The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Yesterday we brought our observations on the characteristics of imaginative knowledge to a certain point of view and emphasized that everything that a person consciously brings into their consciousness through imaginative knowledge is actually already within them. I have used the comparison that in a dark room there are various objects, or for that matter people, which cannot be seen with the physical eyes in a dark room. Then one enters with a light, and everything inside is illuminated; nothing is new in it, everything was already there before. The only difference is that the things are seen and perceived afterwards, and not before. It is the same with what imaginative knowledge presents to us. Everything that imaginative knowledge brings to consciousness is present in man, reigns and works in man down there in the hidden depths of the soul; it belongs to what lives and moves in man. And what is especially important for man on the physical plane is that he is continually increased or diminished in his powers in some way through what he absorbs, experiences and lets sink down from his imaginative life into the depths of consciousness.

I shall have more to say to you on this subject on a later occasion, for the process is very incompletely characterized when one says: Here [it is drawn] is the threshold of consciousness; here is an idea that sinks down into the subconscious and is now down there like a living being. As I said, the process is quite incompletely described. But we want to ascend slowly and gradually to the true facts in this area.

What I want to say today is that we are becoming aware of how these imaginative cognitive facts are, of course, - as you can see from the discussion - thoroughly and deeply connected with all the conditions of human life, even on the physical plane from birth to death. But they belong to the unconscious or subconscious conditions of life. So that from what we have considered, we can also gain the important truth that man, as he lives on earth, is dependent on conditions that do not enter into the bright day-consciousness that we have from birth to death, except when we sleep. So we are dependent on life factors that cannot be known with ordinary normal consciousness.

But from the way I have presented it, these life factors that prevail down there – and we said yesterday, in the etheric body – are still quite close to the person, so close that, because they are related, they connect with what the person continually lets sink down from his world of ideas. For man can, so to speak, when he transforms his thoughts into memories, transform his thoughts himself into the substance that is down there in the subconscious. It is, after all, substantively quite the same as what we think. When what we think is down there, it is just as much a seething, swirling world as what lives and moves down there, which is basically a living thought life. But this is the etheric body, which has come into the etheric body from the cosmos. And because it is related to our conscious thought life, it is still very close to the human being. And just as it lives and moves in us today in our unconscious, so it was basically fully present during the old moon existence. This [moon thinking] was - if you imagine it as a dream, if you think that it is completely immersed in dream life - generally proceeding as when you dream, but perceive the living weaving of thought in the dream. That is the old moon dweller's concept of the imagination. It is only during our life on earth that we have to make an effort to have thoughts, to form thoughts through our own efforts. The old moon dweller did not form thoughts through his own efforts. He lived in dream images, which were not as dead as our thoughts, but were living, weaving images, forming thoughts.

You can see from what I have described to you that when we immerse ourselves in the imaginative world, we gain something and lose something at the same time. We lose the reassurance of the peaceful earthly experience of thoughts; we no longer have that in our power because thoughts themselves are living inner forces. In ordinary life we feel that we are the masters of our thoughts; we do not have them in the imaginative world; but in return we also grasp a life that is just life. The thoughts we have in physical life are dead; what we grasp there lives and moves. And so it was already during the old moon existence for people, only they had it in dreams, and not consciously. Then, in the evolution on earth, there is an ascent to consciousness. And from the conscious realization of that which was a dream during the old moon existence, imaginative knowledge emerges as the first step from which spiritual-scientific knowledge must be taken. This imaginative knowledge is therefore still very much related to the human being.

Now, I said, one gains something and one loses something. People would agree with the first part, gaining something, but they do not agree with the losing. And from this, countless errors arise; very, very many errors arise from this. You see, it is not so easy if you do not make an effort to imagine what this dream-like imaginative imagining was like during the moon phase. When we live here on earth, it is inconvenient, because of the physical developmental period, to always have to form ideas and thoughts only on the basis of earthly facts. That is precisely the inconvenience of studying. One must really weigh the facts, judge the facts, and connect the facts, and one must slowly work one's way through one's own efforts into the worlds of thought and imagination, which one masters as an earthly human being with an earthly will. Some people find it much more comfortable to have the living world of thought simply handed to them, so that they only need to wait for it: when they receive the 'enlightenment' from it, it enters into their soul life, and they no longer need to develop thoughts. That is how they think, but it does not take them any further than they are. One stands much higher as an earth human than as a moon human, because one has developed further. Compared to the dreamy moon-imagination, the earthman, who combines facts and forms concepts from life experiences with his rational judgment, stands much higher than the moonman and than the one who longs for this moonman existence, which is supposed to consist of illuminations that have not been worked out through thought.

One can have peculiar experiences there. Not that a person, when he sinks back to this moon-like realization, has no thoughts. He has thoughts, but they come by themselves, he does not need to do the work of thinking. That seems rather comfortable. One can experience a certain, very important, specific experience over and over again, which must be considered if one wants to understand these things at all.

There are people who develop a certain visionary clairvoyance. This dream-like imagining, this visionary clairvoyance, always involves a regression to a lunar nature. For real clairvoyance that can be desired for the earth must be based on a higher level, on an even greater development through the world of thought than the recognition of the physical plane. The regression is not an elevation, not a development upwards for the person, but a development downwards, a becoming less intelligent than one is as a normal earth person. And then the strange experience occurs, which one can have again and again. There are people who have a certain visionary clairvoyance, but are not really intelligent at all. Yes, their clairvoyance is almost directly related to the fact that they shun intelligence, that they do not want to develop the intelligence that one has to develop as an earthly human being. It is precisely this attenuation of ordinary earthly intelligence that is very often associated with a certain degree of visionary clairvoyance, which is a lunar atavistic one. And then perhaps the following occurs: Such people can then make notes of their images. These notes are not thoughtless, but interwoven with thoughts - the thoughts come with the images and within them are interwoven spiritual, very spiritual images. And then the puzzle can arise: Yes, there is a person who describes in pictures, in very beautiful pictures, Atlantis or other things that come to him in a visionary way, and that is absolutely logically intelligent. But I never perceived such intelligent logic in that person when he was supposed to explain things of the physical plane; then he does not have it. He has not become enough of an earth person. But if he is allowed to fall back into lunar intelligence, then the intelligence comes. But then it is not his intelligence, then he is merely a medium for the lunar intelligence, then the lunar intelligence works in him. One can receive beautiful descriptions of spiritual worlds from people who have sunk a little back into the lunar stage, and who, when they want to apply their earthly acquired intelligence, cannot themselves understand what they have actually produced, and in most cases do not even want to do so.

