The Rudolf Steiner Archive

In last week's lecture we became familiar with every day expressions of man's inner life, namely laughing and weeping, and today we will explore the conditions in both our immediate and more distant surroundings upon which this inner being of man, including man's whole evolution, in a certain way depend. As wide as possible a study of man is what we have been working at in these group lectures this winter, and we will go on studying man from as many aspects as possible.

If you consider what you know of earth conditions, then even if you look at these relatively superficially you would realise immediately that man takes on a different form in different regions of the earth. External bodily characteristics vary according to the different zones of the earth. You will remember that there are ‘races’, the black, red, yellow and white race, and that these races were originally connected with certain regions of the earth. You will also find this corroborated by history, either in what you learnt at school from the observation of purely physical, material conditions, or what we have learnt through anthroposophical science itself. Looking back into the ancient past, we see how the human soul and actually the human body too, developed in the different epochs of earth evolution. In the sphere of spiritual science we have looked back into ancient India, Persia, Egypt, and so on. And we saw how the various capacities that mankind has today, developed gradually in the course of ages. All this gives you an idea of how external conditions are connected with the unfolding of man's inner being. Now if even present-day earth conditions bring about such differences among men, what tremendous human differences must have come about since the very beginnings of our earth evolution, after it has passed through the Saturn, Sun and Moon evolution. We have described various details of this. What we are going to describe today, however, shall be considered from another point of view. For we shall really get to know human conditions if we continually consider them from different points of view.

At the beginning of earth evolution, earth, sun and moon were, as you know, still one body. The conditions within our whole evolution must have been entirely different then. Man, evolving in earthly evolution, would have been very different whilst the earth was still one with the sun; and how greatly he had to change as first of all the sun and then the moon separated from the earth! Now we know that the epoch after the sun and the moon had separated from the earth is also the so-called Lemurian evolution, in which man had only just begun to acquire a form that is anything like our present-day one. We have often described it by saying that this was actually the time when man descended from higher regions on to the earth. Although man was already in a physical body at the time when the sun was still joined with the earth, it was not like today's body. At that time he had the kind of physical body like you can imagine if you picture man today not standing with his feet on the earth, but raising himself into the air, as though he had no bony elements within him, but still belonged to the regions of air and water, whereby we must imagine the water dissolved in the air. He would have been like a transparent being on the periphery of the earth. A present-day eye would not be able to distinguish this human being from his environment, just as a present-day eye cannot distinguish certain sea creatures from their surroundings, because they look so similar. You can imagine such a being wafting through the air. Not until after the separation of the sun and the moon did man become like we know him today. What were the conditions necessary for man to develop into what he is today? It was essential that the sun's force should not work from inside but from outside on to the earth. That was the purpose of the separation of both sun and moon, that these two cosmic bodies should send their forces, like the sun sends its light, from outside on to the earth. Man could only acquire his present-day form because the sun shone on him not from below, from the centre of the planet, but from the side. Just imagine, if you care to assume such a hypothesis, that the moon were to fall back on to the earth, and the sun to reunite with it; if he wanted to survive in those conditions man would have to re-clothe himself with a body as airy as it was before, and he would have to be able to waft through the environment he is familiar with today. Thus man owes his present existence to the fact that the sun and moon shine on him from outside. We will disregard all the other forces today.

Now the sun and moon work in various ways from outside. The way the sun works in the region of the North Pole is very different from the way it works at the Equator. We get the impression of tremendous contrasts that acquired a meaning the moment the sun began to shine on to the earth from outside. You know, of course, that the nearer we get to the North Pole the greater are the differences between winter and summer. And right at the North Pole half the year is day and half the year night. When you think of these differences, then what spiritual science has to say about these things will make sense. It tells us that at the North Pole itself earth conditions in Lemurian times were the closest to those conditions existing on the earth when the sun and moon were still united with it. Today, of course, these conditions are quite different. But even today it is still to a certain extent true that at the North Pole the strongest influence is from the earth's centre to its surface, and the influence of the sun and the moon are at their least. What has made itself felt since Lemurian times, in the great increase of forces raying in from outside, has had the least influence of all at the North Pole, so the effect of the centre of the earth on its surface and everything living upon it is here at its greatest. On the other hand the influence of the sun and the moon is strongest around the Equator, and this was already so in Lemurian times. In the Kashic Record we can confirm that earth conditions changed to something completely new with the separation of sun and moon. This, however, led to a quite definite consequence. Something arose which was of fundamental importance for the whole of earth evolution. For the reasons we have given it was in the area of the North Pole least possible for man to descend, as it were, and to incarnate in a physical human form in such a way that he could come to best expression within it. Therefore in ancient Lemurian times it was just at the North Pole that those beings congregated who, if I may express it this way, laid no claim as yet to coming right down on to the earth, but who preferred to remain above in the regions where the air was still interlaced with vapour. Thus there was at the North Pole in Lemurian times a kind of spiritual species that did not concern itself very much with the physical bodies that swarmed about on the earth below. From a spiritual point of view, seen by a present-day eye, this species consisted of transparent forms that were therefore not actually visible, and as such they were highly developed, but regarding their physical form they showed a lower form of humanity. They lived in an etheric body and were beings of a more ethereal nature, having only a loose connection with the primitive bodies developing on the earth below that still had no density to speak of. These bodies were too dependent on the earth, and these spiritually more advanced beings only used them as sheaths to the very smallest extent. If, therefore, a man of the present, with his powers of perception, had been able to visit the North Pole in Lemurian times, he would have spoken about its population much in this way: What peculiar people!

They are really very little developed with regard to their physical bodies, but this must point to something special, for as a people they are skilful and intelligent; it is as though they were being directed by strings from above! And so indeed it was, for the real human being did not descend on to the earth's surface. That is why the people living around the North Pole at that time were in the highest degree ethereal beings with highly developed etheric bodies but underdeveloped physical bodies; beings that as it were could grasp all the wisdom of the world with their etheric bodies, as though they had great clairvoyant faculties, and who looked out to the starry Heavens with an understanding of the beings who were weaving the life of world spaces. But you could almost say that their physical bodies were sleepy. Yet because they were led as though by strings from above, the deeds they performed were perfectly intelligent.

In the equatorial regions it was different. The influence of the sun and the moon was becoming more and more active from outside. The air was interlaced and warmed through by the rays of the sun. All the phenomena taking place in the region of the air became dependent on the sun and the moon. And the result of this was that just in ancient Lemurian times the people of these regions descended deepest into their physical bodies, and their etheric bodies interpenetrated their physical bodies most deeply. A present-day man with eyes of the senses would assume these beings to be the most highly developed physical human beings, whilst he would reckon the northern peoples to be underdeveloped. And there was a further difference that is of special importance.

Where the sun had least influence men developed in such a way that over large areas they all looked more or less similar to one another. For each of these beings that did not descend but was still ethereal belonged to a number of forms below. Up in the North they were group souls, whilst the souls around the Equator were more individual souls, and each human being was much more inside his own body. Thus the inhabitants of those regions that we find at the North Pole today had, in Lemurian times, the characteristics of group soul beings to the greatest imaginable degree. A great number of people looked up to their group soul. And if we look at these group souls as souls we will see that they were much more highly developed than the souls which, in Lemurian times, descended into physical bodies in the equatorial regions. So we can say that the North Pole was populated by people that actually lived in the realms of air in a kind of paradise, and who had not yet descended as far as the earth. What we thus understand to be a necessary consequence of the foregoing you can now compare with what you encounter here and there in anthroposophical literature, namely that those higher beings who were once the teachers of mankind descended from the cold North! We have actually found them, the group souls around the North Pole. If they wanted to become teachers of those people who were inferior souls and who entered more into physical bodies, then they had to descend further, too, and oppose the capacity of the clairvoyance of Lemurian times in their etheric body, or they had to sacrifice themselves and take on the physical human form of the Lemurian people.

If we had taken a journey in Lemurian times from the Equator to the North Pole, we should have found a spiritualising of the earth population. In those times we can distinguish as it were a twofold population: one kind that had still remained spiritual, and whose earthly bodies appeared really to be only an addition to their spiritual being, and another kind that had already descended into matter, into the physical. What would have happened if no change had occurred with earth evolution? The best souls of the polar regions would not have been able to descend at all into physical bodies. And on the other hand the equatorial population would have more or less died out. Having descended too soon into a physical body, they fell into those wicked and immoral practices that led to the downfall of Lemuria. And this resulted in the best section of the population migrating to those regions lying between the Equator and the northern lands. For in Lemurian times we find the members of mankind with the greatest chance of survival living in the countries between the Equator and the North Pole. The human bodies that could become bearers of the most advanced human souls developed best in those regions of ancient Atlantis known today as the temperate zones.

Now all the various stages of evolution leave so-called stragglers behind and there are also stragglers left from these ancient times. What we call the Lemurian population of the earth, that remarkable people of the North with strongly developed etheric bodies and less developed physical bodies, and that other equatorial population with strongly developed physical bodies and less developed etheric bodies, of these people nothing remains, they became extinct. For these bodies were of such a nature that we cannot even find remains; the substance was so soft that there can be no question of there being any remains. Of paramount importance in their Atlantean descendants was that the germ of the ego, the consciousness of Self, the foundations of which were already basically there from ancient Lemurian times on, went through a progressive development on the earth. If mankind had not to a large extent migrated to Atlantis, the active development of the ego would not have come about. For the Lemurian population would have gradually died out, having to succumb to passions, and the best souls of the North would not have descended to earth at all, for they would not have been able to find suitable bodies. The underdeveloped bodies of earlier times would not have provided them with the possibility of developing a strong consciousness of self within the bodily nature. Through the fact that the better sections of the Lemurian population migrated to Atlantis, the human body evolved its form to the extent that it could become the bearer of self-consciousness in a harmonious way. And it was only in the course of time that the human body acquired this form in the regions corresponding to the present temperate zones. For in this period of evolution the human body was still evolving. In Atlantean times the human body was not yet confined to rigid forms, and the highly developed human beings, those of great spiritual significance, were physically small in those days, whereas a person who was not very significant spiritually had in Atlantean times a gigantically developed physical body. And if you had met such a giant in those days, you could have concluded: He is not on a very high level spiritually, for he has rushed into his body with his whole being! Everything that refers to ‘giants’ in legends is absolutely based on a knowledge of the truth. If, therefore, a real memory of these times is preserved in the Germanic myths, we feel it to be absolutely correct, from the spiritual scientific point of view, that the giants are stupid and the dwarfs very clever. This is entirely based on what could be said of the Atlantean population: Where the people are small we find great intelligence, and a race of large men are all stupid! Where human intelligence ran to flesh there was not much mind left. So that physical size expressed the inability to retain the spiritual. In those days the body was still to a certain extent perfectly capable of transformation. Just at the time when Atlantis began to sink there was a great contrast between men who were good as to their qualities of soul, and were a race of little men, and the giant forms who were wicked and in whom everything had turned to flesh. You might even find echoes of these facts in the Bible, if you cared to look for them.

So we see that in Atlantean times the human body could still form itself according to spiritual characteristics. Therefore it could also take on the form which enabled it to mould all the organs, heart, brain, and so on, in such a way that they could become the expression of an actual ego being, a being with self-consciousness. These capacities and characteristics, however, developed on innumerable different levels. There were people whose inner nature was correctly balanced and who were normal, for they had not developed egoism to too great an extent, nor had they developed their ego-feeling solely on a lower level. With them, devotion to the outer world and ego-feeling maintained a balance. Such people were scattered about everywhere. And these were the men that the Atlantean initiates could do most with. On the other hand there were other men who had developed a tremendously strong ego-feeling, much too soon, of course; for human beings had not yet reached the point when they could make of their bodies an instrument for a strongly developed ego-feeling. This made the body hardened in egoism as it were, and it became impossible for it to develop beyond a certain point. There were other people again who had not reached anything like a normal ego-feeling because they were more susceptible to influences from the outer world than they should have been; peoples who had completely surrendered themselves to the outer world. Thus it was the normal human beings that were the best material for the initiates to use for the evolution of the future, and they were also the ones that the great sun initiate, Manu, gathered around him as being most capable of evolving. Those peoples whose ego impulse was developed too strongly, so that it permeated their whole being and made it a manifestation of egohood, these people gradually wandered to the West and became the nation the last survivors of which appeared as the Red Indians of America. Those people whose ego-feeling was too little developed migrated to the East, and the survivors of these people became the subsequent Negro population of Africa. If you look at those things in a really spiritual scientific way you will see evidence of them right into the physical characteristics. If a man brings his whole inner being to expression in his physiognomy and on the surface of his body, then it permeates his external being with the colour of his inner nature as it were. Now the colour of egohood is red or copper or a yellowish brown. And an overpowering feeling of ego arising from offended self-respect can even nowadays turn a man as it were yellow with rage. They are absolutely connected, these two phenomena: the red colour of those peoples that migrated to the West and the yellow colour of the man whose ‘blood boils’ as we say, and whose inner nature is showing itself right into his skin. Those people, however, who had developed their ego being too little, and who were too exposed to the influences of the sun, were like plants: they deposited too many carbonic constituents beneath their skin and became black. This is why the Negroes are black. Thus both east of Atlantis in the black population and west of Atlantis in the red population we find survivors of the kind of people who had not developed their ego-feeling in a normal way. The human beings who had developed normally lent themselves best to progress. Therefore they were the ones chosen to infiltrate the various other regions from the place we know of in Asia.

Now between the little group of people Manu gathered round him and the extreme cases there were obviously innumerable intermediary stages of development. These were also turned to account, of course. To some extent these intermediary levels were extraordinarily suitable for the further evolution of earth civilisation. Thus for example, in the migration from West to East a people remained behind in parts of Europe who had developed their ego-feeling to a marked degree, but who were at the same time not very open to influences from the environment. Think what a peculiar mixture was bound to result in Europe. Those people who migrated to the East and became the black race were very susceptible to external influences, especially that of the sun, just because they had so little ego-feeling. But other peoples migrated into these parts, or at least in this direction, who had a strong ego-feeling. These were peoples who had preferred as it were going East to going West, and they are a milder red than they would have been had they gone West. They gave rise to the race of people who had a strong ego-feeling which nevertheless kept a balance between this and their devotion to the outer world. Those are the peoples of Europe of whom we were able to say in the last public lecture that their strong feeling of personality was from the beginning their essential feature.

Thus we see how man's outer surroundings work on his inner situation, and how the earth, through the different positions in which the areas of its surface are exposed to the sunlight, gave rise to innumerable levels of soul development. All according to the direction in which the souls looked, they found a different possibility for developing themselves in a physical body. It is very important that we realise the connection between the sun's influence on the earth and man's evolution. If some day you follow up these matters with me as far as the details of later times you will see how much becomes comprehensible through the fact that all these possible shades of colouring arose. Thus for example there was that particular part of the population that stayed in Europe whose characteristics were as I have described, and they led an independent existence up till much later times. They did not concern themselves about other people; but those that migrated into the regions already colonised by peoples with various shades of dark skin, and mixed with them, acquired every possible shade of skin colour. Look at the colours to be found in Asia, from the Negroes to the yellow races. Hence you have bodies that are sheaths for every possible level of soul, from the completely passive Negro soul entirely given up to the outer world of physical existence, to the other levels of passive souls in every possible part of Asia.

Various characteristics of the evolution of the Asiatic and African peoples will now be comprehensible to you: they present various combinations of surrender to the environment and the external manifestation of ego-feeling. So fundamentally we have two groups of people representing combinations: those on European soil, forming the root stock of the white population, who had predominantly developed the feeling of personality, but who did not migrate to where the feeling of personality permeated the whole body, but to where the ego-feeling became more inward. Therefore in western Asia and partly in North Africa and the countries of Europe, too, in earlier times, you find a people with a strong inner ego-feeling, but who on the whole were not given to losing themselves in the outer world; their inner character was strong and firm, but it did not set its imprint on the bodily nature. On the other hand there are those peoples in Asia with passive, self-effacing natures in whom just this passivity expresses itself in the highest degree. This makes the people dreamy, and the etheric body penetrates very deeply into the physical body. That is the fundamental difference between the European and the Asiatic peoples.

Manu, with his group of normal men, was wedged in between them. He had to bring the right form of culture to each different shade of the population, and he had to colour this wisdom and teaching to suit the external conditions of the people. Thus we see that the peoples of Asia were given instruction of the kind to satisfy them in their passivity and self-effacement. The Afro-Asiatic peoples do not emphasise the ego. The Negro would to some extent not lay stress on the ego at all. When these people looked up to the divine, they said: I do not find my innermost being within me, I find it in Brahma by flowing out of myself and surrendering myself to the universe!

A teaching such as this would not have been understood in Europe. Europe was situated much too near the North Pole for that, and the countries have kept a certain similarity right down the ages. Let us remind ourselves that it was at the North Pole that we previously found the peoples that did not descend right into physical bodies but whose physical bodies were actually to a certain extent stunted. In fact the European peoples had not as yet quite descended into their physical bodies. They turned their feeling of personality inward. And we would find this more and more the further back we went. Just think how this feeling of personality has been preserved right into later times, when people perhaps no longer saw any reason for it. Someone who belonged to the East would have said: I unite myself with the one, all-embracing Brahma! Thou unitest thyself with Brahma! The other man unites himself with Brahma, they all unite themselves with the one Brahma! With whom did the European unite himself, if he had to acknowledge this as an acceptable idea? He united himself with the one valkyrie, with the one higher soul. And the valkyrie, one might say, was there for each one at the moment of death. It was all an individual, personal matter. And it was only at the border of these two regions that such a thing as the Moses-Christ religion could arise. It could only come right in the middle between East and West. And whilst it could not take root over in the East where the idea of God was that of a unity, but at a previous stage, it could assert itself as the idea of a personal God, which Jehovah is and which Christ is, among those people who already bore the feeling of personality within themselves. Therefore it spread to the West, and we see it meeting with understanding, when envisaged as the idea of a God people could think of as a person. That is why we see it developing in this way almost as a necessity just in this particular belt. The feeling of personality was there, but it was still inward, still spiritual, just as with the ancient Lemurians everything was still spiritual, and the bodily nature was only developed to a small degree. The bodily nature was certainly developed here, but the personal element, which man prized so highly, was inward, and man also wanted to conquer what was external by means of the inner being. Thus it was here that they best understood a God who had the greatest wealth of inner nature permeating his outer nature, namely the Christ. In Europe everything was prepared for the Christ. And because these were regions in which in earlier times men had not descended entirely on to the earthly scene, and therefore some kind of last remnants of spiritual perception existed, there was still something remaining of the vision of spiritual beings, of the old European clairvoyance.

This old European clairvoyance had also led to there being an ancient image of God throughout Europe and also as far as Asia, which present-day scholars, perhaps, will only get to know of if they discover it in the myths of certain isolated districts of Siberia. A remarkable description emerged there long before Christian times, when nothing was known as yet of what was going on in the South, namely what is described in the Old Testament, the Greco-Roman evolution and that of the East. A remarkable idea emerged there which possibly led to the name that has now more or less died out, the ‘Ongod’; and Ongod is a name that is still echoed as it were in the idea of the ‘One God’. The Ongod would be something like the divine we perceive in all spiritual beings. So according to this way of thinking the idea of a personal God was something that was absolutely familiar to the people that lived in this particular belt of the earth. Therefore we can understand that it was just here that this particular outlook bore its chief fruit. For this belt of the earth and its inhabitants had so to speak solved the mystery of the ego. Strictly speaking all evolution since Atlantean times consists either of peoples who maintained the ego-feeling in just the right proportion, or of peoples who developed the ego too much or too little. Nothing special could come of the peoples who had developed the ego in too great or too little a degree. The peoples we have just described as the peoples of the Near East, and also the peoples of certain parts of Africa and especially of Europe, had developed the ego in a unique way.

These were the basic conditions necessary for the coming civilisation that has developed roughly since the beginning of our era. The ego had to reach a certain point of development, as it were, but not overdo it in either direction. And it is our task today to understand this in the right way. For all spiritual science has in a certain respect to appeal to what we call the development of a higher ego from out of the lower. When we look back over the ages we can learn from the fact that certain sections of the earth's inhabitant's did not find it possible to keep pace with earth evolution in the development of their ego, how many mistakes can be made in regard to the development of the higher ego out of the lower. In ancient Atlantis, for instance, there were peoples who dropped out of the earth population so to speak, and they became Red Indians. What would they have said if they had been able to put the facts of their development into words? They would have said: Above all I want to develop my inner being, which I find to be the highest thing within men when I look within myself. And they developed this ego so strongly that it affected even the colour of their skin, and that is how they became red. Their development led them into decadence. Among the people of Atlantis in whom everything still went directly into the body, these were the ones who cultivated what we might call inner brooding upon the ego, and they were so to say convinced that they could find within themselves everything that had to be developed. At the other extreme were those people who said: Oh, the ego is of no significance. The ego must lose itself entirely, it must dissolve altogether, and only listen to what the outside world says! They did not really say this, because they did not reflect in this manner. But those are the peoples who denied their ego to such an extent that they went black, because the external forces coming from the sun to the earth made them so. Only those peoples that were capable of holding the balance with regard to their ego could develop into the future.

Now let us look at our present earth population. There are still people today who say: Oh, the anthroposophists talk of a spiritual world which they seek within themselves. We, however, look back to our good old religious traditions that have been handed down to us externally. We rely on what comes to us from outside and are not very concerned about a higher world! Of course everything is more spiritual today than it was in Atlantis. Nowadays you no longer go black if you rely merely on traditions, and say: Those to whom we have entrusted the welfare of our souls will take care of us, those who do the job, and whose business it is to see that our souls reach Heaven! Nowadays this no longer makes you black. But we do not wish to deny everything, for in parts of Europe people still say today that if you think in this way you will go ‘black’! Everything happens to be more spiritual today! That then is the one type. The others are those who, without taking the trouble to go into all the details of spiritual science—investigations in the Kashic Record, the nature of reincarnation and karma, the principles of man's being, and so on—which require an effort to be understood, are so easy-going that they say: What do I want all that for? I look within myself, that is my higher ego, the divine man within me is there! Such a way of thinking often arises, even in theosophical circles. These people do not want to learn anything, or really develop themselves and be prepared to wait until the ego has taken hold of the various parts of their nature, but run around waiting for the divine man to speak out of them, talking incessantly about the higher ego. Indeed, there are even certain books that tell you: You do not need to learn at all! Just let the God within you speak! Today, when everything is more spiritual, this no longer makes people red. But they succumb to the same fate as did the peoples that were always boasting of their ego.

