers like Zöllner, Weber, Fechner and also several famous mathematicians like Simony et cetera tried to get closer to the case, while they moved from the three-dimensional on the four-dimensional. The philosophical individualists who could not believe that in the spiritual world also an individualistic development exists like in the physical one were led by means of thorough investigation to understand that the human way, this sensory way to be—to see with bodily eyes to hear with bodily ears—is only one way of many possible ways. The representatives of a super-sensible spiritism like Hellenbach found their ideas confirmed on account of the spiritistic facts. If you imagine a person who knew to deal with the peculiarities of every single medium who knew how to adapt himself to the most difficult circumstances, so that it was a relief to meet him, Hellenbach was such a man. Also those who spoke only about a psychic force of which one does not and needs not think a lot also these followers of a psychic force, like Eduard von Hartmann or also spirits like du Prel of whom I will speak next time, they all explained the facts in their ways. There were many theories, from the popular interpretations for the people who looked after the manifesting spirits, after writing media, after communications by knocking sounds et cetera, from these religious seekers in old way up to the most enlightened spirits: everybody explained these phenomena in his way. This was in the time when this lack of clarity prevailed in every field, in the time when the phenomena could no longer be denied—but the minds of the human beings proved to be absolutely incapable to do justice to the super-sensible world.

In this time the ground was prepared to a renewal of the mystic way, to a renewal of that way which was taken in former times in the occult science and in the mysteries, but in such way that it is accessible to everybody who wants to go it. The Theosophical Society was founded by Mrs. Helena Petrowna Blavatsky to open an understanding of the ways. The theosophical movement revived the investigation of wisdom as it was nurtured in the mysteries and by the Rosicrucians in mediaeval times. It wants to spread what one has searched for in recent time on other ways. It is based on the old movements, however, also on the newest researches.

Somebody who gets a better understanding of the theosophical movement will find that the way of theosophy or spiritual science which leads to the super-sensible truth is on one side really spiritual, on the other side, that it answers the questions: where does the human being come from, where does he go to, what is his vocation?

We know that one had to speak in certain way to the human beings of antiquity, in more different way to those of the Middle Ages, and again in another way to the modern human beings. The facts of theosophy are ancient. But you convince yourselves if you seek on the way of theosophy or spiritual science that it satisfies any demand of modern scientific nature if it is understood in its very own figure. He would be a bad theosophist who wanted to give up any of the scientific truths for theosophy. Knowledge on the bright, clear way of true scientific nature—yes, but no knowledge which limits itself to sensory things which limits itself to that which takes place in the human being between birth and death, but also knowledge of that which is beyond birth and death. Spiritual science cannot do this without having the authorisation of it—just within a materialistic age. It is aware that all the spiritual movements must converge at a great goal at last which the spiritists will find in spiritual science in the end. However, it searches the spiritual on other, more comprehensive ways; it knows that the spiritual is not found in the sensory world and also not by arrangements of sensory nature only, maybe by means of a beholding which is analogous to the sensory looking. It knows that there is a world of which one receives an insight only if one goes through a kind of spiritual operation which is similar to the operation of a blind-born that is made sighted. It knows that it is not right if the modern human being says: show me the super-sensible like something sensory.—It knows that the answer is: human being, rise up to the higher spheres of the spiritual world, while you yourself become more and more spiritual, so that the connection with the spiritual world is in such a way as the connection is with the sensuous world by means of your sensory eyes and ears.

Theosophy or spiritual science has that viewpoint which a believer of the Middle Ages, a deep mystic, Master Eckhart, expressed, while he characterised that the really spiritual cannot be searched for in the same way as the sensuous. In the 13th, 14th centuries, he expressed meaningfully that one cannot receive the spiritual by sensuous performances, by anything that is analogous to the sensuous. Therefore, he says the great truth leading to the super-sensible: people want to look at God with the eyes, as if they looked at a cow and loved it. They want to look at God as if He stood there and here. It is not that way. God and I are one in recognition.

We do not want to behold a higher world by means of events like knocking sounds or other sensuous arrangements. It is called a super-sensible world, indeed, but it is similar to the sensuous world round us.—Eckhart characterises such apparently super-sensible events saying: such people want to behold God as they look at a cow. However, we want to behold the spiritual developing our spiritual eyes like nature developed our bodily eyes to let us see the physical. Nature has dismissed us with outer senses to make the sensuous perceptible to us. The way, however, to develop further in the sensuous to the spiritual to be able to behold the spiritual with spiritual eyes—we ourselves have to go this spiritual way in free development, also in the sense of modern development.

Notes:

In the title of the talk, the term spiritism is used instead of the more common term spiritualism. Allan Kardec used it for the first time in his book The Spirits’ Book. Since then it is used outside the English speaking world to distinguish spiritism and spiritualism (Spiritualismus). The latter term is applied to the opposite of (philosophical, religious) materialism.

St. Augustine (354–430): Evangelio non crederem, nisi me ecclesia commoveret auctoritas (Contr. Epist. Manich., 5)

Christian Rosenkreutz (1378–1484), cf. CW 130

Andrew Jackson Davis (1826-1910) The Philosophy of Spiritual Intercourse: Being an Explanation of Modern Mysteries (1853). Davis dictated his first and most significant book in trance in 1845: The Principles of Nature, Her Divine Revelations and a Voice to Mankind.

Robert Fludd (1574–1637), English philosopher and physician, Rosicrucian
Apologia Compendaria, Fraternitatem de Rosea Cruce … (1616)
Microcosmi Historia (1619)
Clavis Philosophiae et Alchymiae Fluddanae (1633)

Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) in his Divine Comedy

It was in 1716: M. Martin Description of the Western Islands of Scotland, London 1703
Martin Martin (?–1719), Scottish writer

Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772), Swedish scientist and philosopher

Stockholm: the place from which Swedenborg saw the conflagration was Goteborg, 400 km away from Stockholm.