I said: In the ascent to imaginative knowledge one must gain something and lose something, and that people usually do not want to lose anything. I also pointed out that people who have spirit do not want to lose it. These are not the people who love visionary clairvoyance, for they are quite willing to lose ordinary intelligence, ordinary thinking. But there is another group that does not want to lose this intelligence. They want to maintain this intelligence as it is on the physical plane, they just do not want to develop it further. They do not want to work on this intelligence so that the person comes to use the concepts more freely than they are used in the processes of the physical plane. And then such people come to allegorizing, to symbolizing, which is after all again only an activity of the physical plane, because it does not further the thinking, but leaves it standing, and then puts outer thought-capes on it from all kinds of exquisite occult things. It is very important to bear that in mind.

And you see, that was already in the consciousness of those who slowly and gradually worked or wanted to work their way up to the points of view that we must have in spiritual science today. Today, in spiritual science, we really must bring humanity something of clear thinking, combined with the possibility of knowing something of spiritual worlds, but in clear, completely clear thinking. It has taken a long time for the possibility to arise – and hopefully it has now – to see through these things in this way. And many people have worked their way through to this. People of such great clarity as Goethe, for example, have come very close to complete clarity. But many have worked their way through to this. Just think how Jakob Böhme wrestled with the transition points of the materialistic age, with the chaotically writhing, moving, whirling and tumbling concepts. He had already had them, but to really work through them so that what emerged is what stands with Jakob Böhme as a profound illumination of some secrets of the spiritual world.

Another person has expressed a wonderful sentence – I would say, as if illuminating the field of vision wonderfully, as dawned on modern times – from which one can see, or at least from what he has otherwise achieved, one can see how he was not able to penetrate with a completely clear view to what spiritual science should be today, but he was still able to come so far as to represent the most important nerve. The man I am talking about realized in the 18th century that if you want to know the human being, you have to penetrate through the darkness, through the confusion of external material knowledge. Even if you are at the first stage of imaginative knowledge, this is necessary. Because we have seen what weaves down there in the depths of the soul, you can't reach that with physical knowledge. You have to penetrate through the darkness. But that is not the only thing you have to do. You also have to penetrate through the confusion of ordinary concepts to knowledge, you also have to dispel these confusions. So you also have to get beyond the ordinary thinking that works on the physical plane.

And then this man coined a very beautiful sentence. The first part of this sentence is readily followed, the second part is almost never followed. But it is important to follow it. You see, most people today who want to become or be mystics in some way or other admit that one must strip away the sensual, the material, that one must strip away the confusions of the material in order to penetrate into the spiritual. But that one must also discard the forms of the spiritual that adhere to conceptual thinking, very few people admit; for they would like to take them with them, would like to manage them in the same way as on the physical plane, would like to find the thought down there in the subconscious as a possibility for remembrance in exactly the same form as it has up there.

But it would be a mistake to believe that the clairvoyant, when he looks into the human mind, finds the thoughts there in exactly the same form as the person who has them in his head. That is not true. Down there they are transformed, they are living entities, an elementary world. The world of thoughts that man has here on the physical plane is not found in the spiritual world. That is why that man coined a beautiful sentence that I want to write down for you, because it can really be seen as a kind of trial in one's own mind: how can one possibly get to know something about the worlds that lie outside the earthly world? He said, [it was written on the board]:

Dissipez vos ténèbres matérielles ei vous trouverez l'Homme

With this part of the sentence: To disperse the material darkness and confusion - people who want to be mystics agree. But people today still hardly understand the second part of the sentence. [It was written on the blackboard]:

Dissipez vos ténèbres spirituelles et vous trouverez Dieu

whereby we have to imagine the whole content of spiritual science for “Dieu”, because that is still colored by religious ideas. Not true, he could not yet find the expression that can be found today.

Now you can surely imagine that when someone reads the sentence today: “Dissipez vos ténèbres matétrielles et vous trouverez l'homme”, they think: Yes, fine, that's how I enter the spiritual world, that's what I want. But when he reads, “Dissipez vos ténèbres spirituelles et vous trouverez Dieu,” he says, “Yes, but what will remain for me then? I will have nothing?”

Yes, what remains there? Precisely that remains, which is the content of today's spiritual science. This is necessary: the content of knowledge of the physical plane, which is usually believed to be the only correct one, must be dispelled just as the material darkness is dispelled. Now notice how this is taken into account in our spiritual science... [space in the transcript].

This sentence is a sentence of the so-called “philosophe inconnu”, of Saint-Martin, who saw himself as a disciple of Jakob Böhme. Thus, we already find in Saint-Martin a deep longing for that which is to come to light in spiritual science. But he calls himself “philosophe inconnu”, unknown philosopher, because what he carried within him remained foreign to those who saw him, of course, saw his nose, saw his hands, heard the words he spoke. The actual philosopher Saint-Martin remained unknown to them, quite unknown.

So, after the discussions we had yesterday, the appropriation of imaginative knowledge is a return, a conscious return to the way in which man had his relationship to the world during the lunar time. So that we can say - you remember, we have already presented this from a different side here in lectures: In man, today, still prevail, but supersensibly, as spiritual-supersensibles, the events, which are not actually normal events on earth, but were normal events during the moon time. He has preserved these moon events; he can fall back in a certain sense. Then he produces knowledge in a completely different way than the earth man can produce such knowledge. He can have visionary clairvoyance, have subdued intelligence and pose the very riddle I spoke of earlier, namely that if one were to induce him to work reasonably scientifically, or even to make reasonable conclusions about the most ordinary, everyday events, he cannot do it, that he does not succeed; but when he writes something out of the vision, even about the events that took place at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, he only writes pictures, remains in the moon life, but still writes terribly cleverly. And what he writes does not match what is otherwise known about the person. So, theoretically he can do nothing, but he writes very cleverly in a mediumistic way, so that one can be amazed at the cleverness. But that is not a further development, that is a regression of the human being. Of course, that does not exclude the possibility that truths can come to light through such a person, because he is, after all, in an earthly existence and connected to the earthly existence and, in addition, has this lively moon life in him.

I have tried to depict the different types of people in the Mystery Dramas, and also to draw a character who falls back into the lunar, who is therefore unintelligent on the physical plane and yet can reveal correct things, who is therefore below the level of the normal earthly human being: that is Theodora. Theodora is a figure who is meant to be a regression into lunar consciousness. That is very clear. I would like to say that it is very clearly indicated there, as it is, by saying at the one point where Theodora appears: “Theodora, a seer. In her, the will element is transformed into naive seership.” Naive seership means, of course, naive visionary. It is a naive seership, and that is how the character is developed. And for this reason, it is also that in the last mystery, Theodora herself can no longer appear, but only her soul, because she cannot go through certain things. These Mystery Dramas should be taken very, very literally. Perhaps some of you will one day realize that hardly anything that has happened here in recent days could not already be read in the Mysteries in some form or other. If one had read it as the things were meant to be read, we would not have needed these confusions.