What we need is an ego that keeps itself mobile, neither losing itself in external physical observation or in external physical experience, nor remaining stationary at one point, but really advancing in spiritual development. That is why the great masters of wisdom and of harmony of the perceptions have not been telling us all the time in the theosophical movement that we should let the divine man within us speak; on the contrary they have given us quite specific impulses for finding the wisdom of the world in all its different aspects. And we are not pupils of the great masters by only wanting to let the God within us speak, or by imagining that each individual carries his own master within himself, but by wanting to get to know the structure of the world in all its aspects. Anthroposophical development is a striving to know all the subtle aspects of cosmic happenings. We attain our higher ego by evolving upwards from stage to stage. Our ego is there outside, manifest in the wonders of the world. For we are born out of the world and want to live our way back into it.

Thus we see that conditions which a man can fall into today are only so to speak modern, more spiritual versions of what we met with in Atlantean times. Even then men came under these three categories: There were those who really wanted to develop their egos, and who were always taking in new things, and by so doing they really became the bearers of post-Atlantean civilisation. Then there were those who only wanted to let the divine speak in them, and their egos made them red. And the third group turned their minds exclusively outwards, and these people became black.

We must learn the right lesson from these phenomena of earth evolution, then in the anthroposophical movement we shall really find the right impulse. What happens has always in a certain way already happened, but it happens again in ever new forms. The anthroposophical movement is something so great and significant because it is carrying further in the various regions of the earth something that developed visibly in Atlantis, but now is more invisible. Thus man is hastening forward from a civilisation of the visible towards a cultural epoch of the invisible and ever more invisible.

Today we intend adding something to round off the many facts and views we have been studying here this winter. We have often emphasised the way in which spiritual science should take hold of human life, and how it can become life, action and deed. Today, however, we want to give a few concluding aspects on the subject of the great evolutionary processes of the cosmos, as these are expressed in man. And to start with I should like to draw your attention to a fact that can tell you a great deal about the nature of cosmic evolution, if only you are prepared to look at it in the right way.

Consider, in a purely external way to begin with, the difference between the evolution of the animal and that of man. You need only say one word and hold one idea before you, and you will soon notice the difference between the concept of animal and human evolution. Think of the word ‘education’. Actual education is impossible in the animal world. To a certain extent you can train the animal to do things that are foreign to its natural instincts and inborn way of life. But only an extremely enthusiastic dog-lover would want to deny that there is a radical difference between the education of a human being and what can be undertaken with animals. We need merely bear one particular anthroposophical insight in mind, and we shall understand the basis for this apparently superficial fact.

We know that man's development is a gradual and very complicated process. We have repeatedly emphasised that in the first seven years of his life, up to the change of teeth, man develops in quite a different way from the later period up to fourteen, and again from the fourteenth to the twenty-first year. We will only touch on this today, for you already know it. According to spiritual science man passes through several births. The human being is born into the physical world when he leaves his mother's body and frees himself of the physical maternal sheath. But we know that when this has happened he is still enclosed in a second maternal sheath, an etheric one. During the first seven years of his life the child's etheric body is completely enveloped in external etheric currents that come from the outer world, just as the physical body is enveloped until birth in a physical maternal sheath. At the change of teeth this etheric sheath is stripped off, and not until now, at the age of seven, is the etheric body born. Then the astral body is still enclosed in the astral maternal sheath that is stripped off at puberty. After this the astral body develops freely until the twenty-first or twenty-second year, which is the time when strictly speaking the actual ego of man is born. Not until then does the human being awaken to his full inner intensity and the ego that has evolved through the course of his earlier incarnations work its way free.

To clairvoyant consciousness a very special fact becomes apparent here. If you watch a very young child for several weeks or months, you will see the child's head surrounded by etheric and astral currents and forces. However, these currents and forces gradually become less distinct and vanish after a while. What is really taking place there? You can actually discover what is happening, even without clairvoyant vision, although clairvoyant vision confirms what we are about to say. Immediately after the birth of a human being his brain is not the same as it will be a few weeks or months later. The child already perceives the outer world, of course, but its brain is not yet an instrument capable of connecting external impressions in a definite way. By means of connecting-nerves running from one part of the brain to another, the human being learns by degrees to link together in thought what he perceives in the external world, but these connecting nerve-strands develop only after birth. A child will hear and see a bell, for instance, but the impression of the sound and the sight of the bell do not immediately combine to form the thought that the bell is ringing. The child learns this only gradually, because the part of the brain that is the instrument for the perception of sound and the part that is the instrument for visual perception become connected only in the course of life. And not until this has happened is it possible for the child to reach the conclusion: ‘What I see is the same thing that is making the sound’. Connecting-cords like this are developed in the brain, and the forces that develop these connecting-cords can be seen by the clairvoyant in the first weeks of the child's development as an extra covering round the brain. But this covering passes into the brain and subsequently lives within it, no longer working from outside but from within. What works from outside during the first weeks of the child's development could not go on working at the whole development of the growing human being were it not protected by the various sheaths. For when that which has been working from outside passes into the brain, it develops under the protecting sheath first of the etheric body then of the astral body and only when the twenty-second year has been reached does that which first worked from outside become active from within. What was outside the human being during the first months of his existence and then slipped inside, is active for the first time independently of sheaths in the twentieth to the twenty-second year; then it becomes free and awakens into intense activity.

Now let us consider the gradual development of the human being and compare it with that of the plant. We know that the plant only has its physical and etheric body here in the physical world, whereas its astral body is outside it; but only the physical and etheric body within it. The plant emerges from the seed, forms its physical body, and then the etheric body gradually develops. And this etheric body is all that the plant has in addition. Now we have seen that man's etheric body is still enveloped in the astral body until puberty, and that man's astral body is not actually born until then. But the plant, after reaching its puberty, cannot give birth to an astral body, for it has none. Therefore the plant has nothing further to develop after puberty. It has accomplished its task in the physical world when puberty occurs, and after it has been fertilised, it withers. You can even observe something similar in certain lower animals. In these lower animals the astral body has quite evidently not penetrated into the physical body to the same extent as in the higher animals. Lower animals are characterised by the very fact that their astral body is not yet entirely within their physical body. Take the may-fly; it comes into being, lives until it is fertilised, and then dies. Why? Because it is a creature which, like a plant, has its astral body for the most part outside it, and therefore it has nothing further to develop when puberty has occurred. In a certain respect man, animal and plant develop in a similar way until puberty. Then the plant has nothing else to develop in the physical world, and so it dies. The animal still has an astral body, but no ego. Therefore after puberty certain possibilities of development remain in the animal. The astral body becomes free, and as long as it develops freely and possibilities of development remain, further development continues in the higher animal after puberty. But the astral body of the animal has no ego within it in the physical world. The animal's ego is a group ego; it embraces a whole group and exists as group ego in the astral world, where its possibilities of development are quite different from those of the single animal here in the physical world. What the animal possesses as astral body has a limited possibility of development, and the animal already has this possibility within it as a natural tendency when it comes into the world. The lion has something in his astral body that expresses itself as a sum of impulses, instincts and passions. And this tendency continues to live itself out to the full until an ego might be born; but the ego is not there, it is on the astral plane. Therefore when the animal has just reached the stage when man attains his twenty-first year, its possibilities of development are all used up. The length of life varies according to circumstances, of course, for animals do not all live to be twenty-one. But up to the age of twenty-one, when the ego is born in man, his development is comparable to that of the animal. This must not lead to the conclusion that human development up to the age of twenty-one is identical to that of an animal, for that is not the case. The ego is already within the human being from the beginning, right from conception, and it now becomes free. Hence, because there is something within man from the beginning that becomes free at the age of twenty-one, he is from the outset no animal being, for the ego, although not free, is nevertheless working in him from the start. And it is essentially this ego that can be educated. For it is this ego, together with what it has accomplished in the astral, etheric and physical bodies, that passes from one incarnation to another. If this ego received nothing new in a further incarnation, man would not be able to take anything with him at his physical death, from his last life between birth and death. And if he were not able to take anything with him, he would be at exactly the same stage in the following life as he was in the previous one. Through the fact that you see man going through a development in life, and acquiring what the animal cannot acquire, because the animal's possibilities of development do not go beyond its inborn capacities, man is constantly enriching his ego, and reaches higher levels from one incarnation to another. It is because man bears within him an ego that has already been at work, although it only becomes free at his twenty-first year, that education is practicable, and something further can be done with him beyond his original possibilities. The lion brings its lion nature with it and lives it out. Man not only brings with him his nature as a member of the general human species, but also what he has attained as an ego in his Previous incarnation. This can be transformed more and more by education and life, and it will have acquired new impetus by the time man passes through the portal of death and has to prepare for a new incarnation. The point is that man acquires new factors of development and is constantly adding to his store.

Now let us ask what actually happens when man adds to his store from outside? To answer this we must reach three very important, rather difficult concepts. But as we have been working for some years in this group, we ought to be able to understand them. Let us start by taking a fully developed plant, for instance a lily of the valley. Here you have the plant before you in another form, as a small seed. Imagine holding the seed; there you have a minute structure. When you lay it in front of you, you can say: Everything that I shall see later on as root, stalk, leaves and blossom is in this seed. So here I have the plant in front of me as a seed and there as a fully grown plant. But I could not have the seed in front of me if it had not been produced by a previous lily of the valley. The case is different for clairvoyant consciousness. When clairvoyant consciousness observes the fully grown lily of the valley, it sees the physical plant filled with an etheric body, a body consisting of streams of light permeating it from top to bottom. In the lily of the valley, however, the etheric body does not extend very far beyond the physical body of the plant and does not differ from it very much. But if you take the small seed of the lily of the valley you will find that although the physical seed is small it is permeated by a wonderfully beautiful etheric body raying out all round in such a way that the seed is situated at one end of the etheric body like a comet with a tail. The physical seed is really only a denser point in the light or etheric body of the lily of the valley. When a spiritual scientist has the fully grown lily of the valley in front of him then, for him, the being that was hidden to begin with is developed. When he has the seed in front of him where the physical part is very small and only the spiritual part is large, he says: the actual being of the lily of the valley is rolled up in the physical seed. So when we look at the lily of the valley we have to distinguish two different states. One state is where the whole being of the lily of the valley is in involution: the seed contains the being rolled up, involved. When it comes forth it passes over to evolution, and then the whole being of the lily of the valley slips more into the newly developing seed. Thus evolution and involution alternate in the successive states of a plant. During evolution the spiritual disappears further and further and the physical grows great, whilst in involution the physical will disappear further and further and the spiritual become greater and greater.

In a certain respect we can speak of evolution and involution alternating in man to an even greater extent. In the human being between birth and death a physical body and an etheric body interpenetrate to form the physical, and the spiritual interpenetrates them too in a certain way, as an earthly being man is in evolution. But when man is seen clairvoyantly passing through the portal of death, he does not leave behind in physical life as much as the lily of the valley leaves in the seed; the physical disappears so completely that you no longer see it, it is all rolled up in the spiritual. Then man passes through Devachan, where he is in involution as regards his earthly being. For this earthly being of man, evolution is between birth and death, involution between death and a new birth. Yet there is a tremendous difference between man and the plant. In the plant we can speak of involution and evolution, but in the case of man we have to speak of yet a third factor. If we were not to speak of a third factor, we should not comprise the whole of human development. Because the plant always passes through involution and evolution, every new plant is an exact repetition of the last one. The being of the lily of the valley is perpetually going into the seed and out again. But what is happening in the case of man?

We have just realised that man receives new possibilities of development during his life between birth and death. He adds to his store. Hence it is not the same with man as it is with the plant. Each evolution of man on the earth is not a mere repetition of the previous one, but a raising of his existence on to a higher level. What he takes into himself between birth and death is added to what was there previously. That is why no mere repetition occurs, for what is evolving appears at a higher stage. Where does this new element actually come from? In what way are we to understand the fact that man receives and takes in something new? I beg you to follow very closely now, for we are coming to a most important and most difficult concept. And not without reason do I say this in one of the last sessions, for you will have the whole summer to ponder over it. We should ponder over such concepts for months if not years, then we gradually begin to realise their depth. Where does all that is constantly being added to man come from? We will make this comprehensible by taking a simple example.

Suppose you see a man standing opposite two other people. Let us take into consideration everything that belongs to evolution. Let us take the one who is observing the other two, and say to ourselves that he has passed through earlier incarnations and has developed what has been planted in him in these previous incarnations. The same applies to the other two people. Then let us suppose that the first man thinks to himself: The one person looks splendid beside the other. He is pleased to see just these two particular people standing together. Another person might not feel this satisfaction. The satisfaction the man feels in seeing the two standing side by side has nothing whatever to do with the possibilities of development in the other two, for they have done nothing that deserves the pleasure their standing together gives him. It is something quite different, and it depends entirely on the fact that it is he in particular that is standing opposite the two people. The point is that the man develops a feeling of joy over the two men in front of him standing together. This feeling is not caused by anything to do with development. There are things like this in the world that arise simply through coincidence. It is not a question of the two men being karmically connected. Our concern is the joy the man feels because he likes seeing the two people standing together.

Let us take a further example. Imagine a man standing here at a certain spot on the earth and looking up at the sky. He sees a particular constellation of stars. If he were to stand five paces away he would see something else. This looking at the sky creates in him a feeling of joy that is something quite new. Man experiences a number of totally new things that have nothing to do with his previous development. Everything that comes forth in the lily of the valley is determined by its previous development; but this is not the case with what works on the human soul from the environment. Man is concerned with a lot of affairs that have nothing to do with any previous development, but which are there because various circumstances bring him into contact with the outer world. Because he feels this joy, however, it has become for him an experience. Something has arisen in the human soul that is not determined by anything preceding it but which has arisen out of nothingness. Such creations out of nothingness are constantly arising in the human soul. These are experiences of the soul not experienced through given circumstances but through the relationships we ourselves create connecting the circumstances one with another. I want you to distinguish between the experiences produced by given circumstances and those produced by the relationships between the various circumstances.

Life really falls into two parts, with no distinguishing line between them: those experiences strictly determined by previous causes, by karma, and those not determined by karma but appearing on our horizon for the first time. There are whole areas in human life that come under these headings. Suppose you hear that somewhere someone has stolen something. What has happened is, of course determined by something karmic. But suppose you only know something about the theft and not the thief—therefore there is a particular person in the objective world who has done the stealing, but you know nothing about him. The thief is not going to come to you, though, and say: ‘Lock me up, I have committed a theft’, on the contrary, it is up to you to line up the facts so as to produce the evidence as to who is the thief. The ideas you put together have nothing to do with the objective facts. They depend on quite different things, even on whether you are clever or not. Your train of argument does not make the person a thief, it is a process taking place entirely within you that gets associated with what is there outside. Strictly speaking, any kind of logic is something added to things from outside. And all opinions of taste, as well as judgments we make about beauty, are additions. Thus man is constantly enriching his life with things that are not determined by previous causes, but which he experiences by bringing himself into a relationship with things.

If we make a rapid survey of human life and visualise man's development through ancient Saturn, Sun and Moon as far as our Earth evolution, we find that on Saturn there could be no question of man being able to relate to things in this way. Everything was pure necessity then. It was the same on old Sun and also on old Moon, and the animals are still in the situation today that man was in on the Moon. The animal experiences only what is determined by preceding causes. Man alone has entirely new experiences, independent of previous causes. Therefore in the truest sense of the word man alone is capable of education; man alone can continually add something new to what is determined by karma. Only on Earth did man attain the possibility of adding something new. On the Moon his development had not reached the point where he would have been capable of adding anything new to his innate capacities. Although not an animal, he was then at the stage of animal development. His actions were determined by external causes. To a certain extent this is still so today, for those experiences that are free experiences are only slowly making their way into man. And they appear to a greater and greater extent the higher the level at which man is. Imagine a dog standing in front of a Raphael painting. It would see what is there in the picture itself, in so far as it is a sense object. But if a man were to stand in front of the picture, he would see something quite different in it; he would see what he is capable of creating through the fact that he has already developed further in previous incarnations. And now imagine a genius like Goethe; he would see even more, and he would know the significance of why one thing is painted like this and the other like that. The more highly developed a man is the more he sees. And the more he has enriched his soul the greater his capacity to add to it the soul experiences from soul relationships. These become the property of his soul and are stored up within it. All this, however, has only been possible for humanity since Earth evolution began. But now the following will take place.

Man will develop in his own way through the subsequent ages. We know that the Earth will be succeeded by Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan. During this evolution the sum of man's experiences over and above those resulting from previous causes will become greater and greater, and his inner being become richer and richer. What he has brought with him from ancient causes, from the Saturn, Sun and Moon stages, will have less and less significance. He is developing his way out of previous causes and casting them off. And when, together with the Earth, man will have reached Vulcan, he will have stripped off all he received during the Saturn, Sun and Moon evolution. He will have cast it all off

Now we come to a difficult concept which shall be made clear by an analogy. Imagine you are sitting in a carriage that has been given or bequeathed to you. You are taking a ride in this carriage when a wheel becomes faulty, so you replace it with a new one. Now you have the old carriage but a new wheel. Suppose that after a while a second wheel becomes faulty. You replace that, and you now have the old carriage and two new wheels. Similarly you replace the third and fourth wheels, and so on, until you can easily imagine that one day you will actually have nothing left of the old carriage, but will have replaced it all with new parts. You will have nothing left of what you received as a gift or inheritance; you will still drive about in it, but strictly speaking it will be an entirely new vehicle. And now transfer this idea to human evolution. During the Saturn period man received the rudiments of his physical body, on the Sun his etheric body, on the Moon his astral body and on the Earth his ego, and he has been gradually developing these principles. But within the ego he is increasingly bringing experiences of a new kind into being and stripping off what he inherited, what he was given on Saturn, Sun and Moon. And a time will come—the Venus evolution—when man will have cast off all that the gods gave him during the Moon, Sun and Saturn evolution and the first half of the Earth evolution. He will have discarded all this, Just as in our analogy the single parts of the carriage were discarded. And he will have gradually replaced all this by something he has taken into himself from relationships, something previously nonexistent. Thus on reaching Venus, man will not be able to say: Everything from Saturn, Sun and Moon evolution is still in me—for by then he will have cast it all off. And at the end of his evolution he will bear within him only what he has gained through his own efforts, not what he was given, but what he has created out of nothingness. Here you have the third thing in addition to evolution and involution: creation out of nothingness. Evolution, Involution and creation out of nothingness are what we must have in mind if we are to picture the whole magnitude and majesty of human evolution. Thus we can understand how the gods have first of all given us our three bodies as vehicles, and how they built up these vehicles stage by stage, and then endowed us with the capacity to surmount them again stage by stage. We can understand how we may throw away the parts, piece by piece, because the gods wish to make us member by member into their image, so that we may say: The rudiments of what I am to become were given me, and out of them I have created for myself a new being.

Thus what man sees before him as a great and wonderful ideal in the far distant future, of having not only a consciousness of himself but a consciousness of having created himself, was already developed in earlier times by mighty spirits on a higher level than man. And certain spirits already engaged in the past in our evolution are developing at the present time what man will experience only in a distant future. We have said that during the Saturn evolution the thrones poured forth what we call the substance of mankind, and that into this human substance the spirits of personality poured what we call the forces of personality. But the spirits of personality, who at that time were sufficiently powerful to let the character of their personality flow into this substance poured out by the thrones, have since then ascended higher and higher. Today they have reached the point where they no longer need any physical substance for their further development. On Saturn, in order to be able to live at all, they needed the physical substance of Saturn which was at the same time the rudiment of human substance; on the Sun they needed the etheric substance that poured forth for man's etheric body; on the Moon they needed the astral substance, and here on Earth they need our ego. Henceforth, however, they will need what is formed by the ego itself, man s new creation out of pure relations, which is no longer physical, etheric or astral body or even ego as such, but that which the ego produces out of itself. This the spirits of personality will use, and they are already using it to live in today. On Saturn they lived in what is now our physical body, on the Sun in what is now our etheric body, on the Moon in what is now our astral body. Since the middle of Atlantean times they have begun living in the higher elements that man can bring forth out of his ego.

What are these higher elements man produces from out of his ego? They are of three kinds. First, what we call thinking in accordance with law, our logical thinking. This is something that man adds to things. If man does not merely look at the external world or merely observe it, or merely chase after the thief to find him, but observes in such a way that he sees the law inherent in the observation, availing himself of thoughts that have nothing to do with the thief and yet they catch him, then man is living in logic, pure logic. This logic is something that is added to things by man. When man devotes himself to this pure logic, the ego creates something beyond itself.

Secondly, the ego creates beyond itself when it develops pleasure or displeasure in the beautiful, the exalted, the humorous, the comic; in short, in everything that man himself produces. Let us say you see something in the world that strikes you as silly, and you laugh at it. This laughter has nothing whatever to do with your karma. A stupid person might come along, and the very thing you are laughing at could strike him as clever. That is something that arises out of yourself in that particular situation. Or, let us say, you see people attacking a brave man who for a time holds his own but eventually comes to a tragic end. What you witness was determined by karma, but the feeling of tragedy you have about it is something new.