Friedrich Christoph Oetinger (1702 -1782), Swabian theologian and theosopher

Johann Heinrich Jung-Stilling (1740–1817), German pietistic-mystic author

Joseph Ennemoser (1787–1854), physician and mesmerist

Johann Friedrich von Meyer (1772–1849), Protestant theologian, politician
Hades, a Contribution to the Theory of Spirits (1810) (link to German page as the article in the English wikipedia is insufficient)

Justinus Kerner (1786–1862), German physician, poet, author
History of Two Somnambulists (1824), The Seeress of Prevorst. Revelations of the Human Inner Life and about the Penetrations of the Spirit World into ours (1828), Leaves from Prevorst (1831–1839), The Somnambulistic Tables (1853)

Seeress of Prevorst: Friederike Hauffe (1801–1829), somnambulist, born in a little village, named Prevorst

David Friedrich Strauss (1808–1874), German theologian and writer of The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined (1846)

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865), 16th President of the United States

Thomas Edison (1847–1931), American inventor and businessman

William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898), British politician, Prime Minister

Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913), British naturalist

Augustus De Morgan (1806–1871), British mathematician and logician

Ernst Heinrich Weber (1795–1878), German physician, founder of experimental psychology

Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801–1887), German philosopher and experimental psychologist, the founder of psychophysics

Johann Karl Friedrich Zöllner (1834–1882),German astrophysicist. He explains that the spiritistic phenomena are caused in a four-dimensional space and appear as shadows in the three-dimensional space: Transcendental Physics (1878)

Henry Slade (1835–1905), fraudulent medium

Baron Lazar von Hellenbach (1827–1887), Austrian politician, philosophical and socio-political writer, famous spiritist. On the Magic of Figures (Vienna, 1882).

Allan Kardec (pen name of Hippolyte Léon Denizard Rivail, 1804–1869), French spiritist, systematiser of spiritism

Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria (1858–1889)

Archduke Johann Nepomuk Salvator of Austria (1852–1890?) Einblicke in den Spiritismus (Insights into Spiritism) (1885)

Oskar Simony (1852–1915), Austrian mathematician and physicist: On Spiritistic Manifestations from the Scientific Standpoint (1884), cf. R. Steiner mentions him in CW 169 Toward Imagination (Anthroposophic Press, 1990), lecture 6

Master Eckhart (~1260–1327), German Dominican monk and mystic, c f. R. Steiner CW 7 Mystics after Modernism

The title of this lecture series is, Spiritual Science's Answer to the Large Questions of the Present Time, published in German as, Antworten der Geisteswissenschaft auf den Grossen Fragen des Daseins.

It is a far cry from the great Zarathustra or Zoroaster, who formed the subject of our last lecture in this series, to the three great personalities who provide the subject matter of our lecture to-day, and the gulf of time which, in our imagination, we are called upon to span is wide indeed. It is a gulf which stretches from a time thousands of years ago, long before our Christian Era. A time which we can only understand by attributing to the human beings existing then a mental outlook utterly foreign to our own. From this distant standpoint of time, we pass to the 16th and 17th centuries of our own era, to the time when that spirit was first kindled which, ever since, has been the source and inspiration of all vital and progressive culture from then to the present day. As we shall see, this spirit, which burnt so fiercely in the 16th and 17th centuries in individuals such as Galileo and Giordano Bruno, found a fresh medium in a personality so near our own times as that of Goethe.

Galileo and Giordano Bruno are the two names we must mention when we review the beginnings of that epoch in our human evolution at which Natural Science had reached the same turning-point as Spiritual Science has reached to-day. The same great impulse which was then given to the thought of Natural Science will be, in a certain sense, given to this of Spiritual Science in the immediate future. Hence the importance of a comprehensive survey of the lines of thought and feeling of the men of that day, viz.: during the end of the 16th and the beginning of the 17th centuries—the time of Galileo and of Giordano Bruno—so that we may be able to understand their teaching in the full sense of the word.

Casting a retrospective glance over the centuries immediately preceding theirs, viz:—from the 11th to the 15th centuries, we must try and realize what at first sight appears to be the peculiar conception of the Science current in those days, and how wide was the field which the term then embraced. We must realise that during these centuries, Scientific Knowledge was viewed from an entirely different standpoint from that from which it is viewed to-day. The popular conception of Scientific Knowledge was then very different from the ideas which prevailed in later times and from those which prevail to-day. For we are now speaking of the days before the printing-press, of those days when, for the majority of the people, their sole means of participating in Spiritual and intellectual life was through the Church or the school, etc.—That is to say they could only learn from oral instruction. Hence the necessity, if we would understand those times, of obtaining a correct picture of the scientific methods pursued by the educated men of that day.

In the times preceding those of Galileo and Giordano Bruno, there was an impulse towards Science, but it was an impulse which is very difficult for the modern mind to understand. We can only understand it by placing ourselves, in imagination, in an entirely different mental atmosphere from that by which we are surrounded to-day. In those days, whatever auditorium you might have entered where Science was being taught, you would always have noted one thing. Let us take, for example, a lecture on Natural Science. No matter what branch of Natural Science it might be, whether Medicine or another, the lecturer would base all his deductions solely upon the authority of ancient writings, especially upon those of Aristotle. To-day, the lecturer on Science bases his thesis upon the results of modern investigation, carried out in such or such an institute, where scientific methods of research are followed. But the lecturer of the days preceding those of Galileo and Giordano Bruno based his thesis upon the ancient writings, especially upon those of Aristotle, which were the foundation of all Science in those days.

The figure of Aristotle stands out pre-eminent as an intellectual giant in the history of human progress; and the service he rendered to his time is unspeakably important. But, for the moment, the interesting point for us is the fact that the books of Aristotle were seldom read in the sense in which they were originally given, but the traditional rendering gave the tone, and was everywhere considered determinant.

No matter whether it were a question of the definition of a principle or of an axiom, or the question of any truth whatever, it was always referred to Aristotle. “Such was Aristotle's opinion on this point,” “you will find it expressed thus by Aristotle”. Now the modern investigator or the lecturer on Science, or even the popular lecturer, always emphasizes the fact that this or that has been observed in some place or another. But the scientific teacher in the centuries preceding Galileo and Giordano Bruno laid stress upon the fact that a few centuries ago, the great authority, Aristotle, made such or such an assertion upon such or such a question. Just as to-day we refer, in Spiritual matters, to the authority of the revelations of religious documents and tradition and not to personal investigation, so, in those days, teachers of Science did not refer to nature the observation of nature, but referred back to written authority. They referred back to the writings of Aristotle.

It is extraordinarily interesting to study a University discourse and to note how doctors and their colleagues relied upon the theories of Aristotle.

Now Aristotle was an intellectual giant; and though we must admit that even such an intellectual individuality should not be taken literally after the lapse of so many centuries, still, on the other hand, we must acknowledge that the works of Aristotle are so prodigious and so magnificent that even if they learnt nothing new, if men had studied Aristotle diligently, that is to say the original Aristotle, they would have accomplished a great deal. For the deeply illuminating teachings and theories of Aristotle could not have failed to have been of the greatest benefit to them.