So let us remember: what is experienced as the imaginative world is still relatively close to the human being. What can be experienced as the inspired world, on the other hand, is much less close to the human being. For when one first enters into the inspired world, it encompasses those facts that did not take place during the moon's existence but already during the old sun's existence and that the human being has also retained. So you penetrate into even greater depths of the human soul when you work your way through to the inspired world. And the inspired world that you encounter first has a certain peculiarity.

You see, when a person works his way through to the imaginative world, he encounters facts that took place during the old moon's existence. If you imagine the old moon in the phases when it was separated from the then sun (you can read about this in “Secret Science”), then at certain times, man lived on this moon that was separated from the sun. And what the human being experienced there is what one encounters first when one returns with the old, dream-like, imaginative clairvoyance. But when one enters the inspired world, then one experiences in the return not a being split off from the sun, but a being directly inside the sun; thus the facts that the human being experienced together with the sun. One experiences truly correct solar facts. And these solar facts, you see, are actually no longer related to man. Because the way man is now, during his earthly existence, if he does not look into the depths of his soul, does not look at what is in the deeply hidden reasons of his soul, he is actually, through what he is on earth, really more of a shell. It is not a real human being, it is more of a shell. First of all, there is the physical form itself, which has been created during the earthly existence as it appears to us on the physical plane. But there are forces at work within it that cannot be seen and that are not even sought by current science.

A friend of ours has been encouraged to search in this direction with the biological material at his disposal. The friend is putting a lot of effort into it and perhaps after some time - such things require a great deal of study - will be able to come up with a way to bridge the gap to these hidden parts of human nature. But for this it is necessary to search out those biological facts that are not taken into account by present-day science, that the present-day researcher, who experiments, leaves lying, as it were. So one has to search through the preparations for what does not interest the other researchers at all, what they leave lying. Of course, a lot is still missing, and a lot of new research has to be done. It is quite possible that it will take many years of work before it can be completed. But it would be an eminently important work because it could show us what can still be achieved by physical science of what lives in human nature from the old moon. It will result in a completely new embryology, a new part, a new side to embryology. It is necessary that this be done. But that is really all; more cannot be found by looking at the human being from the outside. For what can be found today in the human being from the outside is actually not older, not even as old as the oldest time of the old moon existence. But from such research, of which I have just spoken, conclusions can be drawn about processes of the old moon existence. These will correspond with what is described in “Occult Science”. But, as I said, we do not get very far back when we look at human beings as they are today; not even to the beginning of the ancient moon existence, let alone to the ancient sun existence.

If you want to go back to the old solar existence, then you have to take much, much less material in the human being than can be taken in the science I just spoke of. Because what it is about is that something actually penetrates into human nature, which man on earth can bring to revelation, but does not have to bring to revelation. He can, but he does not have to, bring it to revelation. When, for example, an artist or poet is truly inspired, then these inspirations come from the spiritual world of the existence of the sun. They really come from the spiritual world of the existence of the sun. It is just that our time is so terribly poor in spirit that what comes from the inspirations of the existence of the sun is rejected, and people actually only ever want to create in a naturalistic way, to stick to the model, that is to say to the earthly, while what can come from the model is only the material for what one should actually create. The arts that protect the individual artist from becoming attached to the model, from falling back on the material, are architecture and music. Architecture cannot reproduce anything; it often does it quite badly. And music cannot reproduce anything either, because it is not real music if you reproduce bird calls and cat meows, as you reproduce models in painting and so on. In music, only the very highest material of sound can be used. But it should be the same in every art. Just as much as the musician takes from music, the painter must take from the model. What the tones are for the musician, the form and color must be for the painter. The model should not give him more than the material. So the artistic cannot be taken from the model, but arises from inspiration, which leads back to the ancient solar existence. Hence the strangeness to the earth of truly great works of art. I said that man can live without artistic inspiration, he can, he can indeed bring it in, but he does not need to bring it in. The Botokude, doesn't he say: Man can also live without art.

But now you can – and those who experience things in a deeper sense will do so sooner or later – you can raise an important, crucial question: Yes, if we have a Saturn existence, a Sun existence, a Moon existence, an Earth existence, all with certain facts, and in imaginative knowledge, to the sun in inspired knowledge, and from this it follows that we return to Saturn in intuitive knowledge; yes, if this is so, that we do not have new facts but return to the old facts, why then does man need further development at all?

Someone might ask this question: Why further development? Why the whole earthly existence, which detaches us from the facts through which we have developed, so that the insights are pushed down into the unconscious, and we must first recognize them again? Why the whole thing?

Yes, you see, it is only through this that we become true human beings, because only through it can we truly perfect our true nature. And this can also be seen outwardly if one really studies those personalities who had something of the flexible concepts, of this conceptual mind, as I have mentioned to you in the examples of Goethe's “Metamorphosis of Plants” and “Metamorphosis of Animals”. Such natures must be studied. And such natures show at the same time that they, when they are completely true to themselves inwardly, stand in a very definite relation to yet another world of the soul. This is especially evident in Goethe. Study “Wilhelm Meister”, study all of Goethe's poetry, and you will find that in his work there is a remarkable way of judging and passing judgment on the world. If you look into these things, you will find that in the same measure as Goethe's idea of metamorphosis develops, so does a truly genuine, magnificent inner soul tolerance. A wonderful tolerance develops in his soul, a remarkable way of relating to the world and to life, a soul tolerance! And this is connected with very deep facts.

You see, if we look at the animal world, this animal world has the most diverse forms. If we compare, for example, the hyena, which has its carrion-craving written all over its face and which carries its nature in its entire posture, with the lion, with the wolf, and if we in turn compare these animals with the eagle and the eagle with the vulture, then these animals in comparison with turtles, snakes, worms, the various insects, if we take all these different animal forms, we must still ask ourselves: How does this relate to the spiritual world?

This can only be studied by studying the old moon existence. Because why? You see, during the old moon existence, man did not yet exist in his present form. The corresponding forms that existed at the human level were the angels. The Angeloi, the angels, had very different judgments and a very different way of thinking [than we have today]. The angels were at the same level back then that people are at today, but they were not in a physical body like the people on earth today. They had a very soft, flexible body, because the spirits of form had not yet been involved in forming a solid body. Now, these angeloi thought in terms that were much more alive compared to our earthly concepts, and this was not during their time on earth but during the time on the moon. These concepts, however, have something very peculiar in addition to their liveliness. They were steeped to a high degree in impulses of feeling. Inspired by the archangels, the archai, the spirits of form, the spirits of movement, and so on upwards, the angels grasped the concepts during the lunar time. But these are living, impulsive concepts; much more impulsive than we find the concepts in today's people, who alternately become either “rapture nickels” or “poison nickels” when they put their emotions into how they judge life. There are such people, and they can be the best of people, but they will alternately be enraptured, enraptured about something, or be quite pronounced “poison nickels”, so that the whole soul is in what they express and the whole goes out in the concepts, doesn't it. Now that was present in a much higher degree - directly creative - in these angels on the moon.