Though necessity is the first thing, pleasure and displeasure are the second, and the third is the way you feel the urge to act under the influences of relationships. Even the way you feel compelled to act is not determined solely by karma, but by your relationship to the matter. Supposing two people are on the one hand so situated with regard to their relationship with one another that they are karmically destined to pay off something together, but at the same time one is further advanced in his development than the other. The more advanced one will pay up, the other will hold it back for later payment. The one will develop kindness of heart, the other's feelings will not be touched. That is something new coming into evolution. You must not look on everything as determined, rather it depends on whether or not we allow our actions to be guided by the laws of justice and fairness. New things are constantly being added to our morality, to the way we do our duty and to our moral judgment. Particularly in our moral judgment there lies the third element by means of which man goes beyond himself and then advances further and further. The ego puts this into our world, and what is thus put into the world does not perish. What men have introduced into the world from epoch to epoch, from age to age, as the result of logical thought, aesthetic judgment or the fulfillment of duty, forms a continuous stream, and provides the substance in which, in their phase of evolution, the spirits of personality take up their abode.

That is the way you live and evolve. And whilst you are evolving, the spirits of personality look down upon you, asking continually: Will you give me something, too, that I can use for my development? And the more man develops his thought content, his treasures of thought, the more he tries to refine his aesthetic judgment, and carry out his duty beyond the requirements of karma, the more nourishment there is for the spirits of personality; the more we offer up to them, the more substantial these spirits of personality become. What do these spirits of personality represent? Something which from the point of view of our human world conception we call an abstraction: the spirit of the age, the spirit of the various epochs. To anthroposophists this spirit of the age is a real being. The spirits of the age, who are actually the spirits of personality, move through the ages. When we look back into ancient times, the Indian, Persian, Chaldean-Babylonian, Greco-Latin times and right into our own time, we find that apart from the nations and apart from all the other differences among men, what we call the spirit of the age is always changing. People thought and felt quite differently five thousand years ago than they did three thousand years ago and from the way they do today. And it is the spirits of the age or, according to spiritual science, the spirits of personality who change. These spirits of personality are going through their evolution in the super-sensible world just as the human race is going through its evolution in the sense world. But all that the human race develops of a super-sensible nature is food and drink for these spirits of personality, and they benefit from it. If there were an age in which men were to spend their lives without developing any treasures of thought, without pleasure or displeasure, nor any feeling for duty beyond the limits of karma—in such an age the spirits of personality would have no nourishment and they would become emaciated. Such is our connection with the beings who are invisibly interwoven with our life.

As I told you, man adds something new to development, creates as it were something out of nothingness in addition to involution and evolution. He could not create anything out of nothingness, however, had he not previously received the causes into which he has placed himself as in a vehicle. This vehicle was given him during the Saturn evolution, and bit by bit he is discarding it and developing on into the future. He had to receive the foundation for this, however, and if the gods had not provided this foundation for him in the first place, he would not have been able to perform any action that can be created out of nothingness. That relationships in the surrounding world affect us in such a way that they really help our further development is due to this laying of a good foundation.

For what has become possible through the fact that man can create something new out of relationships, and that he can make use of the connections into which he is placed so as to form the foundation for something new that he himself creates? And what does it mean that man has become capable of extending his thoughts beyond the things he experiences in the surrounding world, and feeling more than what is objectively there in front of him? What has come about as a result of man being able to work beyond the dictates of karma, and live in duty towards truth, fairness and kindness of heart?

By becoming capable of logical thinking, of developing thought in accordance with its necessity, the possibility of error has been created. Because of the pleasure man can take in what is beautiful, the possibility has also been created for him to introduce the element of ugliness and impurity into world evolution. Because man is capable of both setting himself the concept of duty and of fulfilling it beyond the extent of karma, the possibility of evil and of resistance to duty has been created. So it is this very possibility of being able to create solely out of relationships that has placed man in a world in which he can also work on his own spiritual part, so that it becomes full of error, ugliness and evil. And not only had the possibility to be provided for man altogether to create out of these relationships, but the possibility had to be given for him by dint of struggle and striving gradually to create out of these relationships what is right, what is beautiful and those virtues that really further his evolution.

Creating out of relationships is called in Christian esotericism ‘creating out of the spirit’. And creating out of right, beautiful and virtuous relationships is called in Christian esotericism ‘The Holy Spirit’. When a man is able to create out of nothingness the right or true, the beautiful and the good, the Holy Spirit fills him with bliss. But for a man to be able to create in the sense of the Holy Spirit, he had first to be given the foundation, as is the case for all creation out of nothingness. This foundation was given him through the coming of Christ into our evolution. Through experiencing the Christ Event on earth, man was able to ascend to creating in the Holy Spirit. Thus it is Christ Himself Who creates the greatest, most profound foundation. If man becomes such that he stands firmly on the basis of the Christ experience, and the Christ experience is the carriage he joins for his evolutionary progress, then the Christ sends him the Holy Spirit, and man becomes capable of creating the right, beautiful and good in the course of his further evolution.

So we see the coming of the Christ to the Earth as a fulfillment as it were of all that had been put into man through Saturn, Sun and Moon. And the Christ Event has given man the greatest thing possible, the power that makes him capable of living on into the perspectives of the future and of increasingly creating out of relationships, out of all that is not predetermined, but depends on how man relates to the facts of the world around him, which is in the widest sense the Holy Spirit. This again is an aspect of Christian esotericism. Christian esotericism is connected with the profoundest thought in the whole of our evolution, the thought of creation out of nothingness.

Therefore no true theory of evolution will ever be able to leave out the thought of creation out of nothingness. Supposing there were only evolution and involution, there would be eternal repetition like there is with the plant, and on Vulcan there would be only what originated on Saturn. But in the middle of our development creation out of nothingness was added to evolution and involution. After Saturn, Sun and Moon had passed away, Christ came to Earth as the enriching leaven which ensures that something quite new will be there on Vulcan, something not yet present on Saturn. Whoever speaks of evolution and involution only, will speak of development as though everything were merely to repeat itself in circles. But such circles can never really explain world evolution. Only when we add to evolution and involution this creation out of nothingness, that adds something new to existing relationships, do we arrive at a real understanding of the world.

Beings of a lower order show no more than a trace of what we called creation out of nothingness. A lily of the valley will always be a lily of the valley; at most the gardener could add something to it from outside to which the lily of the valley would never have attained of itself. Then there would be something which with regard to the nature of the lily of the valley would be a creation out of nothingness. Man, however, is himself capable of including in his being this creation out of nothingness. Yet man only becomes capable of doing so, and advancing to the freedom of individual creativity through the greatest of all free deeds, and one which can serve him as an example. What is this greatest deed of freedom? It is that the creative and wise Word of our solar system Himself resolved to enter into a human body and to take part in Earth evolution through a deed unconnected with any previous karma. There was no preceding karma forcing the Christ to His resolution to enter a human body; He undertook to do it as a free deed entirely based upon foreseeing mankind's future evolution. This deed had no precedent, having its origin in Him as a thought out of nothingness, out of His pre-vision. This is a difficult concept, but it will always be included in Christian esotericism, and everything depends on our being able to add the thought of creation out of nothingness to those of evolution and involution.

When we are able to do this we shall acquire great ideals which, although they may not extend to what may be called cosmic dimensions, are essentially connected with the question: Why, for instance, do we join an anthroposophical society? To understand the purpose of an anthroposophical society we must return to the thought that we are working for the spirits of personality, for the spirits of the age. When a human being comes into the world at birth, to start with he is educated by all manner of circumstances; these influence him and form the first step of his own creative activity. If only it could be clearly understood that the place where a man is born is only the first step, and that the prevailing circumstances work upon him with overwhelming suggestive power. Let us try to imagine how different a man's circumstances would be were he to be born in Rome or Frankfurt instead of in Constantinople. Through his birth he would be placed in different circumstances, into different religious affiliations. Under these influences a certain fanaticism could develop in him for Catholicism or Protestantism. If, through a slight turn of the wheel in karmic connections, he had been born in Constantinople, might he not also have turned out to be quite a good Turk? Here you have an illustration of the suggestive force with which environmental conditions affect man. But man is able to extricate himself from the purely suggestive nature of conditions and unite with other people in accordance with principles he himself chooses and acknowledges. Then he can say: “Now I know why I am working with other people”. In this way there arise out of human consciousness those social groups in which material is created for the spirits of the age, the spirits of personality. And the anthroposophical society is a group of this kind in which this connection is created on a basis of brotherhood. This means nothing else than that each individual is active in the group in such a way that he acquires in himself all the good qualities that make him an image of the whole society. Thus all the thoughts, wealth of feeling and virtues he develops through the society he bestows as nourishment upon the spirits of personality. Hence in a society like this all that creates communal life is inseparable from the principle of individuality. Each single member becomes capable through such a society of offering what he himself produces as a sacrifice to the spirits of personality. And each individual prepares himself to reach the level of those who are the most advanced, and who, as the result of spiritual training have progressed to the point where they have the following ideal: “When I think, I do not do so for my own satisfaction, but in order to create nourishment for the spirits of personality. I lay upon the altar of the spirits of personality my highest and most beautiful thoughts; and what I feel is not prompted by egoism, I feel it because it is to be nourishment for the spirits of personality. And what I can practise in the way of virtue, I do not practise for the sake of gaining influence for myself, but in order to bring it as a sacrifice to provide food for the spirits of personality.” Here we have placed before us as our ideal those whom we call the masters of wisdom and the masters of harmony and feeling. For thus do they think and prepare for the development which will bring man nearer and nearer to the point where he will always be creating what is new until he will finally develop a world from which the workings of the old causes will have disappeared, and out of which new light will stream forth into the future. The world is not subject to perpetual metamorphosis into different forms, but the old is perfected and becomes the vehicle of the new. Then even this will be thrown off and will disappear into nothingness, so that out of this nothingness something new may arise. This is the tremendous idea of progress, that new things can perpetually arise.

But the worlds are complete in themselves, and you will have seen in the example given that we cannot speak of anything actually coming to an end. It has been shown how on the one hand the spirits of personality lose their influence over man, but on the other hand how they again pursue their own evolution. Thus ours is a world that is constantly being rejuvenated by new creations, yet it is also true that what is stripped off would hinder progress, and it is passed on so that others for their part can progress. Nobody should believe that he must allow something to sink into nothingness, for we have been given the possibility of creating out of nothingness. What on Vulcan will prove itself to be something new, will continually build new forms and discard the old, and what is thrown off will seek its own path.

Evolution, involution and creation out of nothingness are the three concepts we have to apply in order to understand the evolution of world phenomena as it really is. Only by this means shall we arrive at accurate concepts that both enlighten man about the world and engender in him inner warmth of feeling. If man had to admit his incapacity to do anything except create in accordance with impulses implanted into him, this would not steel his will nor kindle his hopes to the same extent as being able to say: “I can create my own life values and constantly add something new to what has been given me as a foundation. My ancient heritage will in no way hinder me from creating new blossoms and fruits which will live on into the future.” This, however, is part of what we can describe by saying that the anthroposophical conception of the world gives man strength, hope and confidence in life, for it shows him that he can, in the future, have a share in working at creations which, today, not only lie in the womb of causality but in nothingness. It shows him the prospect that, through his own efforts, he is working his way in the true sense of the word from being a ‘creature’ to being a ‘creator’.

“History” refers to the external physical world: By means of external documents and information we look back into past ages in the history of nations, of humanity. You know that through the recent discovery of many a document we can look back to thousands of years before the birth of Christ. Now from the lectures you have heard in the domain of Spiritual Science you can gather that by means of occult documents we can look back still further into unlimited distances of the past. Thus we know of the outer physical world by means of external history. When we speak regarding the habits of life, the knowledge above all, regarding the experience of the nations which lived in the centuries immediately behind us, when we speak of their discoveries and inventions we know that we must use a different language than we do when we go back one or two thousand years and speak of the habits and customs, the learning and power of discernment of nations which belong to the distant past. The further we go back into ages, the more different does history become. It behooves us perhaps to ask whether the word “history”, historical development, has only a meaning for this external physical world, whether only in the course of time the events, the aspect of events alters; or whether perhaps the word history can also have a significance for the other side of existence, for that side which we describe by means of occult science and which man has to live through in the time between death and a new birth.

At first from a purely external point of view, we must say that from all we know, the life of man in those other worlds, invisible to man today, is a longer life than that in the physical world. Has the word “history” a significance for that world, for that other side of existence? Or are we to fall in with the idea that in the regions in which man lives between death and re-birth, everything remains permanently the same, that it is the same if we go back through the 18th and 17th centuries into the 8th, 7th and 6th centuries after the appearing of Christ Jesus upon the earth and even further into the centuries before Christ? The people who enter earthly existence meet with different conditions upon the earth at each new birth. Let us imagine ourselves within the soul of a man incarnated in ancient Egypt or ancient Persia,—Let us picture vividly the conditions of a man born in ancient Egypt facing the gigantic Pyramids and Obelisks and all the conditions of life which present themselves to us in ancient Egypt. Let us imagine these conditions during the time between birth and death. Now let us suppose that the man dies he goes through the period between death and a new birth and is then reborn in the 7th or 8th century of the post-Christian epoch. Let us compare the ages. In earthly existence how differently is the world presented to the soul in the ages before the external appearance of Christ Jesus on the physical plane! Further let us enquire into the experiences of a soul appearing in the first centuries of post-Christian times and then entering our physical plane at the present time. It now finds modern political arrangements of which at that time there was no question. It experiences that which our modern means of civilisation have brought about, in short, a very different picture is offered to such a soul. If we compare these separate incarnations we become conscious of how they differ from one another. Then is it not justifiable to enquire into the life conditions of a man between death and re-birth-between two incarnations? If a man previously lived in ancient Egypt and after death passed into the spiritual world, there he found definite facts, definite beings; then if he again entered physical existence during the first Christian centuries, and again died and passed into the other world, and so on, are we not justified in asking whether on the other side of existence “history” is not being enacted in all the experiences a man goes through there, does not something take place there as time rolls on? You know that when we describe the life of man between death and re-birth, we give a general picture of what this life is. Starting from the moment of death, we describe how after the man has developed the great memory tableau before his soul, he enters into a period in which the impulses, longings, passions, to be found in the astral body, in short, everything which still connects him with the physical world and is still present within him, how he passes through what is usually called “Kamaloca”, and how after he has stripped off that connection he passes on into Devachan, into a purely spiritual world. We further describe what is developed for the man in this period between death and re-birth, in this purely spiritual existence. You have seen that what we describe is always at first spoken of in connection with the fact that it is always related to the present, to our immediate life, as indeed it is. We must naturally have some starting point for our descriptions. Just as in describing the present we must start from the observations and experiences of the present, so also in descriptions of the spiritual world it is necessary to describe the picture which is offered to clairvoyant vision of the life between death and re-birth approximately as things are enacted in the present.

To comprehensive occult observation it is absolutely proved that for that world also in which man lives between death and rebirth, the word “history” has a real significance. Even there something takes place just as here in the physical world. We relate distinctive events following one another, beginning from the 4th century before Christ and describing the events on into our post-Atlantean epoch. In the same way there is a “history” for the other period of existence, we must be aware that the life between death and a re-birth at the time of the Egyptian, the ancient Persian, the ancient Indian civilisations was not just as it is in our time. If in the first place we form a preliminary conception of our present time of the life in Kamaloca and of that in Devachan, it is well to extend these descriptions and advance to a historical consideration. We will bring forward something regarding the chapter of “occult history” and in order to make these matters clear we will keep to quite definite spiritual facts. In order to be able to understand we must begin far back, right back in the Atlantean period. Today we have progressed so far that when we speak of such an epoch we assume something known to you all.

We ask ourselves how in that age when birth and death could first be spoken of, how the life of man played its part beyond the veil. The difference between that life and this was not the same as today. When the man of Atlantis died, what happened to his soul? It passed over into a condition in which it felt itself absolutely one with a spiritual world, in a world of higher individualities.

We know that even here upon this physical earth the life of the Atlantean was quite different from our present life. The present alternation of waking and sleeping and the unconsciousness of the night, as it has often been described, did not exist in the Atlantean age. When man fell asleep and when the knowledge of physical things around him withdrew from his consciousness, he entered a world of the spirit. There appeared to him the vision of spiritual beings. Just as here by day he is together with plants, animals, and human beings, so over there during the sleep-consciousness there appeared a world of higher and lower spiritual beings according to the depth of his sleep. Man grew accustomed to this world; and when at death the Atlantean passed into the world beyond, this world of spiritual Beings, spiritual events, appeared all the more clearly. The man with his complete consciousness felt himself at home in these higher worlds in these worlds of spiritual events and spiritual Beings. If only we were to go back into the first Atlantean age we should find that people looked upon this physical existence—all your souls did so—as a visit to a world in which one tarries for a while and which is quite different from the real home. In the Atlantean Age there was however one peculiarity of this life between death—a re-birth—of which it is difficult for present day man to gain an idea, because he had so completely lost it. The capacity of saying “I” to oneself, of feeling oneself as a self-conscious being, of feeling oneself as an “Ego” which is the essential thing in present day man, was completely lost to the Atlantean on leaving the physical world. When he passed up into the spiritual world whether in sleep or to a higher degree in the life between death and re-birth, in place of the self-consciousness, instead of the feeling: “I am a self-conscious being, I am in myself,” arose the consciousness: “I am one with higher Beings, I plunge, as it were, into the life of these higher Beings”. The man felt himself one with the higher beings and in this feeling of oneness with them he there experienced an immense bliss. This bliss increased more and more the further he withdrew from consciousness of the physical sense existence. This was a life of bliss the further we go back into the ages. We have often heard wherein the purpose of the evolution of humanity in earthly existence consists. It consists in man becoming more and more enmeshed in the physical existence on our earth. In the Atlantean epoch, during the sleep condition man felt himself completely at home in the spiritual world, he felt that world to be bright, clear, and friendly, so his consciousness on this side was still partially dreamlike. There was as yet no real taking possession of the physical body. On waking he forgot to some extent the Gods and Spirits who were his companions during sleep but he did not enter so completely into physical consciousness as he does today. The objects around him had no clear outlines. To the Atlantean it was just as it is to us on a foggy evening when the street lamps appear surrounded by a halo, an aura of all sorts of colours; all the objects of the physical plane were indefinite. The consciousness of the physical plane was only dawning. The strong consciousness of the “I am” had not yet entered into man. Only towards the end of the Atlantean epoch did the human self-consciousness; the consciousness of the personality developed gradually in proportion as man lost his blissful consciousness during sleep. Man gradually conquered the physical world, as he learnt the use of his physical senses—the objects of the physical world gained firmer and more definite outlines. In proportion as man conquered the physical world, the consciousness in the spiritual world altered.

We have followed the various epochs of the post-Atlantean age. We have looked back into the ancient Indian civilisation. We have seen how man then had so far conquered the external that he perceived it as “Maya”—he longed for the spheres of the ancient spiritual country. We have seen that in the Persian epoch the conquest of the physical plane had advanced so far that man wished to connect himself with the good forces of Ormuzd, in order to develop the forces of the physical world. Further we have seen that in the Egypto-Babylonian-Chaldean-Assyrian epoch in the art of measuring the land, which led to working upon the earth, also in star law, men found the means of advancing in the conquest of the external world. Finally we saw that the Graeco-Latin age went still further, that in Greece that beautiful union took place between man and the physical world, in the formation of Grecian cities and also in Greek Art. We saw too that in the fourth epoch the personal element which then came into existence for the first time, appeared in the ancient Roman laws. Whereas formerly man had felt himself part of a whole, part of a reflection of earlier spiritual Beings, the Roman for the first time felt himself to be a citizen of the earth. The concept “citizen” arose—the physical world was conquered little by little, therefore it had become dear to man. The desires and sympathies of man were connected with the physical world and in proportion as sympathy for the physical world grew, his consciousness was connected with physical things. In the same degree the consciousness of man was darkened on the other side, in the time between death and re-birth. That blissful feeling of being part of the existence of higher spiritual Beings was lost to man on the other side to the same extent as this side became dear to him in the course of the conquest of the physical world. Stage by stage man's conquest of the physical world advanced, he was always discovering new forces of Nature, he was always inventing new instruments. Life between birth and death gained an increasing value, and the old dim clairvoyant consciousness of that other world became obscured. It never completely ceased but darkened. As man was conquering the physical world, the history of the other world shows a decline. This descent is in connection with the ascent of civilisation; we observe man in early primitive stages of civilisation, when he grew his corn between two stones, and then see how he ascended stage by stage, how he made the first discoveries, learnt to make and to use implements, and continued to advance in the course of time. Life on the physical plane became ever richer. Man learnt to construct gigantic buildings. In following history through the Egypto-Babylonian-Chaldean-Assyrian age, through the Graeco-Latin age into our own time, we must realize a parting of the ways, if we wish to describe a progress in historical civilisation. In proportion we have to describe a declining path between the upper Gods and that which man was to render to them, that which he performed according to the spiritual world and in the midst of the spiritual world. We see how in later times man continued to lose his connection with the spiritual world and in the spiritual capacities. We have to describe for the other side a history of decline with regard to man, just as for this side we can describe a history of advance, of progressive conquests of the physical world. So may the physical world and the spiritual world be said to supplement one another, or rather to qualify one another.

There is as you know a connection between the spiritual world and our physical world. We have often spoken of the great intermediaries between them, of the Initiates; those who certainly were incarnated in physical bodies, but whose souls towered up into the spiritual world between birth and death, when as a rule man is completely shut off from it; even in this period they were able to have experiences in the spiritual world, and be at home in it. What sort of men were these greater or lesser messengers of the spiritual world, the ancient holy Rishis of India, Buddha, Hermes, Zarathustra, Moses, or all those who in more ancient times were the great “messengers of the Gods”? When we speak of all these who were messengers of the Gods or spirits to men, what was their relation to the Physical world and the spiritual world?