This, however, was not the case. The lecturers of those days and the teachers who preached Aristotle in season and out of season, as a rule, understood nothing at all about him.

The doctrines taught in the time preceding that of Galileo and Giordano Bruno and claiming to be those of Aristotle were an almost incredibly mistaken version of his teaching. To-day, I will confine myself to showing you from the standpoint of Spiritual Science the place Galileo and Giordano Bruno took in the intellectual life of their time. I would call to mind in this connection an incident which is perfectly true and which I have often related before.

One of the most devoted adherents of Aristotle was at the same time a friend of Galileo's. Galileo, like Giordano Bruno, was an opponent of the followers of Aristotle, and with good reason, but not of Aristotle himself. Galileo maintained that men ought to go to the great book of Nature, which speaks so clearly to man, and learn from there the meaning of the Spirit in Nature. They should not rely entirely upon the books of Aristotle for their final authority. Now at that time, the School of Aristotle taught a marvelous doctrine concerning the seat of the nerves. Their theory was that the whole nervous system originated in the heart, that from the heart, the nerves spread to the brain and from thence spread over the entire body. “This”, said they, “is the teaching of Aristotle, therefore it must be true.” Galileo, who based his information upon the investigation of the human body, carried out by means of his physical eyes, and did not rely upon the teaching of ancient writings and ancient tradition, affirmed that the nerves had their seat in the brain and that the chief nerves originated in the brain. Galileo told this to one of his friends and wished him to see for himself and be convinced. “Yes, indeed, I will see it,” said the friend who took the opposite view, and he attended a demonstration on the human body. Then, indeed, this scholar, who was a devout follower of Aristotle, was greatly astonished and said to Galileo:—“It does indeed seem as if the nerves originated in the brain; yet Aristotle maintained that they originate in the heart. If there appears to be any contradiction here, I would believe in Aristotle rather than in Nature.” Such was the mental attitude which Galileo had to combat. Aristotle, or rather the distorted view of Aristotle, was dragged into all questions connected with Science.

To quote another instance:—A scholar of the Church wrote a treatise on immortality. Let us consider for a moment the method they employed in those days. They took their subject matter from the Church Doctrine, adding to that what they believed to be the teaching of Aristotle on the subject. Thus they used the words of Aristotle to support their own views, twisting his teaching so that they could claim its support, no matter from which side of the question, whether for or against, they wished to argue. To return to our scholar of Divinity. He had collected various passages from Aristotle in order to demonstrate the opinion of Aristotle upon the question of the immortality of the soul. Now this also is a perfectly true incident. The clergy had to submit their books to their superiors before publication. In this case, the superior objected to the book. “It is dangerous,” he said, “It would be better not to attempt it, for these extracts from Aristotle (in support of immortality) might also be used to support the opposite view.” The author of the book wrote back “If it is only a question of demonstrating more clearly the most acceptable meaning of Aristotle on this subject, then I will support it by another quotation, for one could quite well go on making quotations.” In short, from every point of view, Aristotle was used and abused.

From these two incidents, we can see how greatly Aristotle was misunderstood at the time of Galileo and Giordano Bruno. We will take the example of the origin of the nerves in the heart. The meaning of this statement is hidden. We can only understand it when we realize that Aristotle lived at the end of the period of ancient Greek culture and, therefore, at the end of the period of the old clairvoyant consciousness. Because Aristotle looked back into the past, he transmitted a Science that arose out of a clairvoyant consciousness which was able to see behind the material world into the Spiritual. It was this clairvoyant consciousness which had produced the old Science. The essence of this primeval Science was transmitted by the Greek culture as ancient Science, and this it was which Aristotle possessed. He was one of the last who recorded it. But Aristotle was not himself capable of developing that clairvoyant consciousness, for he only possessed an intellectual consciousness.

Note this well. Not without reason was Aristotle the first historian of Logic. This is because the intellectual argumentative thought was to become dominant. Thus, Aristotle assimilated the ancient teaching and reduced it into a logical system in his writings. Hence there is much in his writings which we cannot understand until we have learnt what it is he really meant. Thus, when he speaks of nerves, we must not ascribe to the word the meaning given to it to-day, nor the meaning it had even in the time of Galileo and Giordano Bruno, which was already related to our own. When Aristotle speaks of the nervous system, he means the Etheric Body of man. By which we mean the super-sensible part of human nature, which is closely connected with the human physical body. This Etheric body can now no longer be seen by man, the power of doing so having been lost during man's progressive evolution. Aristotle could no longer see it, but he knew about it, the knowledge having come to him from those times when the clairvoyant consciousness saw, not only the physical body, but also the Etheric Aura, the Etheric Body, which is really the builder and strength-giver of the physical body.

Aristotle drew his teaching from those times in which man perceived the Etheric Body as we now-a-days perceive colours. Thus, if you look at the Etheric Body instead of at the physical body, the former is truly the origin of certain currents. For Aristotle, this origin was not in the brain, but in the heart. The description given by Aristotle of these currents had usually been designated by the title of nerves. By those currents he did not mean nerves in our sense of the word, but he meant super-sensible currents, super-sensible forces. These proceed from the heart, flow to the brain and, from thence, are distributed to the various activities of the human body. These are matters which we cannot understand until we have learnt by means of Spiritual Science about the super-sensible parts and principles of human nature.

Man had lost the power of seeing clairvoyantly even so long ago as the centuries preceding Galileo and Giordano Bruno. Hence people had no idea that Aristotle was speaking of the Etheric Current. They thought he meant the physical nerves, so they asserted that “Aristotle states that the physical nerves proceed from the heart.”

Such was the contention of the devout followers of Aristotle. Those, however, who had studied in the book of Nature could not allow this. Hence the great battle between Galileo and Giordano Bruno and the School of Aristotle.