Imagine a moon dweller who thinks in this way! He says to himself: Yes, I must now grasp a concept. Inspiration gives me: Wretched creature, who carries his back rising from behind to the front, who makes a repulsive face out of longing for carrion! - That is how this creature came into being, condemned to be a hyena. The creative concept is there. The forms of the animal kingdom are intimately connected with this creative thinking, which creates according to the principle of good and evil. And the whole animal kingdom in its various forms is such a manifestation of good and evil.

The people [of Earth] were not supposed to learn this. One who did not want to let go of the culture of the moon seduced people into recognizing good and evil in the way he had experienced it during the lunar period. The... [gap in the transcription] judged thus; but people should learn to judge differently. This strong identification of the emotions with the concepts should not go down into deeper psychological levels. That had to be discarded, that had to give way to a more objective, more relaxed form. Therefore man had to progress from lunar to earthly development. And if he continues to progress, he will become even more tolerant. A lunar angel, yes, he hated the hyena in an incredible way because for him it represented evil. He hated the snake, hated everything that was ugly and loved everything that was beautiful. Good and evil belonged to the realm of creative life. Man had to unlearn this. Man could not develop an earth science if he were to classify animals, as the moon angels did, into beautiful and ugly – no, we classify differently, according to objective terms – into decent and indecent animals, into playful, into cunning animals, and so on. The moon angels had all that. But it would not be scientific today, for example, if a learned book were to say: “The weasel - characteristic: cunning.” This may be the case in a satirical poem, but in science today this must be suppressed; it cannot be so today.

So in order to make progress in this field, one must be able to rise to a level at which one regards the animal kingdom without emotion in the same scientific way as one regards the natural world when one has the most intense emotions in one's earthly life. And we can see this in this peculiar distillation of Goethe's mind. For him, human life is to a much greater extent a calm stream, which he observes like natural phenomena. That is precisely the wonderful inner serenity of Goethe's view of life, that for him part of human life also enters into the stream of natural facts. This is how he was able to be so objective.

Now, from this point on, we have to take up the matter again and continue the deliberations tomorrow.

In the last few days I have spoken to you about how the knowledge that human beings acquire on the physical plane as earthly human beings is initially a kind of dead knowledge, a knowledge that relates to what we must call knowledge of the next higher world, like the dead to the living. I have tried to make clear how this dead, as it were mechanical knowledge of the physical man on earth comes to life when we raise ourselves to the level of those steps of knowledge through which man can learn something of the so-called higher worlds.

Dead knowledge! Knowledge today is indeed dead, but as physical knowledge on earth it was not always dead. It only became so. And you all know the time when human knowledge on earth became so dead. I have often spoken to you about how, when we go back to ancient times, to times of the development of the earth before the Mystery of Golgotha had taken place, even ordinary earthly knowledge was more alive because there was a kind of ancient inheritance [of higher knowledge]. There was always something of the ancient inheritance of higher knowledge mixed into ordinary earthly knowledge. You can follow this in the various documents of knowledge and religion of mankind. Just see how in the Bible, in the Old Testament, when the supersensible worlds are mentioned, it is always spoken of either as a dream or as the inspiration of the prophets. There we always have a natural descent from living knowledge. The old atavistic inheritance of clairvoyance, which had remained with them as a lunar legacy, had not yet been extinguished in man. This was extinguished at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha.

I ask you to take this sentence quite literally. Because if any of you repeats this sentence anywhere in such a way that you report that I said that the old atavistic knowledge was extinguished by the mystery of Golgotha, then you are saying the exact opposite of what I have just expressed. At the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, this knowledge had been lost through the entirely natural process of human development, and the Mystery of Golgotha provided a substitute for what had gradually been lost, bringing life into the human soul from a different direction. So that today we are confronted with the following fact: if one goes back into ancient human traditions, one finds all kinds of knowledge even before the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. But in this knowledge, the ancients did not suspect anything of a realization of the Most High, the Most Important for man, but basically it was subordinate things that one believed one recognized in this way. Everything important, everything related to the supersensible worlds, was traced back to an ancient wisdom, to a wisdom that was given to mankind, as it were, through a primeval revelation. That is what you expressed in one of our four mysteries. And it was presented in such a way that this heritage was then passed on from generation to generation in the wisdom schools. In the book “Christianity as Mystical Fact” you will find that we have tried to show how, through the Mystery of Golgotha, a substitute was created for this dying old wisdom, how, as it were, the Primordial Mystery became a historical fact at Golgotha, and how, through the cross of initiation being perceptibly set up at Golgotha for all men, life was to be poured into the human soul. So that one can say since then: There is our dead knowledge, which man gains through his own effort on the physical plane, and there is something in addition to this that flows into his soul through the fact that, through the Mystery of Golgotha, the substantial that was to enter the earth aura through the Christ has flowed into the earth aura, and now flows into the human soul as a second source of human knowledge.

So that one can say: From the spiritual-scientific point of view, the matter must be viewed in such a way that man's physical knowledge of the earth is dead, but that life enters into it when man allows this physical knowledge of the earth to be fertilized by that which the Mystery of Golgotha can be for him. And then we have the next higher level of knowledge, which we call imaginative knowledge. This is now already a living, a truly living thing. And this living realization, this imaginative realization, is about the things that we have discussed in recent days.

As important, I would like to emphasize again today what I already said yesterday, that this imaginative realization is still related to the nature of the human soul. It is a return to the moon age. And it is so akin to the nature of the human soul that, in fact, as I described yesterday, atavistic dream-like moon-knowledge can still emerge in human nature today, and that much of what can be recognized through a higher art of clairvoyance can, so to speak, come together with what comes out through atavism, provided the moon clairvoyant has the necessary modesty.

But beyond this [imaginative knowledge], there is everything that enters the human soul through inspiration. Substantively, these are the facts of the ancient solar evolution, with which the human being was connected. And what man has taken up into himself as an element of life during the old solar development is also preserved down there in the depths of human nature. This must be illuminated by conscious knowledge if inspiration is to occur.

Yesterday I indicated that in real, true art there is an unconscious emergence of these things that belong to the ancient facts of the sun and that man has preserved as hereditary traits; that when this, which is deep in the hidden depths of the soul, is raised up into the conscious life of the soul, it can become conscious to man as artistic inspiration. Man then lives only in the consequences that arise from below; he does not live in the causes. If I had to hint to you that the thought below the threshold of consciousness is very different from the thought we have when we bring something from the subconscious thoughts through the memory back , it must be emphasized that what actually lives in the depths of the artist's soul is even more different, radically different, from what then rises to the artist's consciousness.