During their initiation and by means of it they experienced the conditions of the spiritual world. Not only could they see with their physical eyes and perceive with their physical intellect the events of the physical world but through their enhanced powers of perception they could also perceive those of the spiritual world. The Initiate not only lives on the physical plane with mankind but he can also trace what the dead are doing in the period between death and re-birth. To him they are just as familiar forms as are men upon the physical plane. From this you see that everything related as occult history flows from the experience of the initiates—A mometuous turning point for all history including that of our own time appeared upon the earth through the Coming of the Christ. And we gain an idea of the progress of history in the other world if we ask ourselves: What significance has the deed of Christ for the Earth? What significance has the mystery of Golgotha for the history of the other side? In many lectures at many places I have been able to point out the incisive significance of the Event on Golgotha for the evolution of the history of the physical plane. Now let us ask: How does the Event of Golgotha present itself when we observe it from the perspective of the other side?—We gain an answer to this question if we fix our eyes upon the point of time in evolution on the other side when men had reached the utmost height of development on the physical plane, when the consciousness of the personality was most strongly developed; the Graeco-Latin epoch. That was the point of time of the appearing of Christ Jesus upon the earth. On the one hand there was the most intense consciousness of the personality, the most intense joy in the material world, and on the other hand the strongest, the mightiest summons towards the other world in the Event of Golgotha, that great deed which represents the conquest of death by life. These things completely coincide if we fix our attention on the physical world. In the Grecian epoch there was truly great joy in external existence and enhanced sympathy with it. Such people alone were capable of building those wonderful Grecian Temples in which the Gods dwelt. Such a life was needed to produce those works of art and sculpture, showing a wonderful union of spirit with matter. Joy in the physical plane and sympathy with it contributed towards this. This only developed gradually and we plainly trace the advance in history if we compare the arising of the Greek in the physical in with the exalted conception of the world which the people of the first post-Atlantean epoch received from their holy Rishis. They had no interest in the physical world, they felt at home in the spiritual world; enraptured, they looked to the world of spirit to which they endeavoured to attain through the teachings and exercises given them by the holy Rishis. Between this disdain of the pleasures of the senses and the great joy in the sense-world of the Graeco-Latin age—that point of union of spirit and the sense-world, in which both had their rights—between these two points lies a long stretch of human history, yet did such counterpart of this conquest of the physical plane exist within the spiritual world in the Graeco-Latin age? He who is able to look into the spiritual world knows that it is no myth, but is actually founded on truth, related to us by the Greek Poets of the foremost men of their civilisation. How did the latter feel in the spiritual world, they who had been so completely in truth and sympathy with the physical world? It is absolutely in conformity with truth when the sages attributed the words to them: Better be a beggar in the upper world than a king in the realms of shades:! The dimmest weakest conditions of consciousness existed at this period between death and re-birth. With all his sympathies in the physical world man did not understand the existence in the world beyond. He felt as if he had lost everything and the spiritual world appeared valueless to him. In proportion as sympathy for the physical world increased did the Greek heroes feel themselves lost in the spiritual world. An Agamemnon, an Achilles, felt himself to be a depleted being, a Non-being in this world of shades. Of course there were intermediate periods—for the connection with the spiritual is never completely lost,—in which even these people took part with spiritual Beings and spiritual activities, but the condition of consciousness which has just been described certainly existed. Thus we have a history of the world on the other side, a history of descent, just as we have a history of ascent on this side.

Those who were called the messengers of the Gods or spiritual messengers always had the power of going to and fro, from one world to the other. Let us try to picture what the spiritual messengers were upon the physical plane in the pre-Christian ages of humanity. They were those who from their experiences in the spiritual world were able to tell the people of the ancient world what the spiritual really was. Of course there they also experienced the extinguished consciousness of the physical earth man, but as compensation the whole spiritual world in its resplendent abundance was also open to them and they were able to bring to the men on earth the information that there was a spiritual world and what it looked like. They could bear witness of this spiritual world. This was specially important in the ages in which man stood forth more and more on the physical plane with his interests in it. The more man conquered the earth, the more his joy and sympathy were centered in the physical world—the more these messengers of the Gods had to emphasize the fact that the spiritual world existed. They could always speak in this way: You know this and that regarding the Earth, but there is also a spiritual world; of which such can be said—In short the complete picture of the spiritual world was revealed to man by the messengers of the Gods. This was known in the various religions. And always when the messengers of the Gods returned after their initiation or after a visit to the spiritual world, they could bring with them to the physical world, which was becoming more and more beautiful to those living on the physical plane—comfort and exaltation from the spiritual world, something of the treasures of the spiritual world. They brought the fruits of the spiritual life into physical life. And it was always the case that people were led into the spirit by means of that which the messengers of the Gods brought to them. The physical world, the world on this side, profited by the messengers of the Gods and what they brought. But these spiritual messengers could not work fruitfully in like measure for the world beyond. You can picture it in this way. When the initiate, the messenger of the Gods, passed over into the other world the beings there were his companions just as were the beings in the physical world. He could speak to them and give them information as to what was happening in the physical world. But the nearer the Graeco-Latin epoch approached, the less could the initiate, when he passed over from the earth to the other side, offer to the souls there anything of value, for they felt too keenly the loss of that upon which they had depended in the physical world. That which the initiate could impart to them was no longer of any value to them. Thus in pre-Christian times that which the initiates brought over as their messages to men in the physical world was in the highest degree fruitful, but that which they were able to take over from the physical world to the deceased was unfruitful for the spiritual world. Great as was the message which Buddha, Hermes, Zarathustra brought to men of the physical plane, they could accomplish but little on the other side, for they could bring little of what was satisfactory or animating as a message to the other side—Now let us compare that which came about for the other side through the Christ, that which took place in the period of deepest decadence, in the Graeco-Latin period, with that which previously came about by means of the initiates. We know what the Event of Golgotha signifies for the history of the earth. We know that it was the conquest of earthly death by the life of the spirits, the overcoming of all death through the evolution of the earth. Even if today we cannot enter into all that the Mystery of Golgotha signifies, we can summarize it in a few words: it signifies the final and incontestable proof of the fact that life has conquered death. When upon Golgotha life conquered death, spirit laid down the germ of the final conquest of matter! That which is related in the Gospel regarding that visit which Christ made after the Event upon Golgotha to the dead in the underworld is not a legend or a symbol. Occult investigation shows you that it is the truth. Just as truly as Christ wandered among men during the last three years of the life of Jesus, so did he cause the dead to rejoice by visiting them immediately after the Event of Golgotha. He appeared to the dead, to the souls of the deceased. This is an occult truth. He could then tell them that in the physical world spirit had incontestably gained the victory over matter. To the souls of the departed on the other side this was a flame of light which sprang up like spiritual electricity, and the dying consciousness of the Graeco-Latin age in the other world was stimulated, a completely new phase began for man between death and re-birth. And ever since that time clearer and clearer has grown the consciousness of man between death and re-birth.

Thus if we describe history, we can supplement the statements regarding Kamaloca and the life in Devachan, and we must point out that with the appearing of Christ upon the earth a completely new phrase began for the life on the other side. The fruit of that which the Christ accomplished for the evolution of the earth was experienced in a radical change in the life beyond. This visit of Christ to the other side signified a revival of the life there between death and re-birth. since that time the departed who at that important point of the Graeco-Latin age, in spite of all the pleasure they had had in the physical world, had felt themselves mere shadows, so that they preferred to be beggars in the upper world rather than kings in the realm of shades—now began to feel more and more on the other side. Since that time man has grown more into the spiritual world, and a period of ascent, of blossoming, has dawned for the spiritual world. We shall always see what we acquire for the observation of human life upon the earth, if we place before us the true qualities of the spiritual world.

Let us proceed to-day from simple forms of pain, from its elementary forms. When we cut our finger and feel pain, or when we bruise it, or cut it off completely and feel pain, this is the simplest, most primitive form of pain. Let us begin by considering this.

When we ask psychologists who are experienced in matters connected with the human soul, what explanation they have for the simplest form of pain, we find, particularly in the present time, that these psychologists say rather queer things. They made a strange discovery, for they found out that the only way of explaining pain is to add to the different senses, to the sense of smell, of sight, of hearing, a new sense the sense of pain, so that the human being perceives pain through this sense in the same way in which he perceives the light through his eyes and sounds through his ears. They say that man feels pain because he has a sense of pain. External experience does not give us any foundation in support of the existence of a sense of pain; nevertheless science, setting out from pure observation, is not in any way averse to accepting it, in fact, it invents a sense of pain.

But let us take no further notice of this and ask ourselves instead: How does such a simple, primitive feeling of pain really arise? In what manner does the experience of pain arise, when we cut our finger?

The finger is a part of our physical body. The physical body contains the substances of the external physical world The finger is permeated with the etheric and astral parts of the body belonging to the finger. What are the tasks of these higher parts, of the etheric and astral parts? The physical structure of the finger, consisting of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, etc, these cells arranged within it could not be as they are, if the active element, the forming, constructive element—i.e. the etheric body—were not behind them. The etheric body is not only at the foundation of the finger's growth, arranging the cells so that they form the finger, gut it also maintains these cells in their structure, thus preventing the finger's decay. The etheric body permeates the whole finger and fills it with the etheric forces; it is contained in the same space filled out be the physical finger. But the astral finger is also there. When we have a sensation in our finger, when we feel a pressure of anything else,, this is of course transmitted by the finger's astral body, for sensation, feelings, live in the astral body.

The connection between the physical, etheric and astral finger is, however, not only a mechanical connection, but an incessantly living one. The etheric finger always fills the physical finger glowing strength, it constantly works at the formation of its inner parts. In what way is the etheric finger really interested in the physical finger?

Its chief concern is to bring all the parts with which it is connected, even the minutest particles, in their right place, in a right connection everywhere.

Let us now imagine that there is a little cut on our skin, a small injury. This prevents the etheric finger in its task of arranging the different parts in the right way. The etheric body lives in the finger and should keep its parts together. But the cut, this mechanical incision, keeps them apart, so that the etheric finger can no longer fulfil its task. It is in the same situation in which we should be, if we had constructed an appliance to be used for working in the garden and someone had destroyed it; in that case we could not do the work in the way in which we intended to do it. We must give up doing what we wished to do. This inability to do something, as resignation. This impossibility (on the part of the etheric body) to set in with its activity is felt by the astral part of the finger as pain.

When a hand is amputated, only the physical hand can be amputated, not the etheric hand, and the etheric hand is then unable to work; the astral body feels this tremendous renunciation in the form of pain.

The cooperation between the etheric and astral thus produces the most primitive, elementary form of pain. This is how pain arises, and it lasts as long as the astral body in a particular part of the body has grown accustomed to the fact that the corresponding etheric activity can no longer be carried out.

Let us compare this with the pain which we experience in Kamaloka! There, the whole body is suddenly torn away from man, it does not exist any more and the etheric, forces can no longer be active in it. The astral, body feels that the whole can no longer be organised—it longs for the activity which can only be carried out within the physical body,—and this want is felt as pain. Every pain is a suppressed activity. In the cosmos every suppressed activity gives rise to pain, and because activity must frequently be suppressed in the cosmos, pain is necessary in the cosmos.

But something else may arise. Up to a certain degree, the hand may be prevented in its particularly living activity by processes of renunciation, or similar things. This is, for example, the case when a person begins to mortify his flesh. Organs of the body which were formerly active and living are, in a certain way, brought to a standstill. Then the astral part of the hand, for example, withdraws from the etheric hand; it will have a surplus of forces, it will have lost some of its tasks, although it might have continued to fulfil them just as actively.

If a person treats his body in such a way that he begins to feel these surplus forces in his astral body and is able to say to himself: I dispose of surplus forces; formerly, I used up all these forces in order to regulate the physical body; now I have tamed the physical body, it no longer requires all these forces—if this is the case, the astral body endowed with these surplus forces will feel this as blissfulness. For even as suppressed activity produces pain, so accumulated activity produces a feeling of bliss. It is blissfulness for the astral body to do more than it was meant to do from the outset. This consciousness of an overflowing strength which could be used productively, which may be guided from within, since the external body no longer claims it for itself, this implies blissfulness.

What meaning underlies the fact that some religious communities do certain things in order to mortify the flesh, the physical body? What does this imply?

This means that the functions of the physical body are not used so much, they are thus calmed, so that a certain amount of forces is kept back in the etheric body.

Let us imagine a man who lived a life full of privations, who gradually succeeded in calming down the metabolic processes of his physical body, without making many demands on the etheric body, and then another man who likes to eat as much as possible, whose physical processes are in a state of turmoil and who has a lot to digest In the case of the former, where everything takes such a calm course, whose physical functions even show a certain sluggishness and do not consume the etheric forces so much, there will be superfluous forces in his etheric body; in the case of the latter, all the forces of his etheric body must be consumed in order to maintain the functions of the physical body. Consequently, the man whose body has learned to be calm and unpretentious will have superfluous forces in his etheric body, and his astral body will mirror them as forces of knowledge, not only, as blissfulness, and the imaginative pictures of the astral world will rise up before such a person. For example, Savanarola had a weak constitution and was nearly always ill; he had any forces in his etheric body which were not used for the physical body, and he could employ these forces for his powerful thoughts and impulses, he was able to hold those powerful speeches by which he enthralled his audiences. His visions also enabled hem to set before his hearers, in a powerful picture events which would take place in the future.

And now we may transfer this to the spiritual worlds. Even as suppressed activity means privation in Kamaloca—and there is always privation in Kamaloka—every suppressed activity falls away when the human being enters Devachan because there nothing exists which is in any way connected with the physical and which lustfully longs for the physical. In Devachan a spiritual substantiality is given to man which little by little builds up the form of his future incarnation. In Devachan there is purest, freest activity, and man experiences this as purest bliss.

During his earthly life, we continually learn through everything which surrounds us, but the different bodies which we have , were built up in accordance with the forces of our preceding incarnations, we built up these bodies through these forces. But what we learn to know during our life is not yet contained in our body. In the course of life we change; our feelings change, our ideas grow, there is a great amount of suppressed activity in us. But we cannot change our body, it must remain as it is, built up in accordance with the experiences of preceding incarnations.

In Devachan the human being has emancipated himself from these hindrances, and as a result, his unchecked will to work takes on the form of bliss. There he forms his astral body, his etheric body and his physical body for a new life. What remains unused in life, is applied in Devachan. He takes up into Devachan not only his present consciousness, but also what surpasses his personality. This gives him a heightened state of existence in Devachan, so that in addition to what he experiences here as his individuality,he experiences in Devachan all that he has gained over and above his individuality and could not yet bring to expression during his life:

We are thus able to understand pain and privation by rising from the lowest stage up to that of blissfulness. In one world we can always follow the traces of something that passes through all the worlds.

To-day we are thus able to appreciate more fully the ascetic methods of development. We may say: Even as pain is connected with an external injury of the physical body, so the feeling of bliss is connected with a diminution of the external activity and consequently with an increase of the inner activity. This is the sensible side of the asceticism of the past, and we are able to understand why that which was to lead man up into the higher worlds was sought through renunciation.

Consequently we must first throw light upon the most primitive aspects of things in order to grasp, as it were, how spiritual science explains to us by the simplest things, such as hurting a finger, the path leading from renunciation and privation to blissfulness, and also how the tearing of pain may become a kind of path of knowledge. For everything is a parable, and by explaining the smallest things which face us, in the way, in which spiritual science explains it to us, we gradually rise to a spiritual height enabling us to understand the highest things.

If we compare this with what was explained yesterday, we shall be able to grasp that the bearing of bodily pain may become a kind of training, a path of knowledge. Imagine a person who never had a headache. He can say: I am not aware of the fact that I have a brain, for I have never felt it. Let us now imagine that such a headache is not produced by influences from outside, but by a certain stage of Christian Initiation which is called “the crown of thorns”. It is meant to give man the feeling: Through pain and suffering and many hindrances approach me, seeking to undermine what is most important to me, my mission—I will stand upright, though I stand alone! If someone practises these feelings for months, indeed for years, he will finally experience this feeling of headache, as if sharp points or thorns were prickling his head.

This is a transition to the recognition of those occult forces which formed the brain. When the etheric forces of the brain do exactly what they to do, they do not find anything which might bring these forces to the consciousness of man. But when the physical brain is in a certain way injured under the influence of these feelings, the etheric body must loosen itself from it; it must withdraw from the brain, it is driven out of it, and knowledge is the result of this emancipation of the etheric head. This passing feeling of pain is only the transition to the stage in which the forces of knowledge are gained, and this is nothing but an objectivation of something which man did not know before. Before, he did not know that he had a brain, now he learns to know the etheric forces and their activity, the forces which built up his brain and maintain it.

Many other things might still be said, When a physical organ is separated from its etheric part, so that the etheric body is unable to work in it, we experience pain. But when the astral body has grown accustomed to this, when the cicatrization begins, implying an emancipation of the etheric body, when therefore not all the forces of the etheric body are being used, then the opposite arises: namely, a feeling of joy and bliss.

This is the 6th of 19 lectures given by Rudolf Steiner at Berlin, in the Autumn of 1908 through the Spring of 1909. The title of the series of lectures is: Spiritual-Scientific Anthropology/Knowledge of Man.

Today we will consider some things already known to you from a certain side. But in all theosophical questions, we only fully penetrate them when they are illuminated from different aspects. And within the theosophical stream here in our central European regions, things are discussed which are drawn from the most advanced occult investigations, and which can thus be easily misunderstood. On the other hand, however, we should not advance if we did not venture for once to speak about such things quite plainly. Just call to mind that if we go back in human evolution, through the various epochs of the post-Atlantean age, as far back as Atlantis, and then back to the older periods even in Atlantis—that then, if we turn our spiritual gaze on the events of that time, we find quite different forms of humanity.

In the last third of the Atlantean epoch the etheric body was still, to a certain extent, outside the physical body. The head of the etheric body was not yet united with the forces of the physical body, which are the forces of the ego, of self-consciousness. If we observe the process lying behind this we can say: progressive evolution consists in the widely extending etheric head withdrawing into the physical head. If we see a horse today, then the etheric head of the horse extends beyond the physical head. I have also told you what a gigantic organization the etheric parts of the elephant form, which stretch far, far beyond the physical body—quite a house, so to say. So, with man, too, in the Atlantean age, the etheric body was still outside, and gradually entered in more and more. Such an entry of a more rarefied member into a denser one brings about, at the same time, a densification of what is physical. The physical head of man before the last third of the Atlantean age thus appeared quite different from what it did later. And if we went still further back into the last Lemurian times, then one would see spiritually very little of the physical head. It existed first in a quite soft, transparent matter. Only through the gradual entry of the etheric head, through the gradual assimilation of substances, parts of the head become densified, and thus separated from their environment. Even in the later Atlantis man was still endowed, to an extraordinary degree, with what has been retained—but as a pathological state—as water on the brain, as a watery brain. In addition to this we have to think of a softening of the bones, a complete softening of the upper members of man. That sounds terrible for modern man. That which today forms the human head, and surrounds it, hardened out of this watery substance. The comparison I sometimes give is not altogether inept: the crystallizing of salt from a salt solution, in a glass. It gives a fairly correct idea, this crystallizing from a watery salt solution. What thus took place as regards the head at a later time, occurred with the rest of man at a much earlier time.

All the other members gradually developed out of a soft mass, so that we can say: Where was the human ego then, in reality? Where was the present ego? It was not really within man at that time but still in his environment. We can say: the upper members of man harden through the entry of the egos. Because the ego was outside man, it was still endowed with a quality which later became different. Through entering the physical body, the ego was enabled to become an individual I, whereas before it was still a kind of group soul.

I will here give a picture of the facts of the case. Imagine a circle of twelve men are sitting somewhere. These twelve men are sitting in a circle. Through evolution as it is today, each of these men has his ego within himself. Thus twelve egos are sitting in this circle. Let us consider such a circle of men in the Atlantean age; then the physical bodies sat thus around, but the ego is only in the etheric body which is still outside. The ego is thus to be found in front of each one. This ego, however, has another characteristic. It is not so centralized. It develops, as it were, its forces and unites with the egos of the other men so that they form a ring which again sends its forces towards its centre. Thus we have here an etheric circular body which forms a unity in itself, and within it, the egos. Thus there is a circle of physical bodies, and within an etheric circular surface, which forms a unity because the egos are caught up in it, and the single ego is enclosed. Through this image we come to a pictorial idea of the group souls.

If we go further back, then we can keep this image, but we must not imagine such a regular circle of men; these human beings can be scattered in the world in the most manifold way. Let us imagine one in west France, another in the east of America, etc.—that is to say, not sitting together. Where the laws of the spiritual world are in question the egos can still be connected, although the human beings are scattered over the world. These human beings form, then, this “round.” That which is formed through the flowing together of their egos is not indeed such a beautifully formed etheric body, but still it is a Unity. Thus a group of people existed at that time, who were united because their egos formed a unity—and indeed, there were actually four such group egos. You must imagine these human beings in accordance with the laws of the spiritual world. The group souls of the four groups passed into each other. They were not inwardly united, but passed into each other. One calls these four group souls by the names of the apocalyptic beasts: Bull, Eagle, Lion, Man. The Man, however, was at another stage of evolution than the man of today. The names are taken from the organization of the group souls. Why could one call them thus? I should like to make that clear today from another aspect.

Let us place ourselves as vividly as possible in the early ages of Lemurian life. The souls which today are incarnated in human bodies had not yet descended as far as the physical bodies. They had not yet the tendency to unite themselves with physical matter. Even the bodies which later were to become human bodies were very, very animal-like. The most grotesque physical beings were on earth, which would even seem grotesque compared with what we should call today the most grotesque creatures. Everything was still in a soft, slippery form—seething, watery, or fiery—human beings, as well as the environment. Among these grotesque forms were already, of course, the ancestors of the human physical bodies, but these were not yet taken possession of by the egos. The four group souls, whom we have already characterized as four group souls before the entry of the spirit into the physical organization, actually represented four egos who waited to incarnate—such egos as were adapted to quite special forms, which were down there below. One category was adapted to enter the organizations already existing physically, in quite definite shapes, another category to enter another. The forms which were below must correspond in their formation, in a certain way, to the kinds of egos which waited. There were forms existing which were especially adapted to receive the Lion egos, others the Bull egos, etc. That was in a very early age of earth evolution. Now consider that the group soul we have called the Bull soul enters quite definite forms which are there below. These have a quite definite appearance. Similarly, the Lion soul was drawn to other special forms.