The followers of Aristotle completely misunderstood him; no-one understood the real Aristotle; Galileo and Giordano Bruno naturally did not understand him either, for they did not take the trouble to penetrate to the real meaning of the works of Aristotle. Thus Galileo and Giordano Bruno were the two great Intellectuals of their time, who turned away from the pedantry of the Scholastics and of book-learning to the great book of Nature itself, which is available to each and all

Professor Laurenz Muellner, for whom, as philosopher, I have the greatest admiration, refers to this in a lecture which he gave in 1894 as Rector of the Vienna University. In this lecture, he drew attention to the fact that the great Galileo, with his wonderful knowledge and grasp of all the great laws of mechanics, had discovered the laws which govern the distribution of space. Now it is just these laws which govern the operation and, distribution of space which strike the eye and stir the emotions so very forcibly when we see them exemplified in St. Peter's at Rome. This mighty building influences us all. And each one experiences something tangible, which we can all understand. Let me illustrate this by the following example:—Speidel, the Viennese journalist, and the sculptor Natter were driving in the neighborhood of Rome. As they approached the city, Speidel suddenly heard a most extraordinary exclamation from Natter, who was a very genial spirit. Natter sprang suddenly to his feet. His friend could not think what was the matter with him, for he only heard the words “I am frightened”. As Natter would say no more then, it was only later that his friend heard that the exclamation had been called forth by the sight of the dome of St. Peter's in the distance.

Something akin to terrified wonder at the effect of the marvelous distribution of space, created by the genius of Michelangelo, overwhelms all who see this wonderful building. Laurenz Muellner draws attention to the fact that it is owing to Galileo, that great thinker, that it has become possible for mankind to conceive mathematically and mechanically such an effect of space-distribution as meets the eye in the wonderful building of the dome of St. Peter's, at Rome. At the same time, we must not forget that Galileo, who discovered the laws of Mechanics, was born when Michelangelo, the builder of St. Peter's, was almost on his deathbed. This means that it was from the Spiritual forces of Michelangelo that that skill in the distribution of the laws of space arose, which was not available to the intellect of man until later.

From this, we must infer that what we may term intellectual knowledge, knowledge governed by reason, may come much later than the actual composition of matter in space.

If such matters are carefully and thoughtfully considered, it will be seen that human consciousness has undergone a change; that, earlier, men possessed a certain clairvoyance and that the manner of thinking with the intellect does not go back very far. This habit or manner of thinking with the intellect, owing to certain historical necessities, arose during the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Minds like those of Galileo and Giordano Bruno are the first harbingers of what was to come. Hence their fierce opposition to the school of Aristotle and especially to those who first completely misinterpreted Aristotle—who may be taken as the expression of the ancient wisdom—and then used their misinterpretation of him as an argument against Natural Science. We have now indicated Galileo's position in the world. He was, in the highest sense of the word, the man who first inaugurated the system of severe thought necessary for Natural Science, that system of the relation of Natural Science to Mathematics, which has continued on his lines from his day to our own.

What is it that distinguishes Galileo from all other men up to his time? It is the doctrine which he was the first to realize and which he preached with such noble courage, thus proving himself a child of his age. The feelings which possessed Galileo can be to some extent rendered in the following words, which will help us to understand his whole soul and attitude of mind. “Here we stand as men upon the earth. Nature spreads herself out before us, with everything requisite for our senses and for our reason, which is connected with the instrument of the brain through nature”. Galileo says this many times, in various passages in his works, as may be verified, ”through Nature speaks the Divine Spiritual. We men approach Nature, view it with our eyes and study it with our other senses. What we perceive with our eyes, what we receive through our senses, is implanted in Nature by Divine Spiritual Beings. At first, the thoughts of the Divine Spiritual Beings exist yonder; then, as if springing forth from the thoughts of these Beings, come the visible things of Nature as the revelation of. Divine thought. Then come our powers of perception and, above all, our reason, which is inseparable from the brain. There we stand, ready to spell out, as from the letters of a book, and to arrive at the author's meaning, that which Divine thoughts have expressed in Nature.”

Galileo took his stand firmly on the ground upon which all the great minds in the course of earthly evolution have taken their stand. He believed that the manifestations of Nature, the things of Nature, are as the letters of an alphabet, which express the mind of the Divine Spiritual beings. Thus the human mind exists that it may read what the Divine Spiritual Beings have written there, written in the form of minerals, in the course of natural phenomena, in the course of the movements of the stars. Human nature exists that it may read the thoughts of the Divine Mind. To Galileo, however, the Divine Mind is only distinguished from the human mind by the fact that everything that can be thought is thought by Divine Mind at once, in a single moment, unfettered by space or time. Let us apply this to any single field; to the field of Mathematics. We see at once how extra ordinary this conception is. If a student desires to learn all that has as yet been learnt by mankind about Mathematics, he will have or to toil at Mathematics for years. Then, as you know, man's conception of Mathematics depends greatly on time. Now, Galileo argued thus:—What humanity succeeds in grasping in the course of many years is conceived by the Divine thought in one second. Divine thought is unfettered by space or time. Above all, the human mind must not suppose that with its reason limited, as it is, by space and time, it can immediately understand the Divine Mind. Man must strive. He must observe each step. He must study each separate phenomenon carefully. He must not think that he can afford to ignore the phenomena, that he can leave out of account what God has planned as the foundation of the phenomena. Galileo affirmed that it was wrong not to wish to know the, true meaning of the wonderful manifestations which Nature unfolds, by means of human reason, that it was wrong not to strive to ascertain the truth by minute investigation. He affirmed that to endeavour to arrive at the truth by speculation, instead of studying carefully the details of the various phenomena, was an entirely false method of thought.

But the motive which prompted Galileo was quite other than those which give rise to similar language to-day. Galileo would not limit the human mind to observation because he denied the operation of the Divine Mind in Nature; on the contrary, just because the Divine Mind manifests itself in Nature and reveals itself as so great, so powerful and so wonderful; because (to the Divine Intelligence) all creative thought springs into being in a moment, while the human mind requires an eternity in which lovingly to decipher the letters of the Alphabet and can only arrive gradually at the detailed thoughts which they represent. It is humility at the thought of how far human reason is below the Divine Reason which prompts Galileo to warn his contemporaries. “you can no longer see behind the things of sense. Not because this was never possible to man, but because the time for doing so has gone by.”