Now we have to engrave an idiosyncrasy quite sharply in our minds if we want to understand the whole of inspiration at all. You see, for the person who is touched by inspiration, there is no difference between an objective law of nature and that which he experiences in his soul as a thought, as a soul experience. He feels the law of nature as belonging to him just as he feels that which lives in his own soul as belonging to him. Let me put it this way: When the person who is inspired decides to do something, when he acts on some motive, then there is a lawfulness underlying it. This lawfulness one is initially authorized to feel as a lawfulness of one's own heart, as one's own experience. But one feels it in the same objectivity as one feels the rising of the sun in objectivity. I can also say it this way: when I pick up the watch, I experience it as my affair on the physical plane. In the case of physical knowledge, I will not experience it as my affair when the sun rises in the morning. But with regard to that which really comes from the impulse of the inspired world, one experiences what happens in nature as belonging to oneself.

Human interest truly extends beyond natural affairs. Natural affairs become man's own interests. As long as one does not feel the life of the plant within oneself as intimately as the experiences of one's own heart, there can be no truth in inspiration. As long as you do not feel a falling stone, splashing on the surface of the water and making drops splash up, in the same way as you can feel what is going on in your own being, inspiration is not true. I could also say: Everything in man that is closer to him than nature in its fullness does not belong to the inspired truths. But it would be utter nonsense to believe that if someone were to smash the inspired person's skull, the inspired person would feel this objectively in the same way as he feels the eruption of a volcano. Subjectively, he makes this distinction self-evident; but at that moment, when someone is smashing his skull, he is not an inspiration. But for everything that is in this sense the realm of inspiration, his interest is extended beyond the whole of nature. And I have already pointed out in the Hague Cycle how it is the broadening of interest that is the main thing in the case of extended knowledge. Anyone who cannot detach himself, at least for a short period, from what concerns him alone, cannot, of course, achieve inspiration. He does not always need it; on the contrary, he will do well to sharply distinguish his own interests from those that are to be the subject of his inspiration. But when man extends his interest beyond objectivity, when he tries to feel the life of the plant in its becoming as he feels what is happening in his own life, when what grows and germinates and becomes and passes away out there is as intimately familiar to him as the life within his own being, then he is inspired with regard to everything that comes to him in this way.

But then this way of taking an interest is necessarily linked to a gradual ascent to a way of judging people like the Goethean way of judging people that we have mentioned. Goethe learned to

endeavor [for living thoughts] to distinguish the human being's actions from the human essence. And this is something extremely important! What we do or have done belongs to the objective world, is karma put into action; what we are as a personality is in a state of continuous becoming. And the judgment we pass on anything a person has done must, in principle, be on a completely different level than the judgment we pass on the value or worthlessness of a human personality. If we want to approach the higher worlds, we must learn to face the human personality as objectively as we face a plant or a stone objectively. We must learn to be able to take an interest in the personality of those people who have done deeds that we may have to condemn in the most eminent sense. It is precisely this separation of the human being from his deeds, the separation of the human being from his karma, that one must be able to carry out if one is to be able to gain a right relationship to the higher worlds.

And here, if we truly want to stand on the ground of spiritual science, we must also see that this is one of the cases where we come into sharp opposition to the materialistic thinking of our time. This materialistic thinking of our time has, as a tendency, to draw the personality of man more and more into judging his actions. Just think, in recent times, in the field of external jurisprudence, more and more the tendency has emerged that one must not only pass judgment on a particular act when a person has committed it, but one must also observe the whole of human nature, take into account what the person's soul is like, how he came to do it, whether he is inferior or fully developed, and the like. And certain circles even demand that not only doctors but also psychologists be consulted as experts in the assessment of offenses and crimes by the external judiciary. But it is presumptuous to judge the essence of man instead of deeds, which concern only the external life.

Among the more recent philosophers, only one has paid any attention to this. You will find him mentioned in my “Riddles of Philosophy”, though from a different point of view. It is Dilthey who has pointed out that jurisprudence must in turn free itself from psychological jurisprudence and from everything similar.

What a person does concerns two areas: firstly, his karma. This takes effect of its own accord through its causality and is no concern of other people. Christ Himself did not judge the sin of the adulteress, but wrote it into the ground, because it will be lived out in the course of karma. Secondly, the human deed concerns human coexistence, and only from this point of view is the human deed to be judged. It is not the place of the external social order to judge man as such.

But spiritual science will gradually develop into something other than judgment; it will develop into understanding. And those psychologists who might be called upon today to act as experts when judgments are to be passed on the external deeds of man will be of no use, for they will know nothing of a person's soul. The assessment of a person should not correspond to judgment, but to understanding; because the tendency should be to help, and not to judge, under all circumstances. To help, and not to judge! But one can only help if one has an understanding of what is going on in a human soul.

However, if one tends to help in truth rather than in lies, one will be most misunderstood by the world. For the one who is to be helped will be least inclined to judge the one who wants to help in the right way. The one who is to be helped will want to be helped in the way he thinks best! But that may be the worst help one can give him if one helps him in the way he thinks best himself. An understanding gained on the basis of mental and spiritual life will often lead us to do something quite different for the person we want to help, rather than doing exactly what he or she presumes we should do for them. Perhaps sometimes even withdrawing from such a person will be much better than cajoling; perhaps brusquely rejecting something will be a much better, more loving help than flattering and accommodating oneself to what the person in question wants. Someone who treats him strictly can be much more loving to a person than someone who gives in to him in every way. And of course misunderstanding is inevitable in this field, that is quite natural. Perhaps the one who makes the greatest effort to enter into a person's soul in this way will be most misunderstood. But that is not the point, the important thing is to seek understanding under all circumstances and not to exercise judgment.

In the context of our spiritual-scientific lectures, it was often necessary to speak of Ahriman and Lucifer. Of course, especially after the explanations that have been given recently, one can understand how human nature can be seized more or less strongly by Ahriman and Lucifer. For basically, life is a constant oscillation between Ahrimanic and Luciferic impulses, only that the state of equilibrium is sought by the being of the world itself, and life consists precisely in maintaining this state of equilibrium. But now consider a great, an enormous difference. One can do two things: one can pass judgment, declaring that some deed of a person is influenced by Ahriman or Lucifer, and one can judge the person accordingly. Or one can do the other: one can recognize that a deed of a person is influenced by Ahriman or Lucifer, and one can try to understand the person on the basis of this fact. And between these two judgments lies the greatest conceivable difference. For to pass judgment on the basis that something Ahrimanic or Luciferic is in man requires that one never pass judgment from any other point of view than this: one judges human beings no more by this knowledge, that Ahriman and Lucifer live in man, than one judges any plant because it blossoms red and not blue. The idea that anything in man is Ahrimanic or Luciferic must be excluded from any kind of judgment, just as our judgment must refrain from making any value judgment if we want to recognize the plant, whether it be red or blue.