Thus what is physical on earth shows us a fourfold picture. The one group especially develops the organs whose functions coincide more with those of the heart. They were organized one-sidedly in the heart nature; an especially aggressive, courageous, attacking element was in them. They were courageous, self-assertive, sought to overcome the others—were, as it were, already conquerors, born as conquering natures even in their form. They were those in whom the heart, the seat of the ego, had been made strong. In others, the organs of digestion, of nourishment, of procreation, were especially developed. In the third group, it was especially the organs of movement. In the fourth group, these tendencies were equally shared—both the courageous, aggressive, and the tranquil—which comes through the development of the digestive organs. Both were developed. The group in which the aggressive quality belonging to the organization of the heart was specially developed, formed the human beings whose group soul belonged to the Lion. The second group was that of the Bull. The third group, with the mobile element that does not wish to know much of the earth, belongs to the group soul of the Eagle. They are the ones who can raise themselves above what is earthly. And those in whom these things were held in equilibrium belonged to the group soul “Man.” Thus we have, in due form, the projection of the four group souls into the physical. At that time, a quite peculiar sight would have offered itself to the observer. One would have found one kind of race, of which someone with a prophetic gift could have said: Those are physical beings who remind one somewhat of the lion, who reproduce the character of the lion, even though they looked different from the lion of today. They were lion-hearted people, aggressive human germs. Then again there was a group of bull like people, everything adapted to the physical plane. You can easily complete for yourselves the third and fourth races. The third race was already strongly visionary. While the first were combative, while the second cultivated everything connected with the physical plane and working it over, you would have found the third class of people, who were very visionary. As a rule, they had something which, in relation to the other bodies, was misshaped. They would have reminded you of people who have much psychism and believe in visions, and because they do not bother much about the physical, have something dried up, something stunted compared with the abundant force of the other two groups. They would have reminded you of the bird nature. “I will hold back my Spirit,” that was the tendency of the eagle men. The others had something which, as it were, was mixed out of all the parts. Something else must be added to this.

If we go so far back as to meet with these conditions on the earth, then we must also bear in mind that everything that happened in the course of earth evolution, occurred in such a way that the affairs of the earth were regulated from out of the spiritual world. Everything was a detour in order to arrive at the man of today. One who could have seen more deeply into these things, could have made the experience that these lion natures (who reminded one of what we see today in quite another way in the lion body) developed a special attractive force for the male forms of the etheric bodies. These felt themselves especially drawn to the lion men, so that these were beings who had outwardly a lion body—inwardly, however, a male etheric body. There was a powerful etheric being with a male character, and a small part of this etheric being densified itself to the physical lion body. The bull race, however, had a special attractive force for the female etheric body. Thus the bull body had the special force to attract the female etheric body and unite with it. And now think further—the etheric bodies go on continually working, penetrating and transforming. The relation of the lion-like men to the bull-like was especially important in older times. The others come less into consideration. The male etheric bodies which crystallized a physical lion body out of themselves, had the power of fructifying the physical lion body itself, so that the procreation of humanity was especially cared for by the lion-like race. It was a kind of fructification from out of the spiritual, a non-sexual procreation. The bull race, however, could also bring about the same thing. That which had become physical worked back here on the female etheric body. In the course of evolution, the process fashioned itself differently. Whereas the lion nature retained this mode of procreation, since the fructifying force came from above, out of the spiritual, whereas here this process intensified, the other process was drive more and more back. The bull humanity became more and more unfruitful. The result was that on the one side there was a humanity which was maintained by fructification, on the other side, another half which became more and more unfruitful. The one side became the female sex, the other the male. The modern female physical nature has in fact a male etheric body, whereas the etheric body of the man is female. The physical body of the woman has proceeded from the lion nature, whereas the physical bull-body is the ancestor of the male body.

The spiritual in man has a common origin, is neutral, and first entered the physical body when the sexes had already differentiated. Only then was the spirit taken hold of, and only then the head hardened. The etheric body of the head united for the first time with the physical body; it was all the same to it whether it joined on to a male or female body, since both sexes were the same for it.

We must say that woman, so long as we look away from what in general transcends this differentiation, has, through her evolution, something lion-like in her nature. One will certainly find this hidden courage. The woman can develop inner courage; e.g. in war, in the care of the sick, in order to work in the service of humanity. The male physical body has that which in the true sense we can call the bull nature. That is connected with the fact that the man, as he is usually organized, has more of the activity based on physical creation. Occultly regarded, these things reveal themselves precisely thus, even if it sounds extraordinary. You thus see how these group souls have worked together. They so work that the lion and bull group souls cooperate in their work. These divine beings cooperate and, in the man of today, the labours of the different divine group souls are concealed.

These pictures which I have here put before you, in outline, will certainly have their effect. If you follow humanity ever further back, to the time when no procreation was yet possible, then we must say: The external physical female body changes into something which was lion like, whereas the male body was bull-like. Such things, however, must be taken in a holy, earnest sense, if we will understand them aright. It would be easy for those who have studied human anatomy, to deduce the anatomical differences between the physical bodies of man and woman from these lion- and bull-natures. Physical science will be utterly fruitless and only describe external facts as long as it does not penetrate into the spirit of these facts. Now it will no longer appear so strange to you that once a race of people existed who had a lion-like body. These took up the ego nature, and through this the lion nature was changed more and more into the female body. Those who received nothing of this spiritual element changed in quite another way; i.e., into the modern lion, and what is related with it. We will deal another time with the reason why these animals too are bisexual. Those who shared nothing of spirituality formed the modern lion, whereas those who did so developed the modern female body. In the course of time many, many other aspects of these things can be shown. Theosophical learning is not like the mathematical. First it was shown, for instance, that there exist four group souls of which only the names are at first given. Then some or other aspect is chosen, and the matter is illuminated from outside. And so we approach continually from another side. We go around what is first presented, and illuminate it from the most diverse aspects. Whoever grasps this will never be able to say that theosophical matters contradict each other. This is also the case, even in the greatest things we consider. The differences come from the various standpoints from which one observes the matter. Let us take with us from this gathering what one might call inner tolerance. May we succeed in our special theosophical stream in bringing this inner spirit of tolerance into the theosophical movement. Let us take that with us as a content of feeling and try and work externally in such a way that this spirit of the most inner understanding may become effective.

Automated Translation

We have come together for the study of anthroposophical truths for many winters, and for a little group of you, it is now quite a good number of winter seasons that have found us united for such studies. For reasons which we will perhaps discuss in our next General Meeting, we may look back just at this time at our common anthroposophical life of the past. There are still among you a few who, in a certain respect, form a kind of nucleus for this gathering together here. They have brought over from earlier times their fundamental spiritual conviction, have united with us six or seven years ago, and have formed the nucleus around which those others who were seeking have gradually, so to speak, crystallized. We may say that in the course of these years, not only the increased number of these meetings may tell us something, but that in another direction, and with the help of those spiritual Powers, who are always present when the work of spiritual science is carried out in the right sense, we have succeeded in following a certain inner system in our work.

Remember how six or seven years ago, we began as a small circle and how quite slowly and gradually, as well as in inner contents, we have created the ground on which we stand today. We began, with the aid of the simplest basic concepts of spiritual science, to seek first to create a fundamental feeling, and we have gradually reached the point that last winter—at least in our Group-meetings—we could speak of things of the various regions of the higher worlds as one speaks of events and experiences of the ordinary physical world. We have been able to learn about the various spiritual beings and those worlds, which are, in fact, supersensible in regard to our sense-world. And not only could we introduce an inner system into our Group-work, but we could also hold two Courses last winter and enable those who had gradually joined the nucleus to find the definite link with our studies.

It has already been said here, and often emphasized, that we have now come to the point of speaking about the higher worlds as about something—one might say—self-evident, and those who have joined inwardly in our Group meetings have in this way reached a certain anthroposophical maturity. This maturity does not lie in theories or in some conceptual grasp, but in an inner attitude of mind, which one acquires in the course of time. One who has really absorbed inwardly for a length of time what spiritual science has to give, will feel that he can listen to things as actual facts, as self-evident facts that would have affected him earlier quite differently.

And so in this introductory lecture today, we will begin straight-away and without hesitation to speak on a certain chapter of the higher worlds that will lead us to a deeper understanding of man's character and personality. For after all, what purpose is served by all our studies of the higher worlds? We talk about the astral world, about the devachanic world. In what sense do we members of the physical world talk about them in the first place? We talk of these higher worlds not at all with the consciousness that they are quite foreign to us and stand in no kind of connection with the physical world. Rather are we conscious that the higher worlds, as we call them, lie all around us, that we live in them, that they project into our physical world, and that in these higher worlds lie the causes and grounds for facts that take place before our physical eyes and senses. And so we learn to know this life around us with its human beings and nature-events, only when we look at what is invisible but reveals itself in the visible; that is, when we look at what belongs to other worlds in order to be able to form a judgment as to where it plays into our physical world. Normal and abnormal phenomena of ordinary physical life first become clear to us when we learn to know the spiritual life lying behind it—the spiritual life that is far richer and more extensive than the physical life, which forms only a small section of it. The human being stands, and must stand for all our studies, is the central point. Understanding human nature means, really, to understand a great part of the world. But human nature is difficult to understand, and we shall gain a small piece of this understanding of the human being, if we speak today of a few facts, only a few facts of the astral world. The contents of the human soul are very manifold. We will learn about a part of this soul-content today. To begin with, we will set before us certain characteristics of the soul.

We live in our soul-life in the most manifold feelings, perceptions, ideas, concepts, and impulses of will. These all take their course in our soul-life from morning to evening. If we observe man superficially, this soul-life appears to us to be something self-contained, enclosed in itself, and this view is justifiable. Observe how your life flows along with the first thoughts formed in the morning, the first feelings moving through you, the first will-impulses arising. Observe how feeling is linked to feeling, will-impulse to will-impulse, until the evening when the consciousness sinks in sleep. That all looks like a progressing stream. Observed in a deeper sense, however, it is by no means just a progressing stream, for through our thoughts, feelings and perceptions, we stand in a continual relation—to most people quite unconsciously—to higher worlds. Today let us consider this relation as regards the astral world.

When we have some kind of feeling, when joy or terror flashes through our soul, that, to begin with, is an event in our soul-life, but it is not merely that. If someone can test that clairvoyantly, it will be seen that something goes out of the soul like a current, like a shining current, which goes into the astral world. It does not go in casually, however, and without direction, but it takes its way to a being of the astral world. Let us suppose a thought arises in our soul; let us say we ponder on the nature of a table. Inasmuch as the thought shimmers through our soul, the clairvoyant can observe how a current proceeds from this thought to a being of the astral world. And so it is for every thought, every concept, every feeling. From the whole stream that flows away before the soul, currents continually go towards the most diverse beings of the astral world. It would be quite an erroneous idea if you thought that all these currents went to one single being of the astral world. That is not the case. From all these different thoughts, feelings and sensations proceed the most diverse currents, and they go to the most diverse beings of the astral world. That is the peculiarity of this fact: as individuals, we stand in connection, not with one such being, but we spin the most diverse threads towards the most diverse beings of the astral world. The astral world is peopled by a great number of beings just as the physical world, and they stand in connection with us. If, however, we want to realize the whole complexity, we must take something else into consideration.

Let us suppose that two individuals see a flash of lightning and have a quite similar sensation. Then a current goes out from each, and now both currents go to one and the same being of the astral world. We can say, therefore, that there is a being, an inhabitant of the astral world, with whom both beings of the physical world put themselves in connection. And it can happen that not only one person, but 50, 100, 1000 human beings, having a similar sensation, send out currents to one single being of the astral world. In so far as these 1000 beings people agree on one point, they stand in connection with the same being of the astral world. But think what other and differing sensations, feelings, thoughts are possessed by the individuals who, in the one case, have the same sensation! Through these, they stand in connection with other beings of the astral world, and in this way the most diverse connecting threads pass from the astral world into the physical world.

Now, it is possible to distinguish certain classes of beings in the astral world, and it will be easier to form an idea of these classes if we take an example. Imagine a large number of people of the European world, and let us take from the soul-contents of these people the concept of justice. These people may otherwise have the most varied experiences and thereby stand in connection in the most complex way with the most differing beings of the astral world. But since these people think similarly about the idea of justice, have acquired this idea in the same way, they therefore all stand in connection with the same being of the astral world. We can look on this being exactly like a center, a middle point, from which rays go out to all the people concerned. As often as they bring to mind the concept of justice, they stand in connection with this one being. Just as human beings have flesh and blood and are composed of them, so does this being consist of the concept of justice: it lives in it. In the same way there is an astral being for the concept of courage, of goodwill, of bravery, of revenge, etc. Thus beings exist in the astral world for our human qualities, the contents of our souls. And in this way a sort of astral net is spread out over a considerable number of persons. All of us who have the same idea of justice, for example, are embedded in a body of an astral being, whom we can actually call the “Justice-being”. If we have a concept of courage, valor, we stand in connection with another being. Thus in everyone, there is a kind of conglomeration, for we can regard everyone as receiving currents from astral beings on all sides. We are all a confluence of currents that come out of the astral world.

Now we shall be able to show more particularly how human beings, who are individually in this way a confluence of these currents, concentrate them in themselves round their ego-centers. For that is the most important thing for our soul-life; we must collect all these currents round a center that lies in our self-consciousness. This self-consciousness is so important, because the self must act as a controller in our individual inner being, collecting the different currents flowing into us from all sides and uniting them in itself. For the moment the self-consciousness would slacken and give up, it could come about that a person would cease to feel its self to be a unity, and that all the different concepts of courage, valor, etc, would fall apart. People would then no longer be conscious of the self as a unity; they would feel as if they were distributed in all the different currents. There is a possibility—and there it shows us how we can penetrate into the understanding of the spiritual world through knowledge of the true, the right—there is a possibility that we can lose the directing control over what streams into us. As an individual person, you have a certain life behind you, have experienced many things, have had a number of ideals from youth on that have gradually evolved. Each ideal can differ from the others, you have had the ideal of courage, valor, etc. In this way you have come into the currents of most diverse astral beings. One can also come in another way into such a varied succession of astral beings.

Let us suppose that in the course of life an individual man has had a number of friendships. Under the influence of these friendships, quite definite feelings and sensations have developed, especially in youth. In this way, currents passed to a definite being of the astral world. Then the man formed a new friendship, and he was then united with another being of the astral world, and so on for the whole of life. Now let us suppose that through a sickness of the soul, it came about that the ego lost control over the different currents; it could no longer group them. Then the man would reach the state of no longer feeling himself as ego, as enclosed entity, a self-conscious unity. If he should lose his ego through a process of soul-sickness, he would then perceive these currents as if he were not aware of himself, but of the separate currents, as if he flowed into them. You will be able to understand an especially tragic case if we consider it from this point of view, from the aspect of the astral world—Friedrich Nietzsche.

Many of you will certainly know how Friedrich Nietzsche became insane in the winter of 1888/89. It is interesting to read in his last letters how he became divided, split up in different currents in the moment when he lost his ego. He writes to this or that friend—or to himself: “There lives a person in Turin who was once a professor of philosophy in Basle, but he is not egotistic enough to have remained one.” (Thus he had lost his ego and clothed the fact in such words). “And the god Dionysos strides to the River Po and looks down at all his ideals and friendships, which are wandering below him.” He appears to himself now as King Humbert, now as someone else, now even as one of the criminals about whom he had read at that time, during the last days of his life. There were two notorious cases of murder just then, and in the moments of his illness he identified himself with these women-murderers. For he did not experience his ego but, rather, a current that went into the astral world. Thus in abnormal cases, what is otherwise held together through the center of self-consciousness rises to the surface. It will become more and more necessary for people to know what is at the base of the soul. For we would be infinitely poor beings if we were not able to form many such currents into the astral world, and we would also be very limited beings if we were not able gradually to become master over all these currents through the deepening of our spiritual life. We must realize that we are not confined within our skin, but project everywhere into other worlds and that other beings project into our world. A whole web of beings is spun out over the astral world. Now we will observe a little more closely the beings standing in connection with us in this way. They are beings, who by way of comparison, present themselves to us somewhat like this:

The astral world surrounds us. Let us think that here is such a being—one, if you like, that has to do with the concept and feeling of courage. It stretches its tentacles towards all sides and they go into human souls; and inasmuch as men develop courage, the connection is established. Other men are different. All those, for instance, who develop a definite form of anxiety or a feeling of love are connected with another being of the astral world. If we make a study of these beings, we come to what we can call the constitution, the social life in the astral world. People, as they live here on the physical plane, are not merely individuals. Here, too, we are all connected in a hundred, a thousand different ways. We are connected by the law, in friendships, and so on. Our connections on the physical plane are regulated by our ideas, concepts, representations, etc. In a certain way, the social connections of those beings on the astral plane, of whom we have been speaking, must also be regulated.

Now then, do these beings live with one another? They have no such dense physical bodies of flesh and blood as we humans have; they have astral bodies, are at most of etheric substance. They stretch out their feelers into our world; but how do they live together? If these beings were not to work together, our human life, too, would be quite different. In fact, our physical world is only the external expression of what takes place on the astral plane. Now, do these beings arrange things among themselves? One could easily be tempted to think that the social life on the astral plane is similar to the life on the physical plane. But the joint life on the astral plane differs essentially from a working together on the physical plane. People who group the different planes above one another and characterize the higher worlds as if things were just the same there as here in the physical world, do not give a right description of the higher worlds. There is an immense difference between the physical world and the higher worlds, and this difference increases the higher up we come. Above all, a definite peculiarity exists in the astral world, which is not to be found at all on the physical plane. That is the penetrability of the substance of the astral plane. It is impossible here to place yourself on the spot where someone else is already standing; impenetrability is a law of the physical world. In the astral world it is not; there, the law is penetrability. And it is absolutely possible—it is even the rule—for beings to penetrate each other, and where already one being is, another presses in. Two, four, hundreds of beings can be on one and the same spot in the astral world. But that results in something else, namely, that the logic of common life on the astral plane is quite different. You will best understand how the logic of the astral plane is quite different from the logic of the physical plane—though not, perhaps, the logic of the act, of the common life—if you take the following example.

Suppose that a town had decided to build a church on a definite site. Then, of course, the wise council of the town must first consider how the church is to be built, what arrangements must be made, and so on. Now let us suppose that two parties arise in the town. The one party wants to build a church on this site in a definite style and with a certain architect, etc. The other party wishes to build a different church with a different architect. On the physical plane, the two parties will not be able to carry out their intention. Before anything at all is begun, it will be necessary for one of the parties to be victorious and gain the upper hand, and that the style of the church is decided on. You know, of course, that actually far the greater part of mankind's social life is passed in such consultations and mutual arguments before something is carried out, before people come to an agreement about what is to be done. Nothing indeed would be done unless in most cases one or other party gains the upper hand and remains in the majority. But the party in the minority will not straightaway say: “We have been wrong,” but will go on believing they have been right. In the physical world it is a matter of discussing the proposals, which must be decided purely within the physical world, because it is impossible for two plans to be carried out on one and the same spot.

In the astral world, it is quite different. It is perfectly possible there to build—let us say—two churches on one and the same spot. Such actually happens continually in the astral world, and it is the only right thing there. One does not argue as in the physical world. One does not hold meetings and try to get a majority for this or that. In fact, it is not at all necessary there. When a city council holds a meeting here and 40 out of 45 people are of one opinion and the others of another, then the two parties may inwardly want to murder each other on account of their different opinions. That is not so bad, however, because externally the things are at once dealt with. Neither party tries without consideration of the other party to build their church immediately, because on the physical plane thought can remain a possession of the soul, it can remain in the soul.

On the astral plane, that is not so; it is like this: When the thought has been formed, it also stands in a certain respect already there. So that if such an astral being as the one I have just spoken about has a thought, it immediately stretches out the corresponding “feelers” that have the form of this thought, and another being stretches out from itself the substance. Both now mutually interpenetrate each other and are in the same space as a newly-formed being. In this way, there is a continual interpenetration of the most varying opinions, thoughts, and feelings. In the astral world, the most completely opposite ideas can interpenetrate each other. It must be said that when things are discussed in the physical world, contradiction prevails, but in the astral world what prevails at once is conflict. For, as a being of the astral world, one cannot keep back one's thoughts to oneself, they become deeds immediately; the objects are there at once. Now, to be sure, churches such as we have on the physical plane are not built there, but let us suppose that a being of the astral plane wanted to realize something and another being wanted to cross it. Discussion is not possible there, but the principle holds good that a thing must be preserved! So when the two "feelers" are really in the same space, they begin to fight each other; and the idea that is the more fruitful, which is therefore right (i.e., the one that can endure), will annihilate the other and vindicate itself. So that there we have a continual conflict of the most varying opinions, thoughts, feelings. On the astral plane each opinion must become deed. There, one does not oneself fight; one lets the opinions fight, and the one that is the most fruitful routs the other from the field. The astral world is, so to say, the much more dangerous, and a great deal of what is said about its danger is connected with what has just been stated. Thus, everything there becomes deed, and all opinions must fight with each other, not discuss and argue.