Observation, experience and individual thought; these composed the standard which Galileo placed before his contemporaries. This he was able to do because, in a certain sense, his mind was cast in a mathematical mould and because his method of thinking was so rigidly mathematical. In illustration of this we will take the matter of the telescope. Galileo heard that a discovery had been made in Holland, by means of which it was possible to perceive the most distant stars in the firmament. We must bear in mind that there were no newspapers in those days. He only heard from travelers that some thing had been discovered in Holland of the nature of a telescope. Galileo could not rest till he had found out for himself what this was and himself invented a telescope by means of which he made the great discoveries which confirmed the theories which had recently been promulgated in the Copernican-cosmo-conception. In order to understand these things aright, we must remember these two facts:—that nothing was then understood of the old super-sensible science, and that Galileo was a pathfinder for the new science. Secondly, that a short time before, Copernicus had given a new aspect to the conception of the world through external thought concerning the movements of the planets round the Sun. We must put ourselves in the position of the men of that time and try to enter into the mentality of those who believed, as men had done for thousands of years before them:—“Here we stand on the firm earth, immovable in space.” To men with views such as these, the idea was now presented for the first time, that the earth was spinning round the Sun with incalculable rapidity. Such a conception literally out the ground from under their feet. We cannot be surprised at the excitement such an idea created in all, whether partisans or opponents. To minds like that of Galileo, the way by which Copernicus had arrived at his conclusions was particularly convincing. Let us examine in the light of the present time the means by which Copernicus arrived at his conclusions.

What made Copernicus arrive at the conception that the planets move round the Sun?

Up to his time, a theory of the universe had prevailed, which was itself not understood because it was intended to be taken in a Spiritual sense. As then understood, it was indeed an impossible conception. Men had to suppose that the planets described the most complicated movements—circles—and then circles within circles. It was precisely this terrible complication of ideas which had to be got rid of. This it was which was so obnoxious to certain types of mind.

In reality, Copernicus made no new astronomical discoveries. Be said to himself “Let us proceed along the simplest lines of thought in order to arrive at an explanation of the movements of the planets.” He expressed his system of the universe in the simplest of terms. And with what a wonderful result! The Sun was placed in the centre while the planets revolved around it in circles or in ellipses, as Kepler proved later. The whole conception of the universe was reduced to a wonderful simplicity.

It was this simplicity which so greatly influenced the mind of Galileo. For he always emphatically affirmed that “the human mind is capable of recognizing truth in its simplicity.” Beauty is to be found in the simple, not in the complex. And truth is beauty.

It was because of its Beauty and because of the simplicity of its Beauty that the Copernican theory of the system of the Universe was accepted by so many minds at that time. Galileo in particular accepted it because he found in the teaching of Copernicus that Beauty in simplicity for which he was seeking.

Now he could see the Moons of Jupiter, which hardly anyone would believe in. The eyes of Galileo were the first to see the Moons of Jupiter which encircle him as the planets do the Sun. It was a solar system in miniature. Jupiter with his Moons was as the Sun with his planets. This discovery confirmed the theories of a solar system constructed in accordance with a conception. It seemed so to Galileo, who applied the theory of Copernicus in miniature to a visible world. Hence Galileo was indeed a Pioneer of the New Science.

Thus it came about that he divided the presence of mountains in the Moons, that there were spots in the Sun and that the Nebulae extending across the stars were disintegrated worlds of stars. In short, all which may be expressed as the revelation of the Divine Wisdom expressed in the world of sense. All this made a tremendous effect upon Galileo. With his mathematical mind, the question of time, which was completely lost sight of in the material conception of the visible world, naturally influenced him greatly. Galileo first created the impulse in the human mind to admit that we cannot see behind the material veil with our normal consciousness: “The super-sensible is not to be understood by the human senses. It cannot be comprehended by human reason. Divine Reason grasps it outside time and space, while man's reason is limited to time and space. Let us confine ourselves to that which, in time and space, our human reason can understand.”

Now, seeing that Galileo achieved such greatness in so many things, he is also, from the point of view of philosophy, one of the most important pioneers of the modern Spiritual development of humanity. Can we then wonder that we also see in him a mind who wished to make clear to himself and to others the relation of man to the world of sense and to his own soul-life.

It is a popular fallacy that Kant was the first to draw attention to the fact that the world around us is nothing but illusion and that it is not possible to arrive at “the thing in itself,” at things as they really are. Expressed rather differently, Galileo had already demonstrated this idea; only, behind the visible, he always saw the all-pervading thoughts of the Divine Spiritual, and it was only from humility and not from principle that he said that only after long aeons of time would mankind be fit to draw nearer to it.

But Galileo said:—“When we see a colour, it makes a certain impression on us. For example, red. Is the red colour in the things?” Galileo used a very remarkable illustration, which showed at once that the primary conception was incorrect. That, however, is immaterial to our purpose. The point we wish to emphasize is the conception itself as an idea of that time. Galileo said:—“If you take a feather and tickle a man on the soles of his feet or the palms of his hands, the man will experience a sensation of tickling. Now is the tickling in the feather? No. It is entirely subjective. What is in the feather is quite different. As the tickling is subjective, so too is the red colour subjective, which is visible in the world.” Thus he compared colours and even sounds with the tickling caused by the application of a feather to the soles of the feet.

Once we realize this, we can already trace in Galileo the beginnings of what came down to us as the philosophy of our modern times. For modern philosophy doubts the possibility of Man's ever being able to penetrate behind the veil of the world sense in any way whatsoever.

Thus we see in Galileo, who was born in 1664, the quiet, determined pioneer, while Giordano Bruno, who was somewhat older, being born in 1648, reflected in his mentality all the great truths which were fermenting in the minds of men such as Copernicus, Galileo himself and others at that period. The mind of Giordano Bruno mirrors for us all the great ideas of that time in a mighty, comprehensive system of philosophy.

What was Giordano Bruno's own personal attitude to the world, quite apart from the mental attitude of the men of his day? Giordano Bruno (who only knew the corrupted version of Aristotle) argued thus:—“Aristotle maintains that a sphere exists which extends to the Moon, thence to the different spheres of the stars; then comes the sphere of
the Divine Spiritual. Thus, according to Aristotle, the Living God must be sought for outside the spheres of the stars.”

Giordano was viewing the Universe according to the conception of Aristotle. He saw first the earth, then the spheres of the Moon and of the Stars. Then, finally, beyond these again, beyond this world and beyond that inhabited by man, in the great periphery of this world, the Divine Spirit, which literally directs the revolutions and movements of the world of the planets.

Giordano Bruno could not reconcile this conception with the actual human experience of his day. That which could now be perceived by means of the human senses, that which he himself perceived when he looked at plants, animals and man, that which he saw when he looked at mountains, seas, clouds and stars, all this appeared to him as a marvelous image of what lives in the Divine Spirit itself. In the moving stars, in the clouds sailing through the air, he saw not only a script written by the Divine Being, but something which might pertain to the Divine Being as a finger or a limb does to ourselves. The fundamental conception of Giordano Bruno was not that of a God who directs the visible world from outside, from the periphery, but a God who is incorporate in every single manifestation of the visible, whose bodily form is the visible world.