Above all, we must try to keep our knowledge free of all emotion, of all subjectivity. And we will be able to do this more and more, the more we strive to do so, the more we really strive to take such things, as they have just been expressed, with the utmost seriousness.

Goethe, for example, endeavored, especially in his most mature period, to present events between people as natural phenomena. Of course, not from the point of view that there is a mechanical necessity in human relationships as there is in natural relationships. On the contrary, the position of the human soul in relation to the events of human life gradually becomes such that one regards the events of human life with the same objective love with which one regards natural phenomena. This gives rise to that inner tolerance that arises out of knowledge itself.

But in this way one acquires the possibility of gradually allowing into knowledge that which otherwise may not enter into knowledge at all: namely, the terminology that arises from feeling and will. When I explained psychoanalysis to you, we just concluded on one day that we had to speak a condemning word about it; but we first proved that it followed from the matter itself. And why could this judgment be made? Here one may also express something subjective. Why was I allowed to express what seems to be a completely subjective judgment about psychoanalysis? Because I have endeavored – I am expressing something subjective, but then it is the case that things are perhaps most easily understood – to study psychoanalysis in the way I study something that is very pleasant and very congenial to me. That is to say, to have the same objective love for the one as for the other. And we must gradually struggle through to this, really struggle through; otherwise we seek nothing but sensation in knowledge, seek only what is pleasant in knowledge. But one never has knowledge if one seeks only what is pleasant in knowledge!

For our physical life, the sunlike can never enter the human being's consciousness except by giving him pleasure or repelling him. Only feelings enter from the sunlike, and we must approach the sunlike with our understanding, we must penetrate down into what is otherwise foreign to man. We said that the moonlike is related to man, but the sunlike is no longer related to man. We must bring down, carry down into regions where we would otherwise not penetrate, our understanding, if we want to bring the sunlike of inspiration close to us.

Real knowledge of the higher worlds indeed requires preparation in the whole mood of our soul, and without this mood in our soul we cannot penetrate into the higher worlds. I do not mean merely penetrating clairvoyantly, but also pursuing things with understanding. One cannot understand the things related in Occult Science if one wishes to take them in with the frame of mind one would otherwise have for something outwardly indifferent, I mean for something mathematical or the like; but one can only take them in if one first prepares oneself in one's mind for them. He who wants to absorb the inspired knowledge with the ordinary understanding of the physical plane is like the man who believes he can enter a plant with his physical body and be in it in its life. That is why people have always been prepared before they were given knowledge of the higher worlds, they have always been prepared slowly so that the soul's state was such that this knowledge of the higher worlds could affect the mind in the right way. It had to have this effect on the mind because this peculiar way of relating to the higher world requires a certain strain on the mind, a certain holding together, a gathering of the soul's inner strength. Above all, it requires that one is not wounded, that a certain inner exertion of strength is necessary in order to relate to the knowledge of the higher worlds in the right way.

Therefore, it is necessary for the human being to create a counterweight, a true counterweight, one that allows him, so to speak, to tip the scales in his soul in the other direction. We must look at the matter very carefully.

If you make an effort with your soul – and you have to do that if you really want to grasp the spiritual worlds, even just what is given from the spiritual worlds; you cannot follow a lecture on the spiritual worlds if you don't listen carefully, if you don't make an effort with your soul – if you really try to understand what is said about the spiritual world, you feel that you have to make an effort. One should not be surprised at this. One should not say, yes, that tires me, because it is quite natural to tire! But if it tires one so much, then, as long as we are earth people, a consequence will naturally arise. And this consequence is that selfishness is aroused in man. The more man feels himself in himself, the stronger is his selfishness. Take the most ordinary phenomenon: as long as you go through the world in good health, you are not selfish with regard to the physical body; the moment you become ill, the moment everything hurts, you become selfish with regard to the outer body. That is quite natural. And it is simply nonsense to demand of the sick person that he should not be selfish in relation to his illness. That is simply nonsense. And when someone says, “I may be ill, but I accept my illness selflessly,” that is of course also just a false pretence.

But it is the same when you go through the soul effort that is necessary to work your way up into the higher worlds, to climb up. There you also enter into the selfish. You should not deceive yourself, but should hold the truth before you, especially if you want to penetrate into this world. You have to say to yourself: You are working your way into a mood of selfishness if you want to enter the higher worlds, because you have to feel these efforts within you.

I would like to compare this working into the higher worlds with something. I would like to compare it with a peculiar kind of artistic activity, as it was present in our friend Christian Morgenstern. This certain idiosyncratic manner of his — I have often emphasized it — was different in Morgenstern than in other poets. When he worked his way into the serious, it was different with him than with other poets; it was to a much higher degree self-carrying into the region of the serious. Therefore, he needed a counterweight, something like in the gallows song:

A weasel
sat on a pebble
amid the tumbling stream.
Do you know
why?
The mooncalf
told me
in silence:
The most cunning
animal
did it for the sake of the rhyme.

He needed these light poems, these satirical poems, as a counterweight, for balance. Those who can always make a long face poetically, who sentimentally look up to the higher worlds, are not true poets. The true ones are those who need the counterweight, the counterpart.

Now, of course, we are looking everywhere, aren't we, for the possibility of understanding the phenomenon of egoism that must accompany the striving into the higher worlds. We must not judge egoism when it occurs in such a region, because we must understand it as a natural phenomenon. We must not have the egoism of always wanting to be rid of egoism, because then we are not being true to ourselves. We create, for example, the counterpart in relation to many things [through the exercises] in “How to Know Higher Worlds”; first of all the inner counterparts. But also in what we have created as eurythmy there is a kind of counterpart in this peculiar way of bringing the etheric body into its appropriate movements, and of gaining an understanding for this whole language of the human being. It will encourage young people in particular to live in a way that is in harmony with the spiritual world.

But something that must be emphasized on this occasion is that an element should be particularly sought by the person who really wants to gain a right relationship with the spiritual worlds. This is the element of humor. Do not be surprised at this, but it must be clearly stated, or at least more clearly stated than it has always been done. It is really necessary not to face the striving for the higher world humorlessly! It is this humorless facing that produces such terrible excesses. For if the person who imagines himself to be Homer or Socrates or Goethe were to realize how endlessly ridiculous he must feel in this role, it would help him tremendously to recover his views! But such things can only fail to occur to someone who keeps humor at a distance from his untrue, sentimental life. Because if someone really, yes, I would even say, had the “misfortune” of having been Homer, and through a correct recognition in a later incarnation came to the conclusion that this was the case, then this realization would really appear to him in a humorous light at first. Precisely because it is true, it would at first appear to him in a humorous light. One would truly laugh at oneself at first!