I will now touch upon a matter that is doubtless shocking to the modern materialistic age, but which nevertheless is fact. I have often emphasized that our present age grows more and more accustomed to the mere consciousness of the physical world, to the characteristics and peculiarities of the physical world. So that when discussions arise, everyone would like to annihilate the one who is not of his or her opinion, or else takes him for a fool. That is not how it is in the astral world. There a being will say, “I do not concern myself with other opinions.” The most complete tolerance obtains. If one opinion is more fruitful than the others, it will drive them out of the field. One lets other opinions stand just as one's own, because things have to right themselves through conflict. One who gradually becomes familiar with the spiritual world must learn to adjust oneself to the customs of the spiritual world. The first part of the spiritual world is the astral world, where such usages prevail as have just been described, so that in a person who becomes familiar, with the spiritual world, the customs, too, of the beings of that world in a certain respect take root. And that is also right. Our physical world should become more and more an image of the spiritual world, and we shall bring more harmony into our world if we make it our purpose that life in the physical world should resemble life in the astral world. We cannot, of course, build two churches on the same spot, but where opinions differ, one lets them mutually prevail as regards their fruitfulness in the world. The opinions that are the most fruitful will assuredly carry off the victory, as it is in the astral world.

So, the characteristic qualities of the astral world can extend into the physical world precisely within a spiritual movement. That will be a great field of education, which the spiritual-scientific movement will have to cultivate—to create on the physical plane an image of the astral world. However much it shocks the person who only knows the physical plane and accordingly believes that only one opinion can be advocated and that all who hold other opinions must be blockheads, yet it will become increasingly obvious to the adherents of a spiritual world-conception that an absolute tolerance of opinions must prevail, not a tolerance consequent on a sermon, but one which takes root in our soul.

This penetrability that has been described is a very important and essential quality of the astral world. And no being of the astral world will develop such a concept of truth as we know in the physical world. The beings of the astral world look upon discussion, etc., in the physical world as quite unfruitful. Goethe's words, “What fruitful is, alone is true!” hold good for them, too. We must learn to know truth not through theories, but through its fruitfulness, through the way in which it vindicates itself. Thus, a being of the astral world will never contend with another as human beings do. It will say to the other, “Fine; you do as you think, I will do as I think!” It will soon be shown which idea is the more fruitful, which idea will drive the other from the field.

If we transpose ourselves into such a way of thinking, we have also gained something of practical knowledge. One must not imagine that the growth of human beings into the spiritual world occurs in some tumultuous way; it happens inwardly, intimately. If we can pay attention to it and make our own what has just been described as the peculiarity of the astral world, then we shall increasingly come to regard such feelings as the astral beings possess as model feelings for ourselves. And if we take as our guide the character of the astral world, we shall have a hope of gradually living into the spiritual world. The spiritual worlds gradually dawn for us in this way. This is what proves to be the more fruitful for mankind in the matter.

What has been said today is in many respects to be considered a kind of preparation for what we shall deal with in the next lectures. If we have now spoken of the beings of the astral world and their particular character, yet we must already point out that the astral world differs much more sharply from the higher worlds—let us say from the devachanic world—than one would be inclined to believe. It is true that the astral world is there where our physical world is, too; it interpenetrates our physical world, and all that we have often spoken about is always around us in the same space as physical facts and physical beings are. But there is also the devachanic world. It differs through the fact that we experience it in a different state of consciousness from that in which we experience the astral.

Now you could easily think: Here is the physical world and it is penetrated by the astral world, the devachanic, etc., but it is not quite so simple. In order to describe the higher worlds more exactly than we have done earlier, we must realize that there is yet another difference between the astral and devachanic worlds. Our astral world, in fact, as we live in it and as it permeates our physical space, is in a certain respect a double world, whereas in a certain way the devachanic is a single one. That is something we will mention today as a preparation.

There are, as it were, two astral worlds and their difference lies in the fact that one is, so to say, the astral world of the good, the other the astral world of evil. It would be incorrect to make such an abrupt difference in the devachanic world. If we consider the worlds from above downwards, we must say: devachanic world, astral world, physical world. Even so, we do not consider the totality of our worlds; we must consider worlds still deeper than the physical. There is a lower astral world lying below our physical world. In practice, these two interpenetrate, the good astral above, the evil below. Now the most diverse currents pass over to the beings of the astral world, and amongst them are currents from the good and evil qualities of humanity. Those that are good pass to a good being and the evil currents to a corresponding evil being of the astral world. If we take the totality of all the good and the bad beings of the astral world, we have, in a certain way, two astral worlds. When we consider the devachanic world, we shall see that there, that is not the case in the same degree. Thus, there are two worlds in the astral world, mutually interpenetrating and having in the same way a relation to humanity. Above all, these two worlds are to be distinguished from each other in regard to their origin.

If we look back in the earth's evolution, we come to a time when the earth was still connected with the sun and moon. In a still earlier time, the earth was itself moon and was a body that was outside the sun in the Moon-evolution. At that time, before the earth had become our present earth, there was already an astral world. This astral world would have become the good astral world if it could simply have developed further without hindrance. Through the fact, however, that the moon had separated itself from the earth, the evil astral world has been incorporated into the general astral world, and today we are still at this stage. In the future, an evil part will be incorporated into the devachanic world, as well.

Provisionally, we must clearly keep in mind that there is not one astral world but two, one into which pass all the currents fruitful for human progress and further evolution, and one into which pass all the currents that hinder man's evolution—to which, at the same time, Kamaloca belongs. In both these worlds are beings whom we have learnt to know today in a more abstract way, how they exercise an influence on us, how they live with one another. In our next lecture, we will gain more exact knowledge of the inhabitants of the higher worlds, of their condition and constitution.

This lecture is meant as still introductory to our astral “General Meeting Campaign”, and it will have a particular purpose. It is to show that spiritual science—or rather the special way of observing the world, which underlies it—stands in fullest harmony with certain results of the specifically scientific method. It is not quite easy for the anthroposophist (as can be seen particularly in public lectures) to find complete understanding in a totally unprepared public. When spiritual science meets with an unprepared public, the anthroposophist must be aware that with regard to many things, he speaks quite a different language from those who so far have either heard nothing at all, or only superficially, of the knowledge that underlies the movement of spiritual science.

A certain deeper penetration is needed to find the harmony between what is so easily given today in ordinary science, the experiences of physical research, and what is given to us through the knowledge of the spiritual, the higher, the supersensible consciousness. One must gradually grow accustomed to see deeper into this harmony, and then one will find what a beautiful harmony exists between what is maintained by the spiritual researcher and the statements or enumeration of facts that can be brought forward by physical research. One must not, on this account, be too unjust towards those who cannot understand anthroposophists; they lack all the preparation that is definitely required in order to be able to grasp the results of spiritual research. And so in the majority of cases, they cannot help but think something quite different from what is intended—both in the words and in the ideas. Therefore, in wider circles a greater understanding for spiritual science can be achieved only if one speaks quite openly and frankly from the spiritual standpoint, even before an unprepared public.

Among these unprepared people, there will then be a great number who say, “That is all stupidity—fantastic things, puzzled-out nonsense.” But there will always be a few who, from inmost need of their soul, will get an inkling that there is, nevertheless, something behind it. They will go further and gradually familiarize themselves with it. And it is on such patient study that anthroposophy must depend, and at which we can aim. It will be very natural for a large part of those who come to a lecture on spiritual science from pure curiosity to give vent afterwards to the opinion: “That is a sect that only spreads its own particular gibberish!” But when one knows the difficulties, one will also wait patiently for the selection that must arise. Persons among the public will themselves find their way and form a nucleus through whom spiritual science will then gradually flow into our whole life.

A special example shall be given today to show how easy it is for prepared students of spiritual science, who have already grown accustomed to think and live in the conceptions aroused by spiritual science, to come to terms with the apparently most difficult reports given out by physical-sensible research. The learner will gradually become aware that the farther we advance, the more we will realize what a good foundation spiritual research is for universal knowledge. And that will give the seeker the necessary calmness to meet the storms pouring out against spiritual science, because it speaks quite a foreign language. If we have the patience to accustom ourselves to this harmony, we shall gain more and more assurance. Then when people say, “What you tell me does not agree with the most elementary researches of science,” the anthroposophist will answer, “I know that through what spiritual science can give, full harmony can be found with all these facts, although it is perhaps impossible to come to an understanding in a moment.”

We will now let something pass before our souls as a particular chapter, in order further to strengthen the consciousness.

After living for some time with the spiritual conception of the world, students of spiritual science have become accustomed to speaking of physical body, etheric body, and astral body as ideas, which they can then apply as guides when they are seeking to understand external things from a universal standpoint. They must gradually become used to seeing the difference in the physical nature of the objects around them. They look at the stone and do not say, “The stone consists of such and such materials, the human body consists of the same, and therefore, I can treat the human body just like the stone.” For even the plant body is quite different, though it consists of the same physical materials as the stone. It has the etheric body within it, and the plant's physical body would fall to pieces if the etheric body were not to permeate it in every part. Hence, the spiritual scientist says, “The physical body of the plant would dry away unless the etheric body kept it alive and fought against this dissolution. In regarding the plant, we find that it is a combination of the principles of the physical and etheric bodies.”

Now, it has often been emphasized that the most elementary principle of the etheric body is recapitulation. A being, standing solely under its etheric and physical principles, would express in itself the principle of recapitulation. We see evidence of this in the plant in a very marked degree: We see how leaf after leaf develops, since the plant's physical body is permeated by the recapitulation principle of the etheric. A leaf is formed, then a second and a third; leaf is added to leaf in continuous repetition. And even when the plant comes to a certain conclusion above, recapitulation is still there. There is a kind of wreath of leaves forming the calyx of the flower, though they have a different form from the other leaves. Yet, you feel that it is still a recapitulation of the same leaves in altered form. We may therefore say that the green calyx-leaves up above where the plant ends are a kind of recapitulation. And even the flower petals are a recapitulation. It is true that they have a different color, but in essentials, they are still leaves—greatly transformed leaves.

It was in Goethe's great work in the plant-kingdom that he showed how not only the calyx-leaves and flower petals are transformed leaves, but also how one must see in pistils and stamens just such a metamorphosed repetition. However, it is not a mere repetition that meets us in the plant. If the purely elemental etheric principle were alone active, the plant would come to no termination. The etheric body would press through the plant from below upwards, leaf upon leaf would be developed, and there would never be an end. Then, what makes the flower come to a conclusion, makes it end its existence, begin to be fruitful in order to produce another flower? It is the fact that in the same degree as the plant grows upward, there comes to meet it from above, enclosed in itself, the plant's astral body. The plant possesses in itself no astral body of its own, but as it grows upwards, the plant-like astral body meets it from above. It brings to a conclusion what the etheric body would continue in eternal recapitulation; it causes the transformation of the green leaves into the calyx, flower petals, stamens and pistil.

For occult sight, we can say that the plant grows towards its soul-like part, its astral part, which causes the metamorphosis. Now the fact that the plant remains plant and does not go over to voluntary movement and sensation is because the astral body, which meets the plant there above, does not take inner possession of the organs; it touches them only outwards from above. To the degree that the astral body seizes the organs inwardly, the plant goes over to the animal. That is the great difference. If you take a leaf of the plant, you can say: “Even in the leaf of the plant the etheric body and the astral body are working together, but the etheric body has, so to say, the upper hand. The astral body is not in a position to extend its feelers towards the interior; it works from outside.”

If we want to express that from the spiritual standpoint, we can say: “What is within, in the case of the animal, what it experiences inwardly as pleasure and sorrow, joy and pain, impulse, desire, and instinct, is not within in the plant; it sinks down, however, continuously towards the plant from above.” That is entirely something of a soul-nature. And whereas the animal directs its eyes outwards, has its pleasure in the surroundings, directs its perception of taste outwards and regales itself on some approaching enjoyment, i.e., experiences pleasure inwardly, one who can really regard these things spiritually can affirm that the astral being of the plant also feels joy and pain, pleasure and sadness through looking down upon that which it has brought about. It rejoices over the rose color and over all that comes towards it. And when the plants form leaves and flowers, then the plant-soul permeates and tastes all that as it looks down, and there is an exchange between the soul-part sinking down and the plant itself. The plant-world is there for the happiness—and at times also for the pain—of its soul-part. We can really see an exchange of feeling between the plant-covering of the earth and the earth's astrality, which enfolds the plants and represents their soul nature.

That which works on the plants from without seizes the soul-nature of the animal inwardly and first makes it animal. But there is an important difference between the active soul-nature in the astrality of the plant-world and that in the astrality of animal-life. If you test clairvoyantly what works as astrality on the plant-covering, you find in the soul-nature of the plants a certain sum of forces, and these all have a certain peculiarity. When I speak of plant soul-nature and of the earth's astrality that permeates it and in which the soul nature of the plants plays its part, you must be clear that these plant-souls do not live in their astrality as, for instance, physical beings on our earth.

Plant-souls can interpenetrate each other so that they flow along as in a fluid element. But one thing is characteristic of them; namely, they develop certain forces, and all these forces stream to the central point of the planet. A force works in every plant, which goes from above downwards and strives towards the center of the earth. That is what regulates the direction of the plant's growth. If you lengthen their axes, you come to the earth's center, which is the direction given to the plants by the soul-nature coming from above. If we investigate the soul-nature of the plant, we find that its most important characteristic is that it is rayed through by forces, which all strive towards the center of the earth.

It is different when we consider the astrality around our earth, which belongs to the animal nature. The plant-nature as such would not be able to call forth animal life. To produce the animal nature, it is necessary for still other forces to pass through the astral element. Thus, the occult investigator can distinguish purely from the astrality whether some will produce plant or animal growth. That can be distinguished in the astral sphere, for all astrality, showing only forces that strive towards the center of the earth or of some other planet, will give rise to plant growth. If, on the other hand, forces appear, which in fact stand at right angles to these, but which go round the whole planet as continuous circular movements with extraordinary mobility in every direction, then that is a different astrality, which gives rise to animal life. At any point where you set up observations, you find that the earth in every situation and direction and altitude is surrounded by currents, which, if lengthened, would form circles flowing round the earth. This astrality harmonizes quite well with the plant astrality. They interpenetrate each other and yet are inwardly separate, differing through their inner qualities. Thus, on one and the same spot of the earth's surface, both sorts of astrality can positively stream through each other. If a clairvoyant tests a definite portion of space, forces are found that strive only to the earth's center with others interpenetrating them that are only circular, and of which the clairvoyant knows that they give rise to animal life.

When you consider a physical body, no matter whether plant or animal, you have to look at it as a spatial enclosure and have no right to count something else as belonging to it that is separated from it in space. Where there is spatial separation, you must speak of different bodies; it is a single body when there is spatial connection. This is not so in the astral world, and particularly not so in the astrality that can give rise to the animal kingdom. There, it is a fact that astral structures, widely separated, can make up a single whole. Here in some part of space, there can be an astral structure, and in quite another part of space, there can be another enclosed astral structure; yet, in spite of having not the slightest thread of space in common, these two astral structures can make up a single being. Yes—three, four, five such spatially separated structures can be connected. Even the following can happen.

Suppose you have an astral being that has not embodied itself physically anywhere at all, and you then find another that belongs to this one. Now you observe the former and find something going on in it, which you can call intake of food, consumption of something, since certain substances are taken in and others thrust out. And while you perceive this in the one structure, you can perceive in the second being, spatially separated from the first, other processes going on that correspond to what occurred in the first as absorption of food. On the one hand, the being eats—on the other hand, it experiences the taste, and although there is no spatial connection, the process in the one structure entirely corresponds to the process in the other structure. Thus, astral structures quite separated in space can, nevertheless, belong inwardly to one another.

In fact, a hundred widely separated astral structures may be so interdependent that no process can take place in one without a corresponding process in the others. When the beings take physical embodiment, you can still find echoes of this astral peculiarity. You will have heard of the remarkable parallelism shown by twins. This is because they remain related in their astral bodies, although they are separated spatially through their physical embodiment. So that, when something goes on in the astral body of the one, it cannot take place alone but is expressed in the astral part of the other. Even where it is a case of plant astrality, this peculiarity is shown: the interdependence in things quite separated in space. You will perhaps have already heard of this peculiarity in the plant-nature—how the wine in vessels shows a quite remarkable activity when the grape season comes. What causes the grapes to ripen is to be remarked again even in the wine containers.

I wished only to bring forward the fact that in what is manifested, the hidden is always betrayed and can be brought to light with the methods of occult research. You will acknowledge from this that it does not seem at all unnatural that our whole organism is put together astrally out of quite differentiated members.

There are very singular sea-creatures, which you will understand if you remember what we have now described to some extent of the mysteries of the astral world. It is not at all necessary for the astral forces that bring about the intake of nourishment to be connected with those that regulate movement or reproduction. When the clairvoyant investigator examines astral space for such structures as can give rise to animal life, he finds something very remarkable. He finds a certain astral substantiality, of which he must say that if it worked in an animal body through the forces prevailing in it, it would be particularly fitted to transform the physical and make it an organ for taking nourishment. Now somewhere or other, there can be quite different members of astral being through which, when they submerge into a body, not organs of food-intake are formed but organs of movement or perception. You can conceive that, when on the one hand you have an apparatus for taking in food and again an apparatus for moving hands and feet, forces from the astral world are sunk into you, yet these forces can stream together from quite different sides. The one astral mass of forces has given you the one, the other has given you the other, and they find themselves together in your physical body, because your physical body has to be a connected object in space. That depends on the laws of the physical world. The different force-masses that come together there from outside must form a unity. They did not do so right from the beginning.

What we have just gone into as the result of occult research in the astral field can be definitely confirmed in its effect on the physical world. For there are certain creatures that have a remarkable life as marine creatures. We see in them something like a common stem or trunk, a kind of hollow tube. Above this, on the top, there is a formation that has, actually, no other ability than to fill itself with air and empty itself again. This achievement causes the whole structure to stand upright. If this bell-formed part were not there, then the whole thing that hangs on it could not keep itself upright. It is a kind of balance-being which gives equilibrium to the whole. This may not seem to us so very peculiar. But it is peculiar when we realize that the structure, which is up above and gives balance to the whole being, cannot exist without nourishment. It is of an animal nature and must therefore receive nourishment. Yet, it has no instrument at all for taking in food. But in order that this structure can be fed, there are placed on the hollow stem certain outgrowths—genuine polyps, distributed in all sorts of places; they would continually tumble about and not be able to keep in balance if they had not grown on a common stem. They can absorb nourishment from outside and give it to the whole stem, which they permeate. In that way, the air-balance-being is also nourished. Thus, on the one hand, there is a being that can only keep the balance, and on the other hand one that can only provide nourishment for the whole. But now we have a structure that can be very much held up in the matter of food; when the nourishment is taken in, nothing more is there, and the creature must seek other spots where it can find new food. For this, it must have organs of movement. Care has been taken for this, too, for there are still other structures that have grown on this stem and that have other capacities. They cannot keep the balance or provide nourishment, but instead, they possess certain muscular formations. These structures can draw themselves together and so press out the water. This causes a counter-thrust in the water, so that when the water is pressed out, the whole structure must move towards the other side and so be enabled to reach other creatures for food. The “medusae” move forward by pressing out water and in this way causing a counter-thrust. And such medusae, which are genuine movement-creatures, have now also grown on there. So here you have a conglomeration of differing animal formations, one kind that only keeps balance, another that only nourishes, and then other beings that provide movement.

If such a being, however, were no more than this, it would lie out entirely; it could not reproduce itself. But even this is provided for. Again, on other places of the stem, there grow ball-shaped forms that have no other capacity than reproduction. In a hollow space inside these beings, male and female fertilization substances are developed; they mutually fructify each other and beings of their own kind are brought forth. Thus the reproductive process in these beings is delegated to quite distinct formations that have no other capacity at all. In addition, you still find certain outgrowths on this common stem; these are beings in which everything is stunted; they are only there as a protection, so that what lies beneath has a certain protection. They have sacrificed themselves, have surrendered all else and become only protective polyps.

Still to be remarked are certain long threads called “tentacles”, which again are metamorphosed organs. These have none of the faculties of the other structures, but if the creature is attacked by some hostile creature, the “tentacles” repulse the attack; they are defensive organs. And still another kind of organ is there, which one calls “touchers”, “feelers”. These are fine, mobile, and very sensitive organs of feeling and touch—a kind of sense-organ. The sense of feeling, which in a human being is spread over the whole body, exists here in a special member.

Now what does this siphonophore—the name of this creature that you see swimming about in the water—mean to one who can look at things with the sight of an occultist? Here are the most varied structures astrally crowded together, creatures of nourishment, of movement, of reproduction, etc. And since these various good qualities of astral substance wish to incorporate physically, they had to string themselves on a common substantiality. So, here you see a being that predicts the human being to us in an extremely remarkable way!

Imagine that all the organs, appearing here as independent entities, were in an inward contact with each other, had developed together: then you have the human being and the higher animals in a physical respect. Here, through plain facts of the physical world, you see the confirmation of what is shown by occult research: namely, that in the human being, too, the most diverse astral forces stream together. These, we each hold together through our ego, and when they no longer work together as a being, feeling itself a unity, they make an individual strive apart in different directions. It is related in the Gospel, how so and so many demonic beings are in the man, which have streamed together in order to form a unity. And you also remember how in certain abnormal conditions, when there is mental illness, the person loses the inner connection. There are cases of insanity, where people can no longer hold fast to their ego and feel that they are split up into different parts; they confuse themselves with the original partial structures that have streamed together in them.

There is a certain occult principle, which asserts that everything present in the spiritual world ultimately betrays itself somewhere in the world of the senses. So you see what is interconnected in the human astral body embodied physically in such a siphonophore. The hidden world spies through a peep-hole into the physical. If human beings had not been able to delay their incorporation until they could achieve the suitable physical density, then they would be—not physically but spiritually—beings put together out of such a piece-work. Size has nothing at all to do with it. This type of creature—which belongs to the species of hollow creatures, described today by every natural history, and which, in a certain respect, form a kind of fascination for the material-science researcher—becomes inwardly comprehensible when we can understand it out of the occult principles of animal astrality. This is such an example, and you can listen calmly to one who speaks quite a different language and says that physical research contradicts the statements of anthroposophy. For you can reply that, if one patiently allows time to show the agreement, then harmony will certainly be displayed, even in most complicated things. The concept of "evolution" held by most people is a very simple one. Evolution has, however, taken place by no means so simply.