If we seek to understand how it was that he arrived at such a conclusion, we find that it was the result of the joy of the intoxication of delight in the spirit of the new age which had just begun. This new age had been preceded by a time during which man had been content to grope about amongst the old ideas of Aristotle. A time in which the leading Scholars, if they walked through woods and fields, had no eyes for Nature and all her beauties, but had their minds wholly set on Parchments and Writings which had originated with Aristotle.

Now, however, the time had come when the voice of Nature began to make itself heard by men. Great discoveries revealed themselves one after another. Mighty minds like that of Galileo pressed on from point to point, recognizing the Divine in Nature herself at every step.

The theory of the God in Nature, in contradistinction to the mediaeval conception of Nature, from which God was eliminated, was accepted everywhere with an universal delirium of joy. To this spirit, every fibre of Giordano Bruno's being responded. “There is Spirit in all things,” he says, “This is proved by physical research. Wherever we see a visible creation, there we shall meet the Divine.” There is only one difference between the physical and the Divine. Because we are men and confined within narrow boundaries, the visible appears to us to be limited by time and space. To Giordano Bruno, the Spirit of God exists behind the sense-world. Not in the way in which (as he thought) it had existed for Aristotle or the men of the Middle Ages. He believed the Divine Spirit to be self-existing; and Nature only the body by means of which its Spirit manifested itself in all its beauty.

Nevertheless, man cannot perceive the whole of the Divine Spirit in Nature, he can only see a part. In all things, in all time and in space, the Divine Spirit is to be found. This was the creed of Giordano Bruno. Hence he says “Where is the Divine? In every stone, in every leaf, the Divine is everywhere. In all creation, specially in beings possessing a certain independent existence”. These beings, which recognise their own independence, he terms Monads. By a Monad, he means something which floats and flourishes in the ocean of divinity. All Monads are mirrors of the Universe. Thus Giordano conceived of the universal Spirit as divided into many Monads, and in each Monad that was an individual Spirit, there was something which was a reflection of the Universe.

Such a Monad is the human soul, and they are many. Indeed, the human body itself is composed of many Monads, not of one. If we understand the truth about the physical body according to the ideas of Giordano Bruno, we shall not see the fleshly human body, but a system of Monads; these Monads cannot be clearly seen, just as we cannot distinguish the separate midges in a swarm; the chief Monad is the human soul. When the human soul comes into existence at birth, so said Giordano Bruno, the other Monads which belong to the soul collect together and, by this, the existence of the Chief-Monad, of the Soul Monad, is made possible. When death approaches, the Chief-Monad discharges and disperses the other Monads.

According to Giordano Bruno, birth is the assembling of many Monads round a Chief-Monad, while death is the separation of the inferior Monads from the Chief-Monad, so that the Chief-Monad may be able to take on another form. For each Monad is obliged to take on, not only the form by which we know it here, but every form which it is possible to take on in the Universe. Giordano Bruno conceives of a procession through every form. Thus he approaches as close as possible—in his enthusiasm—to the idea of the re-incarnation of the human soul.

And with reference to the conception of our collective reality, he says:—Man, with his normal consciousness, stands confronted by this reality. What he first receives are the impressions of the senses. These are his first means of knowledge. Of these, there are four, says Giordano Bruno. The first means by which man acquires knowledge is by the impressions of the senses.

The second are the images we construct in our imagination when the things which have impressed the senses are no longer before us, when we only remember what we have experienced. Here we already penetrate further into the soul. This second channel of knowledge he terms “the power of imagination.” The word must not be taken to mean what it does to-day, but it must be understood in the sense in which it was used by Giordano Bruno. After a man has received what the impressions of sense have to give him, he enters (forming the picture within himself) into the impressions. The impression is made from without on the within. It then follows that man, while he penetrates the things with his reason and then proceeds further, draws nearer to the truth, instead of going further away from it. Hence Giordano Bruno recognises reason, the intellect, as the third means of acquiring knowledge, and in this he has in mind the moment when we leave the objects visible to our senses and ascend to the realm of thought. Then something higher and truer than any impression created by the senses flows towards us.

According to Giordano Bruno, the fourth stage is Reason. Reason to him is a living and weaving in the regions of Pure Spirit.

Thus the system of Giordano Bruno comprises four stages of knowledge. He does not, however, classify them in the same way as they are classified, for example, in my books, “The Way of Initiation” and “Initiation and its Results”, under the headings of Present Knowledge, Imaginative Knowledge, Inspirational Knowledge and Intuitive Knowledge. His classifications are more in the abstract. We must, therefore, think of him in the following way: Giordano Bruno lived first at that point of time when the knowledge of visible phenomena was, advancing, therefore he used expressions which resemble those used now to express knowledge of the ordinary visible world, rather than those which relate to the higher worlds. But when Giordano Bruno looks up to the Spiritual World, we can have no doubt of his meaning from the tremendous emphasis with which he says “The Divine Spirit which exists in everything, which has its bodily form in all things, possesses that of which we have the representation, as the idea is the conception of the thing”.

“In what way is the world in God? How is the Spirit in God?” he asks, and replies: “The Spirit is in God as Idea, as the Thought that precedes the Word.” In everything is the Spirit in Nature, as form, he replies, by which he means, that the idea which exists in the Divine Spirit is in the crystal, which has a form; it is in the plant, which has a form; in the animal, which has a form; it is in the human body, which has a form. Of all visible things which have form, a counterpart exists in the human soul as the concept of them.

Giordano Bruno carries this still further. The things of Nature are shadows of the Divine Ideas. “Note well”, he says, “Our concepts are not the shadows of things, they are the shadows of the Divine Thoughts.” Thus, if we have the things of Nature around us and thus have the shadow of the Divine Idea, our concepts will be again fructified thereby. While we are forming our concepts, the Divine Spirit is weaving His Ideas into the original, so that we come in direct contact with the stream which connects us with the Divine Idea.

When we study the theories of that Physical Science which is to-day called Monism, (unlike that of Giordano Bruno), what strikes us most is the fact that, if we would be consistent in speaking of these theories, we must say “they do not mention the Divine Thought”. But Giordano Bruno did not say that, he was a Spiritualist in the strictest sense of the word. What he has to gibe us out of the true inspiration of the Renaissance relates to the Monads. The assembling of the Monads at birth and their dissolution at death refers to the Divine Thoughts, which, in his conception of the world, flow into the world of ideas; and in his own words “The human thought is a reflection of the Divine.” If this is once thoroughly understood, we shall understand something of the spirituality of Giordano Bruno.