It is difficult to speak about this chapter in the right way, especially in a nutshell. But keeping one's soul open and free to humor is a good way to take the serious in real earnest. Otherwise, sentimentality contaminates and belies the seriousness, and sentimentality is the worst enemy of true seriousness for the serious things in life. I could even imagine that someone who, as a foreign lady once said, only wants to face the seriousness of spiritual-scientific knowledge “with a face down to the stomach” might have found it unpleasant that I spoke of thoughts these days that look like a mouse in one's hand. But one frees oneself from the seriousness of the facts by trying to present them in such a form. For one easily distorts the facts when one approaches them with mere sentimentality, because then one feels sufficiently uplifted to the higher worlds in one's sentimentality and does not believe that one should also still come up to the spiritual worlds through the pliable, elastic, mobile understanding. And truly, it is easier to speak of conquering the elemental world when one is “altruistic, truly altruistic.” It is easier to get some hazy ideas about the elemental world from that than to really make the thing so vivid that one has the transition of thought from a dead object to a living being. This vivid characterization is what we should strive for. So that we gradually train ourselves to ascend into these spiritual worlds without all sentimentality. The serious side is coming. The effort arises precisely from the difficult work of acquiring spiritual science. And what matters is that we gain the strength to correctly understand the place of the spiritual scientific world view within today's materialism and, through this strength, to become a proper member of the spiritual scientific movement. We can gain this strength in no other way than by trying to understand in the right way how these spiritual worlds can be clothed in words, in concepts, that are taken from the physical world, even though the spiritual worlds themselves are so unlike the physical world.

Inspiration as such deals with those inner facts in human nature that are the legacy of the ancient solar evolution, that are connected with everything that makes man capable of accomplishing in the world that which is from heaven, that which is right from heaven. But to do that, the human being must reflect not only on what can be worked out in the individual life within the soul work that is present between birth and death; rather, the human being must reflect on what is in the hidden depths of his soul so that the divine worlds can work into his organization. He who is to be a poet in the world must have the brain of a poet, that is to say, his brain must be prepared for it by the spiritual world. He who wants to be a painter must have the brain of a painter. And in order to give a person a painter's brain or a poet's brain, those forces and impulses must work in human nature that were already substantially present during the cosmic development in the old solar age and were linked to human nature when the human being himself was not nearly as condensed as he is on earth, when the human being himself had only just reached airtightness. Do you think that during the time of the old sun, man consisted only of warmth and air? In what works on warmth and air in man, there lies, as an inheritance from the time of the old sun, what can prepare the human brain to be a painter's or a poet's brain.

From this you can see, however, how we must say, through this observation of what is seen in man and how it goes from the microcosm into the macrocosm: man is one with his surroundings through what is ancient solar inheritance; for air and warmth are just as much outside as they are inside. I have often pointed out that the amount of air I have in me now is out of me in the next moment; it is always going out and coming in, exhaling, inhaling. The air has my form, and in the moment when I exhale the air, it is indeed the same air; it is then only outside, outside of the human being. But as truly as my bones are myself, so truly is the air form, from the moment of inhalation to the moment of exhalation, that which belongs to my own being. As truly as the bones belong to me from my birth to my death, so the air stream belongs to me from the moment it is inhaled to the moment it is exhaled. It is just as much me as my bones are me, only the me-ness of that air stream lasts only from one inhalation to the next exhalation, and the me-ness of my bones lasts approximately from birth to death. Only in terms of time are these things different: the air man dies with the exhalation and is born with the inhalation. And just as our bones are born before our physical birth and gradually decay, something is born in us when we breathe in, and something in us dies when we breathe out. That which is born in us when we breathe in dies when we breathe out; this belongs to the genetic makeup from the old sun, it was laid down back then.

We see how the human realm expands out into the cosmos, how man grows together with it. But we should learn to understand how man lives in the spiritual realm at all. Our time does not even have the talent to grasp this connection between man and the spiritual in the most primitive way. We must come back to that. It would never have occurred to an ancient person to form words as they are formed today when it is necessary to form a word for any compound substance. Now, at most, chemists look for hypothetical conditions to find appropriate names when something is to be named according to the principles of chemistry. These names are very unpleasant for people to pronounce, sometimes they have an awful lot of syllables! Let yourself be informed about this, for example, by those of our friends who are chemists! But where things are not named according to these principles, the names are not connected to the things.

This was not always the case. Today I have spoken to you about inspiration; I have shown you how inspiration leads back to the ancient solar heritage of man. But man had come to the sun through breathing. That is to say, what is now breathing and what lives in the element of air was laid down in former times. So there must be a relationship between human breathing and inspiration. You only have to consider what the word inspiration actually originally means. The intimate relationship between breathing and 'inspiration' is already expressed in this word, because it is basically the word for inhaling. Those who want to deny the spirits would only have to look at the development of language. We have already hinted at this from another angle: one would find the spirits of speech, but also how these spirits of speech work in human nature! Then we will find how we are embedded in the spiritual worlds, how the spirits work with us, how the spirits work with us in everything we do in life. And we will feel ourselves in a real way: our self expanded to the great self of the world. Intuition will become what theory is. And that is the way to really enter into the spiritual worlds.

But we really have to go into these things as well. We have to take them in detail, we have to try to take them seriously, to take some of what has just been said about the relationship between human beings and the spiritual worlds in relation to the simplest of circumstances seriously.

This is what I would like to suggest to you at the end of these lectures, which were intended to show you from a certain point of view how there is a descending current in man and an ascending current, and how man stands in the ascending and descending currents.

And when Faust opens the book and utters the words:

“How the powers of heaven ascend and descend
And pass the golden buckets!”

there you have what I have been trying to convey to you during these days, this rising and descending of the heavenly powers, which Faust first gazes at and cannot understand. But it is expressed in this way in the Faustian legend, so that we can already see in the “Faust” where modern times must strive. It must be very clear to us that we want with our spiritual science what people should strive for. We cannot but recognize that spiritual science must become the spiritual possession of humanity. And as soon as we have come to work together in this becoming a new spiritual possession, we must do everything to realize it, to achieve this goal for humanity.

And with that, I consider these considerations to be concluded for the time being.

Today I shall give neither a lecture nor a lecture, but rather discuss some things in the way that I believe is still missing in our branches. I will tie in with the brochure “Science and Theosophy” by F. vor Wrangell, published in Leipzig by Max Altmann in 1914. In doing so, I would like to show in particular how one can tie into such a writing can be linked to such a writing.¹

The title 'Science and Theosophy' obviously touches on an issue that it is important for us to consider, because we will very often be confronted with the objection that our movement is not scientific or that scientists do not know what to do with it. In short, it will certainly be necessary for one or other of us to deal with science in some way, because he will have to face this objection and perhaps also be pointed to some individual points in doing so. Therefore, it will be good to start by considering the views of a man who believes that he is fully immersed in the scientific spirit of the present day, and of whom, having read his booklet, one can readily can say that he deals with the relationship between science and theosophy in a very astute way, and in such a way that he creates a relationship that many will try to create who are involved in the scientific work of our time. And with such people, who want to create a relationship between science and theosophy, we, or at least a certain number of us, must be able to think along the same lines.