In conclusion, I should like to raise a kind of problem, which shall stand as a task for us to seek to solve from the occult standpoint. We have seen an important occult truth demonstrated externally in a relatively lower animal. Let us now pass to a somewhat higher animal species—the fish—which can give us still more riddles. I will put before you only a few characteristics.

When you observe fish in aquariums, you can again and again be amazed at the wonderful life of the water. But do not imagine that any occult insight will disturb these reflections. When you shed light there with the facts of occult research and see what still other hidden beings swim about just in order to form these creatures as they are, then the understanding will not lessen your wonder but only increase it. Let me, however, take an ordinary fish—it presents us with quite potent riddles. The average fish has, in the first place, remarkable stripes running along the sides, which appear also on the scales in another form. They run along both sides like two lines of longitude. If you were to deaden these two lines, the fish would behave as if it were mad. For then, it would have lost the power of finding the differences of pressure in the water—where the water gives greater support or less; where it is thinner and denser; the fish would no longer be able to move according to the pressure differences in the water. Water differs in density at different places, so that an uneven pressure is exercised. The fish moves at the surface of the water differently from below, and through these lines of longitude, it perceives the different pressures and all the movements produced by the fact that the water is in movement.

But now, through fine organs, which you find described in every natural-history book, the separate points of these lines of longitude are connected with the fish's quite primitive organ of hearing. The way in which the fish is aware of the movements and inner life of the water is just the same as the way in which we humans perceive the pressure of air—only that the conditions of pressure are felt first in the lines of longitude and are then transmitted to the hearing organ. The fish hears that; however, things are still more complicated.

The fish has a swimming-bladder that enables it in the first place to make use of the pressure of the water and to move just in definite conditions of pressure. The pressure on the swimming-bladder gives it the art of swimming, but because the different movements and vibrations touch upon the bladder and affect it like a membrane, this reacts on the hearing organ, and with the help of the hearing organ, the fish orientates itself in all its movements. The swimming-bladder is thus actually a kind of membrane, which is stretched out and which comes into vibrations that the fish hears. Where the fish's head ends towards the back, there are the gills, and these enable the fish to use the air of the water in order to breathe.

If you follow up all these things in the ordinary biological theories on evolution, you always find evolution presented somewhat primitively. The head of the fish is thought to evolve somewhat higher, and then the head of a more highly-organized animal arises; the fins evolve further, and then the organs of movement of the higher animals arise, and so on. But the matter is not so simple when one follows the processes with spiritual observation.

For in order that a spiritual structure that has embodied itself to form the fish may evolve higher, something much more complicated must happen. A great part of the organs must be transformed and turned inside out. The same forces that work in the fish's swimming-bladder conceal in themselves—in a mother-substance, as it were—the forces that the human being has in the lungs. But they are not lost. Tiny pieces remain behind—only turned inside out—everything material vanishes, and they then form our human ear drumskin. The eardrum, spatially considered, stands at a distance in man; it is, in fact, a portion of that membrane, and forces work within it that have functioned in the swimming-bladder of the fish. And further: the gills are transformed into the little bones of the ear, at least in part, so that in the human organ of hearing you have, for instance, transformed gills. Now you see that it is somewhat as if the fish's swimming-bladder, were turned over the gills. In human beings, therefore, you have the eardrum outside, the hearing organs inside. And what is quite outside in the fish—the remarkable lines of longitude through which the fish orientates itself—form in human beings the three semi-circular canals through which we keep our balance. If you destroyed these three semi-circular canals we would become giddy and could no longer keep our balance.

So you do not have just a simple process from natural history, but instead, a marvelous astral work, where things are indeed continually turned inside out. Imagine that you had a glove on this hand with patterns on it that were elastic. If you now reverse it, turn it inside out, it would become a quite tiny picture. So do the organs that were outside become small and tiny, and the organs that were inside will form a broad surface. We understand evolution only when we know that in the most mysterious way, such a reversal takes place in the astral and how, in this way, the progress of the spiritual takes place.

Today's lecture is to deal with the conditions that we must fulfill if we want to develop the forces and faculties slumbering within us and come to an experience and observation of the higher worlds. In the articles in the Journal “Lucifer-Gnosis” How does one attain knowledge of the Higher Worlds? [Now in book form], you have a picture of much that a human being has to fulfill when treading the path of knowledge, when wishing to press up into the higher worlds.

You remember the indications that were given in the interpretation of Goethe's Fairy Tale. We are concerned with the fact that human beings have soul forces of various kinds, and that from their development—that is, of thinking as such, of feeling as such, and of willing as such—depends our ascent on the one hand, and on the other hand our need to bring these into the right proportion by means of exercises. Willing, feeling and thinking must always be brought to development in exactly the right measure in knowledge of the different goals of spiritual life. For a definite goal, willing, for example, must step back, while feeling must come more strongly to the fore; for another goal, thinking must retreat, and again for another goal, feeling. All these soul forces must be perfected through occult exercises in the right proportion. The ascent into the higher worlds is connected with the development of thinking, feeling and willing.

Above all, it is a matter of refining and purifying thinking. That is necessary in order that thinking may no longer depend on the external sense-perceptions that can be gained on the physical plane. Yet, not only thinking but also feeling and the will can become forces of knowledge. In ordinary life, they go on personal paths; sympathy and antipathy take their way in accord with the individual personality, yet they can become, forces of knowledge. This may sound unbelievable for modern science! One can believe it more easily of thinking, especially of the descriptive thinking directed to sense-observation, but how can people admit that feeling can become a source of knowledge when they see how one person feels so, and another feels so, about the same things?

How can one admit that anything so vacillating, so dependent on personality as sympathy and antipathy can become an authority for knowledge and can be so far disciplined that they could grasp the innermost nature of a thing? That thought does so can be easily understood, but that when we confront something, and it arouses a feeling in us, this feeling can be of such a nature that not personal sympathy or antipathy speaks, but that feeling itself can become a means of expression for the inmost being of the thing—that seems hardly credible! And further, that the force of will and desire can also become means of expression for the inner nature—that above all, seems simply frivolous.

In the same way, however, as thinking can be purified and become objective, and hence a means of expressing facts in both the sense-world and the higher worlds, so, too, can feeling and willing become objective. Yet, there must be no misunderstanding. Feeling, as it exists in the ordinary life of modern man—in its direct content of feeling, does not become a means of expression of a higher world. This type of feeling is personal. The object of the occult exercises received by the student is to train feeling, alter and transform it, so that it becomes different from what it was when it was still personal. Yet, when a certain stage has been reached on the occult path through the development of feeling, one must not believe that one can state with knowledge: I have a being before me, and I feel something of this being—not that what one has there in feeling is a truth, a piece of knowledge.

The process that transforms feeling by way of occult exercises is a much more intimate and inward one. One who has changed feelings through exercises comes to Imaginative knowledge, so that a spiritual content reveals itself in symbols. The facts or beings of the astral world express themselves by symbols. Feeling becomes something different; it becomes Imagination, and astral pictures light up that express what is taking place in astral space. One does not see as one sees a rose, for instance, in the physical world with its color; one sees in symbolic pictures, and in fact, all that is brought before us in occult science is seen in pictures. The black cross with the wreath of roses and all such symbols are to bring to expression a definite fact, and they correspond just as much to astral facts as what we see in the physical world corresponds to physical facts. One therefore develops feeling, but knows in Imagination. And it is just the same with the will.

When one has reached the stage that can be reached to a certain extent through occult training, then if a being confronts one, one does not say, “It awakens in me a power of desire,” but one begins to perceive the nature of sound in Devachan.

Feeling is developed in us and astral vision in Imagination is the result. Will is developed in us, and the result is the experience of what comes about in devachanic spiritual music, the sphere-harmony from which there streams to us the inmost nature. Just as one perfects thinking and attains to objective thinking, which is the first step, so does one develop feeling, and a new world will emerge at the stage of Imagination. In the same way, one trains willing and there results in Inspiration the knowledge of Lower Devachan, until at length in Intuition there opens before us the world of Higher Devachan.

We can say, therefore, that as we lift ourselves to the next stage of existence, we are presented with pictures, but pictures that we cannot use as we use our thoughts. We do not ask, “How do these pictures correspond to reality?” Things are clothed in pictures of form and color, and through Imagination we must ourselves “unriddle” the beings who are showing themselves to us in symbols. In Inspiration, the things speak to us. There, we need not question nor try to find a solution in ideas that would be a carrying-over of the theory of knowledge from the physical plane. Rather, the inmost being of the thing itself speaks to us. When a human being confronts us, expressing his or her inmost nature to us, it is different from when we stand before a stone. We have to "unriddle" the stone and ponder about it.

With people, it is different; we experience their being in what they say to us. That is how it is in Inspiration. There, in Inspiration, it is not an abstract discursive thinking, but one listens to what the things say; they themselves express their being! It would have no meaning for someone to say, “When someone dies and I meet him again in Devachan, shall I know whom I meet?” For devachanic beings must look different and cannot be compared with what is on the physical plane. In Devachan, the being itself says what being it is, as if human beings should tell us not only their names but also let their natures flow out to us continually. That streams to us through the sphere-music and a non-recognition is not possible.

Now this is a certain opportunity for answering a question. Misunderstandings can very easily arise through the various theosophical presentations, and one can easily think that the physical, the astral and devachanic worlds are distinguished from one another spatially. We know, in fact, that where the physical world is, there is also the astral and the devachanic—they are in one another. Now the question could be asked, “Well, if everything is in one another, I cannot distinguish them as in physical space, where everything is side by side! If the ‘other side’ is in ‘this side’ how do I distinguish the astral world and the devachanic world from each other?” One distinguishes them through the fact that when one ascends from the astral pictures and colors to the devachanic world, the colors resound. What before was spiritually luminous becomes, henceforth, spiritual resounding. In experiencing the higher worlds there are also differences, so that when we rise up to these worlds, we can always recognize by definite experiences whether we are in this or that world.

Today we will characterize the differences between experiencing the astral world and the world of Devachan. It is not only that the astral world is known through Imagination and the devachanic through Inspiration, but we also know through other differences, too, which world we are in. A part of the astral world is the time during which a human being has to live through directly after death, which in anthroposophical literature we call the period of Kamaloca. What does it mean to be in Kamaloca? We have often tried to show this by description. I have often given the characteristic example of the epicure, who pines for the enjoyment that only the sense of taste can give him. With death, the physical body is stripped off and left behind, and so, too, the etheric body to a great extent, but the astral body is still present with its qualities and forces. These do not change immediately after death, but only gradually. If a person has longed for dainty foods, this longing remains, this pining for the enjoyment, but after death the soul lacks the physical instrument with which to satisfy it. The physical body with its organs is no longer there, and the soul must do without the enjoyment; it pines for something that it must go without. This holds good for all the Kamaloca¬experiences that consist, really, in a condition within the astral body when the soul still longs for the satisfaction that can be fulfilled only through the physical body. And because the soul has this no longer, it has to rid itself of the striving for these enjoyments; it is thus the period of becoming “disaccustomed”. The one who has died is freed from it only when this longing has been torn out of the astral body.

During the whole Kamaloca period, something lives in the astral body that can be called “privation”—deprivation in most varied forms, nuances and differences; that is the content of Kamaloca. Just as light may be differentiated into red, yellow, green, blue tones, so can privation be differentiated into the most varied qualities, and the characteristic of privation is the sign of the one who is in Kamaloca. However, the astral plane is not alone Kamaloca, but is far more comprehensive. Nevertheless, a human being who has lived only in the physical world and experienced solely its contents would never be able to experience the other parts of the astral world—whether after death or through other means—unless the soul had prepared itself. It can experience the astral world in no other way than through deprivation! One who comes up into the higher worlds and knows: “I am deprived of this or that and there is no prospect of supporting it,” experiences the consciousness of the astral world. Even if such a one had been able through occult means to enter the astral plane out of the body, he or she would always have to suffer privation there.

Now, how can one so develop and perfect oneself that one learns to know not only the part expressed in privation, the phase of feeling a lack, but that one experienced the astral world in the best sense—the part that is really brought to expression in the good, the best sense? A human soul can come into the other part of the astral world through the development of that which is the counterpart of deprivation! Therefore, the methods that awaken the forces in a human being that are opposed to privation will be the ones that will bring the soul into the other part of the astral world. These are the forces of renunciation. Just as privation can be conceived in manifold nuances, so, too, can renunciation. With the smallest renunciation that we take upon us, we make a step forwards in the sense that we evolve upwards to the good side of the astral world on the path of sacrifice.

When one renounces the most insignificant thing, it is an inculcation of something that contributes essentially to experiencing the good side of the astral world. Hence, in occult traditions so much weight is laid on the test carried out by the pupil of denying oneself this or that, the exercise of renouncing. Through this, the pupil gains entry into the good side of the astral world.

What is brought about in this way? Let us first remember the experiences in Kamaloca. Let us think that someone leaves the physical body, either through death or in some other way; then the physical instruments of the body are lacking to that person, who thus entirely lacks the power to satisfy some desire. Deprivation is felt, and this arises as an imaginative picture in the astral world. For instance, a red pentagon or a red circle appears. This is nothing but the image of what appears in the soul's field of vision and corresponds to the privation, just as in the physical world an object corresponds to what one experiences in the soul as concept of it. If someone has very low desires, then terrible beasts confront that person when out of the body. These frightful beasts are the symbols for the very debased desires. If one has learnt renunciation, however, then in the moment when through death or initiation one is out of the body, the red circle changes into nothing, because one permeates the red with the feeling of renunciation, and there arises a green circle. In the same way, through the forces of renunciation, the beast will vanish, and a noble image of the astral world will appear.

So what is given to one objectively—the red circle or horrible animal—he or she must change into its opposite through the developed forces of renunciation and resignation. Renunciation conjures out of unknown depths the true forms of the astral world. No one must believe, therefore, that if he or she wants in the true sense to lift oneself up into the astral world, the co-operation of one's soul forces is not necessary. Without this, one would attain to only one part of that world. Renunciation is essential—even all Imagination. One who gives up claims and renounces—this is what conjures forth the true form of the astral world.

In Devachan, one has Inspiration. And here, too, there is an inner difference for the parts of Devachan, which the soul cannot experience passively when experiencing them after death. Through a certain universal relationship, so much harm has not yet been done in Devachan; the astral world has the fearful Kamaloca in it, but Devachan has not that yet. That will first come about in the Jupiter and Venus conditions, when through the use of black magic and the like, a decadence will have set in. Then, in Devachan, an element will develop similar to what exists today in the astral world. Here, in Devachan in the present cycle of evolution, the situation is somewhat different. What first appears before a human being ascending on the path of knowledge from the astral world to Devachan, or when as a simple human being one is led there after death—what does such a one experience in Devachan? Bliss is experienced! That which changes from the color-nuances into tones—that under all circumstances is bliss. At the present stage of evolution, all in Devachan is a bringing forth, production, and in respect of knowledge, a spiritual hearing. And all producing is blissfulness; blissfulness is all-hearing of the sphere-harmony! The human being in Devachan will experience pure bliss—nothing but bliss.

When a human being is led upwards through the methods of spiritual knowledge, through the leaders of human evolution, the Masters of Wisdom and the Harmony of Feelings, or in the case of the ordinary human being after death, such a one will always experience bliss there. That is what the initiate must experience when he or she has come so far on the path of knowledge. But it lies in the future evolution of the world that it may not remain at mere bliss. That would signify an enhancement of the most refined egotism; the human individuality would always take into itself the warmth of bliss, but the world would not progress. In this way, beings would be developed who would harden in their souls. For the welfare and progress of the world, therefore, it must be possible for someone who through exercises enters Devachan, not only to experience all nuances of bliss in the sphere-music, but must also develop in oneself the feeling of the opposite of bliss. Just as renunciation is the counterpart of deprivation, so is the feeling of sacrifice related to bliss: sacrifice that is ready to pour out what is received as bliss—to let it flow out into the world.

Those divine Spirits, whom we call the Thrones, had the feeling of self-sacrifice when they began to play their part in the Creation. When they poured out on Saturn their own substance, they sacrificed themselves for the newly-arising humanity. What we have today as substance is the same as they streamed out on Saturn. And in the same way, the Spirits of Wisdom sacrificed themselves on the Old Sun. These divine Spirits have ascended into the higher worlds; they have taken in the experiences of bliss not only passively, but by passing through Devachan they have learnt to sacrifice themselves. They have not become poorer through the offering, but richer. Only a being living entirely in materiality, thinks that it loses itself through sacrifice; no, a higher, richer development is linked with sacrifice in the service of universal evolution.

So we see that the human being ascends to Imagination and Inspiration and enters that sphere where the whole being is permeated with ever-new nuances of bliss, where the soul experiences everything around it, in such a way that everything not only speaks to the soul, but that all around the soul becomes an absorption of the spiritual tones of bliss.

The ascent to the higher powers of knowledge is attained through the transformation of one's whole life of feeling. And occult training has this sole purpose: that through the rules and methods that have been given us by the Masters of Wisdom and of the Harmony of Feelings, and which have been proved and tested for thousands of years, the human being's feeling and will are so transformed that he or she may be led up to higher knowledge and experience. When pupils gradually develop and transform the content of their feeling and will through occult methods, they attain to these higher faculties.

It should not be a matter of indifference to one who is within the Movement of Spiritual Science whether he or she has belonged to it for three or six or seven years. That has a definite significance. The feeling of a shared experience of this inner growth through its inner law must become real to the student. We must direct our attention to it; otherwise, its effects pass us by.

It is often said, and rightly so, that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science will only attract the attention of the right people when it is able to engage with philosophical matters. Until it does so, it will make an amateurish impression on philosophers, and until then people will also say that the followers of this spiritual science are only followers of it because they lack a thorough philosophical education.

It would be quite hopeless to wait until a sufficiently large number of people with a philosophical education would realize that spiritual science is something that lifts even the most philosophical person far above mere philosophy. But since we cannot afford to wait for the spiritual-scientific movement, and must give spiritual science to the public as this public is capable of receiving and grasping it, even without the individual members of this public having received any particular philosophical training, if we is generally compelled to do so, it must be strictly emphasized that in the field of anthroposophy there is nothing that cannot be discussed in the strictest sense with what is necessary and right in the field of philosophy. And even if I am not in a position to give philosophical considerations due to the general direction of the theosophical movement, I would still like to use this short hour to draw the attention of those who have studied philosophical matters to some philosophical points of view. And I ask you to take this as something that falls completely outside the scope of the other anthroposophical considerations, as something that is purely a single philosophical consideration. You may find some of the things that need to be discussed difficult. But don't worry if you have to sit through a short hour of difficult and not-so-heartfelt reflections here. In any case, you can be sure that it will be extremely useful for you to establish the foundations of spiritual-scientific truths. You will find again and again, when you take in real philosophical thinking, that this philosophical way of thinking will not only greatly facilitate your understanding of spiritual science in general, but also of what is called “esoteric development”. So today's purely philosophical reflection is to be quite out of the ordinary.

You should not regard philosophy as something absolute. Philosophy is something that has only emerged in the course of human development, and we can easily state the hour of its birth, for this is more or less correctly stated in every history of philosophy. In recent times, some have objected to the fact that every history of philosophy begins with Thales, that is, with the first appearance of philosophy in Greece; and it has been thought that philosophy could be traced back beyond that time. This is not correct. What can justifiably be called “philosophy” actually begins with Greek philosophy. Oriental wisdom and knowledge are not what should properly be called “philosophy”. If we disregard the great philosophical intuitions, as they appear in a different way in Heraclitus, Thales, and later in Socrates, and go straight to philosophy as it presents itself to us in a closed world-building, in a closed structure of thought, then Pythagoras is not the first philosopher. For Pythagoras is, in a certain respect, still an intuitive seer who, although he often expresses what he has to say in philosophical forms, is not a philosophical system in the true sense of the word, any more than the Platonic system is. A philosophical system in the true sense of the word is only the great system - as a philosophical system - that Aristotle built up in the 4th century BC. We must first orient ourselves on these things.

If Aristotle is called the first philosopher and Plato is still regarded as a half-seer, it is because Aristotle is the first who has to draw solely from the source of philosophy, namely from the source of thinking in concepts. Of course, all this had been prepared for a long time; it was not as if he had to create all the concepts himself; his predecessors had done considerable preparatory work for him in this regard. But in truth, Aristotle is the first to give precisely that which, for example, was the subject of the mysteries, not in the old seer form, but in the conceptual form. And so, anyone who wants to orient themselves in philosophy will have to go back to Aristotle. In him, he will find all the concepts that have been gained from other sources of knowledge in earlier times, but he will find them processed and worked up into a conceptual system. Above all, it is in Aristotle that we must seek the starting point of a - let us call it 'science' - a science that did not exist in this form within the development of mankind and could not have come into being. Anyone who can follow the development of humanity in this way, with the means of spiritual science, knows that before Aristotle – of course this is all to be understood with the famous Gran Salz – an Aristotelian logic was not conceivable in this way, because only Aristotle created a corresponding thinking technique, a logic. As long as higher wisdom was imparted directly in the mysteries, there was no need for logic. In a certain way, Aristotle is also the unrivaled master of logic. Despite all the efforts of the 19th century, logic has basically not made much progress in all essential points beyond what Aristotle has already given.

It would take us too far afield today to point out the reasons why philosophy could only enter into humanity at this time, in the time of Aristotle. Through anthroposophy, it will gradually become clear to many why a very specific age was necessary for the foundation of philosophy.