But for this, one thing is necessary: we must distinguish between the real and the unreal Giordano Bruno, between the Giordano Bruno who was so greatly misunderstood and the real man himself.

Giordano Bruno was the master-mind, who, by his unbounded enthusiasm, spread broadcast among his contemporaries the more intellectual achievements of Galileo in the realms of Scientific Thought. This is why every utterance of Giordano Bruno carried such weight. All the joy and enthusIasm of the Spirit of the age, all its delight in the discovery of the working and weaving of Nature in the physical world, was concentrated in the personality of Giordano Bruno. This flood of rejoicing was itself crystallized into a system of philosophy, for the Divine Spirit which dwells in all visible things most certainly illuminated the soul of Giordano Bruno, and he was conscious of it. Hence we can understand those utterances of Giordano Bruno, which we do well to remember; they sound as if Nature herself had a direct message for men in those days. We can only quote a few words here.

Consider how wonderful the following thought is, to which Giordano gives expression in contradistinction to the teaching of Aristotle on the same subject. “The Spirit of Divine intelligence is not beyond the visible world, it is not exterior to it, it is everywhere, wherever we may look. The Divine Intelligence does not dwell in any place exterior to the visible world. It does not dwell in that vague realm, of which we may say ‘something moves in circles wide’, it does mot dwell in a revolving, encircling realm, with which we can communicate only from a great distance. The Divine Spirit is the united principle of that vital force, which is in everything and in Nature herself.”

Such was the language which rang out at that time, such the convictions which sprang from the innermost depths of the soul of Giordano Bruno. The question now remains how best to reproduce this language to-day, so that it will speak directly to our hearts and minds. Hermann Brunnhofer, who called attention to this and had to submit to being called a too enthusiastic admirer of Giordano Bruno, put his words into fine verse:

Non est Deus vel intelligentia exterior
Cirounrotans et circumducens;
Dignuis enim illi debet esse
Internum prinzipuim Motus,
Quod est Natura propria, species propria, anima propria,
Quam habeat tot quot in illius
Gremio et corpore vivent
Noe generali Spiritu, corpore.

Anima, Natura animantia
Plantea, Lapides quae univena ut
Disimus proportionaliter cumastro
Euden composita ordine, etaedem
Contemperata complexion um, symmetus,
Secundum genus, quantumlebet secundum
Specierum numeros singula deslingunlui.

1. Giordano Bruno says philosophically: It is worthy of God to be the inner moving principle of things.
2. See also: Herman Brunnhofer, The Influence of Giordano Bruno upon Goethe—Goethe's Journals—Vol. VII, 1886.

Goethe translates this line for line in the poem beginning:

“What Kind of God were He who from the World
Remained aloof and the great Universe Around His finger twirled?” etc.

This is a poetical translation of the mind of Giordano Bruno through the instrumentality of the mind of Goethe. It was not merely that Goethe wrote these verses with Giordano Bruno's works lying beside him. Some other influence must have been at work than that which would have made Goethe merely recast the words of Giordano Bruno in a poetical form. We see in this how the spirit of Giordano Bruno becomes fully alive in Goethe. Nevertheless it is not only a couple of centuries which have to be bridged when we pass from the days of Galileo and Giordano Bruno to Goethe. We must realise that what in the case of Giordano Bruno had its origin in the first great enthusiastic mood from which arose the philosophic cult of Nature, became in Goethe a mood leading him with complete devotion from one thing to another and finally causing him to bring back into Nature the God whose existence man now learned to feel in Nature herself. In Goethe the mood of Giordano Bruno had become his own. It was born in him, as it were. It was already present in him when, at the age of seven, he took the music desk belonging to his father and arranged on it mineral ores from his father's collection, so as to have some products of Nature herself—for the same purpose he took plants from his father's herbarium. He then placed a little stick of incense on the top of the heap and waited, burning glass in hand, for the Sun to rise, so that he might enkindle the incense from its rays and thus consummate a sacrifice culled from the forces of Nature to the God who lives in the plants and minerals and to whom he had erected an altar.

Thus did Giordano Bruno live in Goethe at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, but in such a way that what lived as the innermost attitude of his soul, Goethe carried into every detail of Nature.

It was this mental attitude which made it impossible to Goethe to understand how the Scientific investigators of that day could attach such importance to the outward signs which differentiate men from animals. The physical Scientists of the eighteenth century maintained that man did not possess the same number of small bones in the upper part of the jaw bone as the animals—viz. the inter-maxillary bones—which contain the sheath of the upper teeth. Animals possess these and this is where men differ from animals. Goethe could not understand this highly materialistic idea. This indeed could not be the God who was the inner vital principle of Nature. The God of whom Giordano Bruno spoke as “circumroians et circumducens.” He must be a God who worked outside Nature, a God who, first of all, made the animals, then made man and then, in order to differentiate man from beast, arranged that animals should have the inter-maxillary bones, while these should be wanting in man.

Goethe was the great investigator of Nature, who endeavoured to show that that which existed in Nature as form was capable of rising higher, and that it is not in anything external, such as the inter-maxillary bones, that the difference between the human and the animal world is to be found, but that something exists in man which, though it may be clothed with tones and muscles like those of the animals, constitutes the higher mind of humanity. This is only another proof of the magnitude of Goethe's genius. He not only discovered traces of the inter-maxillary bone and proved that it had only disappeared in man because it was a subordinate bone, but he also shows that the vertebrae may be distended if the activity of the mind contained in the brain finds this to be necessary. A long time ago, when I was studying the Scientific writings of Goethe, in order to understand his assertion that the bones of the skull are transposed vertebrae, the latter having been extended into the cavities of the skull, I came to the inevitable conclusion that Goethe must have conceived the idea that the brain itself was transposed spinal marrow and that this change had been wrought by the mind. That not only the covering tissue, but that the brain itself had been moved up from the vertebrae and spinal marrow to a higher level. It was a wonderful moment im my life when I discovered that, in the last decade of the eighteenth century, Goethe had written in pencil on a slip of paper “The brain is in reality only a piece of transposed spinal marrow.” Professor Bardeleben relates this in his article in the Weimar Year-Book on “Goethe as Scientific Investigator.”