We then see how Aristotle is the leading philosopher for a long time and, with brief interruptions - which seem more like interruptions to today's people than they really were - remains so until today. All those who are active in other fields, let us say in Gnosticism, Platonism, or in the church teachings of early Christianity, they processed the Aristotelian arts of thought. And in a wonderful way, what Aristotle gave to humanity as the formal element of thinking also spread in the West, where what the Church had to say was more or less clothed in the forms that Aristotle had given in his thinking technique. Even though in the first centuries of the spread of Christianity, Aristotle's philosophy was still disseminated in the West in a very deficient form, this is essentially because the writings of Aristotle were not available in the original language. But people thought in terms of the thinking technique developed by Aristotle.

In a different way, Aristotle found acceptance in the East, only to come to the West again via the Arabs. Thus Aristotle found his way into the West in two ways: firstly through the Christian current and secondly through the current that gradually flowed into the culture of the West through the Arabs.

It was during this period that there was a great interest in Aristotle's thinking, which represents the actual high point in medieval philosophy, namely the first form of what is called “scholasticism”, specifically “early scholasticism”. Scholasticism essentially existed to be a philosophy of Christianity. It was compelled for two reasons to take up Aristotle: firstly, out of the old traditions, because one was accustomed to knowing Aristotle in the first place; even the Platonists and Neoplatonists were more Platonists in content; in their thought technique, they were often Aristotelian. But there was another reason why scholasticism had to rely on Aristotle, namely because scholasticism was compelled to take a stand against the influence of Arabism and thus against Oriental mysticism, so that in the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries we find scholasticism philosophically justifying Christianity in the face of the Arab world of ideas. The Arab scholars came with their wonderfully honed Aristotelian knowledge and tried to attack Christianity from a variety of positions. If one wanted to defend Christianity, one had to show that the Arabs were using the instruments they were using in an incorrect way. The point was that the Arabs gave themselves the appearance that only they alone had the correct way of thinking of Aristotle and therefore directed their attacks against Christianity from this correct way of thinking of Aristotle. In the interpretation of the Arabs, it appeared as if anyone who stood on the ground of Aristotle must necessarily be an opponent of Christianity.

The philosophy of Thomas Aquinas arose in the face of this endeavor. His aim was to show that if one understands Aristotle correctly, one can use Aristotelian thought to justify Christianity. Thus, on the one hand, there was the tradition of proceeding in Aristotelian thought technique, on the other hand, the necessity to handle this very technique of Aristotle in the right way against the onslaught of Arabism, which was expressed in the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas.

Thus we find a peculiar synthesis of Aristotelian thought in what constitutes the essence of scholastic philosophy in its early days, a philosophy that was much maligned but is little understood today. Very soon, then, the time came when scholastic philosophy was no longer understood. And then all kinds of scholastic aberrations occurred, for example the one that is usually referred to as the school of thought called “nominalism”, while early scholasticism was “realism”. It is due to this nominalism that scholasticism soon outlived itself and fell into disrepute and obscurity. In a sense, nominalism is the father of all modern skepticism.

It is a strange tangle of philosophical currents that we see emerging in our more recent times, all of which basically flow against scholasticism. We still see some minds that stand firmly and firmly in the Aristotelian technique of thought, but which are no longer completely protected against the onslaught of modernity. Nicholas of Cusa is one of them.

But then we see how the last thing that can be saved from this philosophical-methodical basis is to save Cartesius. And on the other hand, we see how all the good elements of Arabism - that kind of philosophy that combined more Western-Oriental vision with Aristotelianism - have intertwined with that technique of thought that we call “Kabbalistic”. Among the representatives of this trend is Spinoza, who cannot be understood otherwise than by linking him, on the one hand, to Western Orientalism and, on the other, to Kabbalism. All other talk about Spinoza is talk in which one has no solid ground under one's feet.

But then “empiricism” spread with a vengeance, especially under the aegis of Locke and Hume. And then we see how philosophy finds itself increasingly confronted with purely external material research - natural science - and how it gradually retreats before this kind of research. We then see how philosophy becomes entangled in a web from which it can hardly extricate itself. This is an important point where the philosophy of modern times gets caught, namely with Kant! And we see in the post-Kantian period how great philosophers appear, such as Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, who appear like a kind of meteor, but who are least understood by their own people. And we see how a brief, strange wrangling over ideas takes place in order to escape from the net in which Kantianism has caught the philosophers, how impossible it is for philosophy to escape from it, and how German thought in particular suffers from Kantianism in its most diverse variations, and how even all the beautiful and great attempts that are made suffer from Kantianism. Thus we see a deficiency appear in all of modern philosophy that has two sources: One is evident in the fact that at our philosophy chairs, which believe they have more or less freed themselves from Kantianism, people are still floundering in Kant's snares; the other is evident in the fact that philosophy suffers from a certain impossibility of asserting its position, which it should defend as philosophy, against the very short-sighted natural science.

Not until our philosophy has freed itself from the nets of Kantianism and from all that causes philosophy to stop in the face of the onslaught of natural science, not until our better-intentioned elements recognize how they can get over these two obstacles that stand in their way, can any salvation on the philosophical field be expected. Therefore, the philosophical field, especially within Germany, presents a truly sad picture, and it is highly distressing to see, for example, how psychology is gradually receding, how, for example, people who are actually incapable of doing anything other than processing elementary things a little in a philosophical way, but who do not get beyond certain trivialities, have a huge reputation, like Wundt, for example. On the other hand, it must be seen that minds such as Fechner's - who could be stimulating if people had an appreciation for it - are regarded by those who are pure dilettantes as a new Messiah. This was bound to happen and is not meant as criticism.

I would now like to start from a concept that is so closely related to the web in which philosophy has become entangled since Kant, which is the fundamental evil of the philosophical mind, an evil that can be characterized by the words: “philosophy has fallen prey to subjectivism!”

If we want to understand Kant, we must first understand him historically. Kant's view is actually born entirely out of the developmental history of human thought. Those who know Kant better are aware that the Kant of the 1750s and 1760s was completely absorbed in what was the most common philosophy in Germany at the time, which was called the Enlightenment philosophy of Wolf. In its external form, it was often a jumble of empty phrases, but its spirit was partly still borrowed from the old Leibnizianism. But let us concern ourselves here with a brief characterization of Wolffianism. We can say that for Wolffianism, the world view is divided into two truths: firstly, that of external observation and what man can gain from it; secondly, that which man can gain through pure thinking: 'a priori'. Thus there was also a physics - an astronomy, a cosmology - that was gained from the consideration of facts, and a rational physics - a rational astronomy - that was gained by pure thinking. Wolff was aware that human thinking, without taking any experience into account, could construct knowledge about the nature of the world purely rationally, out of itself. This was knowledge from pure reason, “a priori”, while “a posteriori” was knowledge that was gained from the senses, from mere understanding, from experience. Likewise, for Wolff there were two psychologies, one in which the soul observed itself, and the other, the rational psychology. And in the same way, Wolff distinguished between a natural theology based on revelation, on what has come down to us as revealed truth and is present as the supersensible in religious creeds; from this he distinguished rational theology, which could be derived from pure reason - a priori - and which, for example, draws the proofs of the existence of God from pure reason.

Thus, all knowledge of the time was divided into that which was derived from pure reason and that which was derived from pure experience. Those who stood on this ground studied at all universities at that time. Kant was also one of them, even though he went beyond them, as can be seen from one of his writings entitled: “On the Concept of Introducing the Negative into the World”. Then he became acquainted with the English skeptic Hume and thus became familiar with that form of skepticism that has a shattering effect on all rational knowledge, especially on the view of universal apriority, the law of causality. Hume says: There is nothing that can be gained by any a priori form of thinking. It is simply a habit of man to think that every fact is to be understood as the effect of a cause. And so the whole rational structure is something that one has become accustomed to. For Kant, who found something plausible in Hume, the ground was thus removed for Wolffian rationalism, so that he said to himself that only knowledge from experience is possible.

Kant then found himself in a very strange situation. His whole feeling and perception resisted the assumption that there was actually nothing absolutely certain. If you were to go along with Hume completely, you would have to say: Yes, we have seen that the sun rises in the morning and warms the stones, and we have concluded from all the cases that the sun rose in the morning and warmed the stones that there is a certain causal connection in this; but there is no necessity at all that this conclusion is an absolute truth. That is Hume's view. Kant did not want to abandon the absolute truth. It was also clear to him that no a priori statement is possible without experience. He therefore turned this last sentence around and said: Certainly, it is true that man cannot arrive at anything without experience; but does knowledge really come from experience? No, said Kant, there are mathematical judgments that are quite independent of experience. If mathematical judgments were derived from experience, we could only say that they have proved true so far, but we do not know whether they are correct. Kant added: The fact that we can make judgments like mathematical ones depends on the organization of the subject at the moment we make these judgments; we cannot think differently than the laws of mathematics are, therefore all experience must conform to the realm of mathematical lawfulness. So we have a world around us that we create according to the categories of our thinking and our experiences. We begin with experience, but this has only to do with our organization. We spread out the network of our organization, capture the material of experience according to the categories of perception and understanding of our subjective organization, and basically see a world picture that we have spun according to its form. [Gap in the postscript.]

Since Kant, philosophy has become ensnared in this subjectivism – except to a certain extent in Fichte, Schelling and Hegel – in this subjectivism, which states that man has something to do with things only insofar as they make an impression on him. More and more has been attributed to Kantianism. Even Schopenhauer, who in his “World as Will and Representation” really goes beyond Kant, but also others to a much greater extent, have only understood this Kantianism to mean that the “thing in itself” is completely inaccessible to human knowledge, whereas everything that occurs in man - from the first sensory impression to the processing of impressions as knowledge - is merely an effect on the subject.

You see that man is then basically cut off from everything objective, only wrapped up in his subjectivity. “Our world is not a world of things, only a world of ideas,” says Schopenhauer. The thing is something that lies beyond the subject. The moment we know something, what we have before us is already our idea. The thing lies beyond the subject, in the trans-subjective. The world is my idea and I only move within my ideas. That is the net in which philosophy has caught itself and you can find it spread over the whole thinking of the nineteenth century. And this thinking could not lead to anything else in the field of psychology either, except to understand that which is given to us as something subjective. This is even noticeable in the individual sciences. Consider the teachings of Helmholtz. Helmholtz says: That which is given to us is no longer just an image, but only a sign of the real image; man must never claim that what he perceives has a similarity to reality.

The whole development of subjectivism in the nineteenth century is an example of how people can lose their impartiality once they are wrapped up in a thought. Eduard von Hartmann's “Transcendental Realism” is an example of this. It was impossible to talk to Eduard von Hartmann about the fact that perhaps the world could not just be “my imagination”. He had become so wrapped up in this theory that it was hardly possible to discuss an epistemological question with him objectively. He could not get beyond this definition “the world is my imagination”.

Anyone who is fair will not deny that this subjectivism, which lies in the sentence “the world is my imagination”, has something tremendously seductive about it. If you look at it from the subject's point of view, you will say that if we want to recognize something, we must always be active. From the first sensation to the last generation of the point in our field of vision that means “red”, we must be active. If it were not for the way our eyes are organized, “red” could never appear in our eyes. So that when you survey the field of experience, you have the activity of the subject in the experiences, and that therefore everything within your knowledge, viewed from the subject, is produced by yourself. This is in a certain way very significant, that man must be active, down to the last detail, if he wants to recognize. The subjectivity of the human being touches on the “thing in itself”; wherever it touches, it experiences an affection; you only ever experience a modification of your own powers. So you spin yourself in; you do not go beyond the surface of the “thing in itself”. All you could achieve is to say: My own activity always pushes against the surface of the 'thing in itself', and everywhere I feel only my own activity.

I would like to give you an image. This image is one that none of the subjectively oriented philosophers has really thought through. For if they did, they would find in this image the possibility of getting out of subjectivity.

You have a sheet of paper, drip liquid sealing wax on it and now press a seal into the sealing wax. Now I ask you: What has happened here? On the seal there should be a name, let us say “Miller”. When you have pressed it, what is in the seal is absolutely identical to what is in the sealing wax. If you go through all the sealing wax, you will not find the slightest atom that has come from the seal into the sealing wax. The two touch each other, and then the name “Miller” appears. Imagine that the sealing wax were a cognizant being and would say, “I am sealing wax through and through; that is my property, to be sealing wax. Out there, the seal is a ‘thing in itself’; not the slightest part of this ‘thing in itself’ can get into me.” The substance of the brass remains completely outside; and yet, if you remove the seal, the name “Müller”, on which it depends, is absolutely correct for the sealing wax. But you cannot say that the sealing wax has produced the name “Müller”. The name “Müller” would never have come about if there had not been a touch.

If only sealing wax could talk and say, “This imprint is only subjective!” – That is basically what all Kantians conclude; only they do so in such convoluted thoughts that the simple person can no longer recognize the error in such something simple.

Now, however, the seal impression completely matches the name engraved in the seal, which is what matters here, apart from the mirror image, which is not considered here. Therefore, the impression and imprint can be considered identical, at least with regard to the essential, the name “Müller”. It is exactly the same with the impressions we receive from the outside world: they are identical with the way in which things exist outside, that is to say, in relation to the essential in both.

Now, the sealing-wax could still say: “I do not get to know brass after all.” But that would mean that what contains the name “Miller” would also be recognized in terms of its material nature. But that is not the point. You have to distinguish between refuting Kantianism – if we follow this example to its conclusion, Kantianism is absolutely refuted – and completely transcending subjectivism. And that raises the question of whether we can now also find the other thing, which is neither in the nature of the sealing wax nor in that of the brass, which is above both and will be a synthesis between objectivism and subjectivism? For merely refuting Kantianism is not enough.

If we want to answer this question, we have to delve a little deeper into the problems. The fact that recent philosophy has not been able to make any headway in this area is due to the fact that it has lost touch with a real technique of thinking. Our question now is this: Is there anything in man that can be experienced that is not subjective? Or does only that live in man that cannot go beyond subjectivity?

If humanity had been able to follow the straight path from Aristotle, it would never have been entangled in the web of Kantianism. The straight path – without the break in the Middle Ages – would have led to the realization that there is a supersubjective reality above the subjective. Mankind did not progress in a straight line from Aristotle, but rather took a detour, and this deviation already began in the later scholasticism due to the emergence of nominalism. It then rolled further and further down this wrong path until it finally found itself entangled in a formal net with Kant. To get out of this impasse, we have to go back to Aristotle and ask ourselves: Is there nothing that goes beyond the merely subjective, that is, so to speak, subjective-objective?

Let us consider how Aristotle treats cognition. He distinguishes between cognition through the “sense” and cognition through the “mind”. Cognition through the sense is directed towards the individual sensual thing, cognition through the mind is directed towards making a distinction between “matter” and “form”. And Aristotle understands “form” to mean a great deal. Mankind would first have to be made aware of Aristotle's concept of form in the right way. An old friend of mine in Vienna always made this clear to his students using one example. Matter is basically not the essence of a thing, but the essence of a thing for our minds is the “form”.

If we want to make this distinction correctly in the sense of Aristotle, then we must say: All wolves are based on the species from which they “sprang”, which transformed matter into wolves. And the human soul represents the wolves in the concept, so that the generic concept in the human soul is for Aristotle what is represented in the soul, what the species is. How man recognizes the genus in the generic concept depends entirely on him, but not the reality of the genus.

Thus we have a union between what is only in the soul, the concept, and what is in the realm of the trans-subjective or the genus. This is absolute realism, without falling into the error of Plato, who subjectivized the species and regarded them as a kind of trans-subjective powers. He grasps the concept of the species again as the essence in itself, whereas the concept is only the expression of the soul for the transcendental reality “species”.

From here we then come to the task of early scholasticism, which of course had the very special task of justifying Christianity. Here, however, we will only deal with the epistemological basis of early scholasticism in a few words. It is initially based entirely on the fact that man knows nothing but his ideas. It is true that we know through ideas, but what we imagine is not “the idea” but the object of the idea. The “representation” is an impression in the subject, and need not be more. Now it is important that you understand the relationship between subject and object in the early scholastic sense. Everything that is recognized depends entirely on the form of the human mind. Nothing can enter or leave the soul that does not come from the organization of that soul itself. But that which originally underlies the work of the soul comes about through the soul's contact with the object. And it is the subject's contact with the object that makes the idea possible. This is why early scholasticism said that man does not present his ideas, but that his ideas represent the thing to him. If you want to grasp the content of the idea, you have to look for the content of the idea in the thing.

However, this example shows that in order to absorb the scholastic concepts, one needs a keen mind and a fine distinction, which are usually lacking in those who simply condemn scholasticism. You have to get involved with such sentences: “I present” or “My ideas represent a content, and that comes from the object”. Modern man wants to get straight down to the nitty-gritty with all the concepts, as they arise for him out of trivial life. That is why the scholastics all appear to him to be school foxes. In a sense, they are, because they have just seen to it that man first learned something: a discipline of thinking technique. The thinking technique of the scholastics is one of the strictest that has ever occurred in humanity.

Thus, in all that man cognizes, we have a web of concepts that the soul acquires from the objects. There is a fine scholastic definition: in everything that man has in his soul in this way, in the representations and concepts, the object represented by the same exists in the manner of the soul. “In the cognized, the objective exists in the manner of the soul.” Down to the last detail, everything is the work of the soul. The soul has indeed represented everything in its own way within itself, but at the same time the object is connected with it.

Now the question is this: How do we get out of subjectivism today? By taking the straight path from Aristotle, we would have got beyond subjectivism. But for profound reasons, this straight path could not be followed. The early days of Christianity could not immediately produce the highest form of knowledge through thinking. In the first centuries, something else lived in the souls, which prevented scholasticism from [gap in the transcription] rising above subjectivity.

We can easily understand how to get beyond subjectivism if, in the manner of the scholastics, we understand the difference between concept and representation. What is this difference? It is easiest to understand this using a circle as an example. We can gain the representation of a circle by taking a boat out to sea to a point where we see the vault of heaven on the horizon all around us. There we have gained the idea of the circle. We can also gain the idea of the circle if we tie a stone to a thread and swing it around. Or, even cruder, we can get this idea from a wagon wheel. There you have the circle everywhere in the life of ideas. Now there is another way to get the circle, the way in which you get the circle through purely inner construction, by saying: the circle is a curved line in which every point is the same distance from a center. - You have constructed this concept yourself, but in doing so you have not described yourself.

You can gain the idea through experience, you can get the concept through inner construction. The idea still has to do with subject and object. At the moment when a person constructs internally, the subject and object are irrelevant to what he has constructed internally. Whether you really construct a circle is absolutely irrelevant to the nature of the circle. The nature of the circle, insofar as we come to it through internal construction, is beyond subject and object.

Now, however, modern man does not have much that he can construct in this way. Goethe tried to create such [inner constructions for higher areas of natural existence as well. In doing so, he came up with his “archetypes”, his “archetypal phenomena”].

In such an inner construction, the subject rises above itself, it goes beyond subjectivity. To return to the image - the sealing wax, as it were, into the matter of the seal.

Only in such pure, sensuality-free thinking does the subject merge with its object. This high level could not be attained immediately. Man had to pass through an intermediate stage first. Up to a certain point in time man worked directly out of the spiritual world; he did not think for himself, but received everything from the Mysteries. Thought only arose at a certain time. Therefore, logic was only developed at a certain time. The possibility of developing pure, sensuality-free thinking was only attained at a certain stage of development. This type was already attained, potentially, in the nineteenth century in minds such as Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. And we have to develop it further in the more intimate areas through spiritual science. Spiritual research is to be re-founded on pure, sensuality-free thinking, as it has been lived and expressed, for example, in the Rosicrucian schools. In earlier times of human development, people were initiated into the deeper secrets of existence by initiates. Now they must train themselves to gradually work out these things for themselves. In the meantime, it was important to maintain the connection with the divine world. In order for Christianity to mature calmly, the knowledge of the supersensible had to be withdrawn from human research for a certain period of time. People should learn to believe, even without knowing. Therefore, for a time, Christianity relied on mere belief. People were to let the idea mature quietly. Hence we have the coexistence of faith and knowledge in scholasticism. In scholasticism, the concept only wants to provide a firm support for what, with regard to supersensible objects, should be left for a certain period to what has been imparted to it through revelation. This is the standpoint of scholasticism: to keep the things of revelation aloof from criticism until man's thinking has matured. The foster-father who gave thinking its technique was Aristotle. But this thinking should first be trained on firm points of support in outer reality.

Today it is a matter of understanding the spirit of scholasticism in contrast to what dogma is. This spirit can only be recognized in the fact that what was beyond the power of judgment remained the subject of supersensible revelation, while the consequence of rational knowledge was that man himself should arrive at productive concepts, at that which is imperishable in them, through the world of sensual experience. This method of constructing concepts was to remain - and it is precisely this method that modern philosophy has completely lost. Nominalism has conquered modern philosophy by saying: the concepts that are formed according to the nature of the soul are mere names. The connection with the real had been completely lost because the instrument of those who no longer properly understood scholasticism had become blunt. Early scholasticism wanted to sharpen thinking on the thread of experience [for the supersensible-real]. But then came others who clung to the documents of experience, whereas reason was only to be trained on them. And then came the current that said: Forever must the supersensible be withdrawn from all human rational knowledge! - And according to Luther's saying, reason is “the stone-blind, the deaf, the mad fool”.

Here we see the starting point of that great conflict between what could be known and what could be believed; and Kantianism arose from this one-sided, nominalistic school of thought only in a mysterious way. For basically, all Kant wanted was to show that Reason, when left to its own devices, is nothing but a “stone-blind, deaf, and crazy fool.” When reason presumes to transgress the boundaries it itself has laid down in [...] [... gap in the transcription], then it is the “blind fool.” In the one-sided development of [nominalistic] thinking, we see the web in which Kantianism has spun itself maturing. Knowledge is tied to external experience, which is now even prescribed the limits. And faith [gap in the postscript].

It is a task that only anthroposophically oriented spiritual science will be able to accomplish: to get philosophy back on the right track.