Thus we see the mood which first appeared in Giordano Bruno applied by Goethe to the different parts of living beings. We see how Goethe applied the ideas of Giordano Bruno—to whom, as we have seen, he approaches so closely, even in his choice of words—in a practical way to everything in natural scientific thought.

This is why Goethe laid such stress upon finding in the whole plant world the metamorphosis of the primal archetypal plant (Urpflanze). Added to the great achievements of Goethe as artist were his noteworthy achievements as a scientific investigator of Nature. In a certain sense, the spirit which had come down from the clairvoyant stages of perception to a material form of vision was incorporated in Goethe, as a personality who saw the Divine in all his observations of Nature, even in the individual plants. The expression “Urpflanze”, Primal Archetypal plant. What did Goethe mean by that? He meant to indicate the Spiritual essence in the various species of Plants. With regard to this, the conversation between Schiller and Goethe at Jena, after a meeting of the Botanical Society, which they had both attended, is important. When they had left the assembly, Schiller said:—“What they said about plants was very unsatisfying.” Goethe replied:—“It might have been expressed differently. We ought to be able to see, not only those parts of the plant which we hold in our hands, but also their Spiritual relationship.” Then he took a piece of paper and drew the structure of a plant in a few strokes. He showed to Schiller that the type is not only present in the Lily, the Dandelion or the Ranunculus, but in all plants. Then Schiller, who could not understand the structure of the primal plant) said:—“That is no reality, it is nothing but an idea.” Goethe was very puzzled and said:—“It would gratify me very much to think that I could have ideas without knowing it and even see them with my physical eyes.” For Goethe could perceive the Spiritual element which permeates all plants. He saw it so clearly that he could even draw it. The same applies to the primal archetypal animal in all animals.

Thus Goethe pursued the God who does not work from without the material world, but who lives and operates within all visible things. Thus he followed the Divine Spirit which moves invisibly in everything, working in a concrete way from plant to plant, through leaf, blossom and fruit. It works in the same way from one animal to another, and also from one bone to another, from one animal form to another. It is interesting to note that Goethe was not understood by the men of his own time, not even by Schiller. But little by little the spirit of Goethe will take root even in the thought of the Natural Scientists. It will be acknowledged that Goethe's ideas were a stage higher than those of Giordano Bruno. Giordano Bruno spoke of a God, a pantheistic God, who is to be found everywhere, in plants and in animals. But Goethe, although he too sought the great spirit who does not operate from without, said further:—We must not only seek for Him in general; we must study the detailed phenomena and look for the Spirit in the separate things. For it lives in one way in plants, in another in mineral; one way in this bone and another way in that.

The Spirit is in perpetual action; it forms the various parts of matter, matter follows the moving spirit. This can be expressed as one universal spirit, as was done by Giordano Bruno. It can also be sought with deep devotion in every single detail, as Goethe did. In this way, man draws nearer and nearer to the Spirit at work in the outspread carpet of Nature, by degrees will that Spirit reveal itself.

If we study the successive stages of progress represented by Galileo, Giordano Bruno and Goethe, and search for the root principle which directed such great minds, we shall learn by degrees to adhere to the root principle which directed them, and not to be led away by the will-of-the-wisp of superficial criticism. For even the greatest minds do not escape criticism. Let us take Galileo with his great conception of the Divine, which embraced the whole of Creation in the span of one moment, and was unfettered by space or time. When we consider this, the question is bound to arise:—“What do the men of to-day know about the real significance of Galileo?” As a rule, they know little more about him than the one incident which is assuredly not true, that he said, as is supposed, “It moves, nevertheless.” A fine saying, truly, but, as can be seen from the investigations of the Italian scholar, Angells de Gubernatis, it cannot be true. And how often do we not hear that the last words of Goethe were:—“More light”, which is exactly what he never did say.

Hence we see that these great minds must be studied in the light which Spiritual Science is able to throw upon them, We cannot, as we are so fond of doing, judge of the past with our own, individual, unaided, modern mind.

These three master-minds form a wonderful, harmonious triad, which marks the beginning of our modern age; in Galileo and in Giordano Bruno we see the dawn, in Goethe we see the Sun itself, which show how the Spirit of the modern age already taught him to see that the smallest atom of matter cannot exist without Spirit behind it, which brings one atom in touch with another.

I would call to your remembrance an incident which Goethe relates himself. Many years after the death of Schiller, it was decided to transfer his remains from their grave to the Princes Mausoleum. There was some difficulty in deciding which were really the bones of Schiller. Goethe was attracted by a skull, which he saw must have belonged to a man of the type of the genius of Schiller; on closer inspection, he decided that this must be Schiller's skull, as he recognised it from the strongly marked peculiarity in the shape of the skull. This skull was accordingly placed in the Princes Mausoleum. Here he recognised the principle, which was also recognised by Galileo, that the spirit (or genius) must be sought for humbly and mathematically.

The ancient church lamp still hangs in the cathedral at Pisa, swinging backwards and forwards before countless souls. But Galileo had only sat before it once, when he measured the beating of his pulse by the regular swinging of the lamp and thus discovered the laws of balance, which are of such vast importance to-day. This was a Divine Inspiration. There are many such cases. At the grave of Schiller, Goethe was inspired with the thought which lived in the philosophic inspiration of Giordano Bruno. “Spirit is inseparable from matter. It is everywhere. Not, however, tossing it wildly about and driving it round, but, as Spirit which exists in the minutest atom.” This conception of the Spiritual, which existed in Giordano Bruno, was re-born in Goethe's soul, as he held the skull of Schiller in his hand, and, as water congealed into ice, so was the Spirit of Schiller made manifest to him in the skull of Schiller.

Goethe's entire spiritual standpoint lies before us when we study the poem which he wrote after having looked on Schiller's skull. Especially those lines, which are so often misinterpreted, and which we can only understand when we realise that in the situation which we have described above, Goethe saw the individuality of Schiller in plastic form before him, as if frozen.

Then he cries, as he must do, forced thereto by the similarity of the Spirit which united Giordano Bruno and Goethe:

Was kann der Mensch imleben mehr gewinnen,
Als dass sich Gott-Natur ihm offenbare,
Wie sie das Feste ladesst zu Geist verrinnen,
Wie sie das Geisterzeugte fest bewahre.

What can a man wrest more from life
Than that Nature, all-divine, reveal to him
How that she causeth the firm and formed to melt into Spirit,
And how what is born of the Spirit she holdeth fast in form.