Furthermore, since the brochure is written favorably for Theosophy, we are not so much compelled to fall back on polemics and criticism, but can tie in with some of the author's thoughts, which arise from the specifics of our spiritual striving. Of course, if some of us were to write such a brochure, we might even avoid the title “Theosophy” after the various experiences we have had in such a debate. This is a question that may perhaps be examined in more detail in the course of reading the brochure itself.

The brochure is divided into individual, easy-to-follow chapters and bears as its motto a saying of Kant's, which reads:

“It is not correct to always speak in the lecture halls of wisdom that in the metaphysical sense no more than one single world can exist.” Kant.

Taken out of context, there is certainly not much to be gleaned from this saying of Kant's. However, the author of this paper wants to refer to Kant in the opinion that Kant wanted to say with this saying that the world view that external science creates need not be seen as the only possible one. Here, perhaps, the author of this paper has not quite accurately captured Kant's opinion, because Kant basically means something different in the context of his saying. Kant means: When man reflects, metaphysically reflects, he can think of various real worlds, and then the question is, why of these various conceivable possible worlds, the one in which we live exists for us, while for the author of the booklet the question is: Is it possible to have other world views besides the materialistic one? Of course, he is of the opinion that precisely another, a spiritual world view must also relate to this world of ours.

Then the writing begins with its first essay, which bears the title:

Introductory

A powerful spiritual movement has taken hold of European culture at the present time, in contrast to the materialistic current of thought that prevailed in the leading intellectual circles around the middle of the 19th century.

The author thus looks, as it were, at the hustle and bustle of intellectual work around him and finds that things have changed from the mid-19th century; that in the mid-19th century, scientific salvation was found in materialism, whereas now - in the time when this booklet was published, 1914 - a powerful spiritual movement has taken hold of European culture.

Now he continues:

What are the inner reasons for this counter-current? It seems to me that they lie not only in people's metaphysical need, but also, at least in part, in the widely awakened awareness of the danger to human civilization that is associated with the domination of a materialistic world view.

Thus the author of this booklet is one of those who not only believe that a metaphysical need of humanity has awakened in the 20th century, but also believe that there is a certain moral danger in the minds of people being seized by the materialistic world view.

With increasing speed, the materialistic intellectual current pours through numerous channels from the intellectual heights into the lowlands of human society, displacing the religious convictions based on reverence, which provided a firm hold for the moral life of the masses. It is becoming increasingly clear to many that the victory of a materialistic worldview inevitably leads to a materialistic outlook on life and a corresponding lifestyle, which sees the only reasonable degree of life in exploiting the short lifespan for as much enjoyment as possible.

In earlier times, too, when a solid edifice of morals based on tradition and authority succumbed to corrosive intellectual criticism, humanity was seized by a craving for raw sensual pleasure and led down disastrous paths that took it away from what we feel is its most intrinsic destiny.

This is not contradicted by the fact that among those men who, inspired by an unconditional love of truth, communicate the results of their research and thinking to their fellow men, without regard to the consequences might ensue that many, if not most, of these men stand at a high level of moral greatness and are moved by noble, unselfish motives, in the full conviction that they are thus serving humanity.

So here the author points out that certain dangers for the moral life of human beings must arise as a consequence of a materialistic world view, and he says: This danger cannot be countered solely with the objection that those people who theoretically recognize a materialistic world view as theirs and as the right one themselves stand on a high level of moral conduct.

The author touches here, from his own observations, on a point to which I have repeatedly referred in our spiritual science, I may well say, from a higher point of view. For if one says that a spirit such as Haeckel, who works in such an eminently theoretical and materialistic way, stands on the ground of high moral ideals and also shows a higher moral conception of life in his own conduct, and that therefore the materialistic world-view does not necessarily lead to a materialistic way of life, one forgets one thing – and I have pointed this out in various lectures that I have given – namely, one forgets that in the development of mankind, feelings and thoughts move at different speeds.

If you look at just a short piece of human development, you will find that thoughts move relatively quickly. From the 15th and 16th centuries onwards, materialistic thinking, the living out of human theorizing in materialistic thought, has developed rapidly and all sciences have gradually been permeated theoretically by materialistic thought forms. Moral life, which is expressed in feelings, has developed less rapidly. At least people still show in their old feelings and emotions that feeling has not progressed as quickly. Therefore, people today still live in terms of the moral feelings that arose from the previous worldview, and that is why there is a dichotomy today between materialistic thinking and a non-materialistic life and a non-materialistic way of life that is still in the old sense. But the time is approaching when the consequences will be drawn from the materialistic-theoretical world view, so that what can be called is just around the corner: the moral life will be flooded by the consequence of the materialistic world view. One can therefore deepen one's understanding of the different speeds that feelings and thoughts have when viewed from a spiritual science perspective.

Now it says further:

But if the final result of this mental work is one that seems to contradict the destiny of man, the question is justified as to whether there is not a fundamental error in the seemingly so solid structure of the critical train of thought.

The author is therefore convinced that immoral consequences must follow from theoretical materialism, and that he can only expect salvation for humanity from morality. And so he wonders whether a materialistic world view, which must necessarily lead to immorality, not only shows errors, but has errors in itself when viewed critically. And so he continues:

Is this error only felt in one's feelings, or can it also be discovered intellectually? I have also been concerned with this question, and in the following I will attempt to clarify it for myself. I hope that my train of thought will also interest some readers who, like me, are convinced that it is more effective to fight an error with its own weapons than to merely call it into question. To indicate my scientific standpoint, I would mention that I am an astronomer by training, that my independent work lies in the fields of theoretical meteorology and physical geography, and that from early youth I have moved almost exclusively in academic circles, and respect for strict science based on critical thinking has become second nature to me, so to speak.

This does, however, justify the author's claim to have something to say about the relationship between science and Theosophy, because he shows that he is familiar with science on a certain point and that his judgment must therefore be infinitely more valuable than the judgment of someone who, for example, reads Kant and says, that is all nonsense, we Theosophists do not need to read Kant, and who thus only reveals that he himself has perhaps not seriously read and thought through five lines of Kant. It continues:

I am firmly convinced that a Weltanschhauung which cannot stand up to a strict critique of reason cannot endure, however much it appeals to the emotions. These introductory words should inform the reader of the task I have set myself in this essay and the point of view from which I intended to treat it.

The next essay describes in a few sentences what a materialistic-mechanical worldview is, the worldview that developed in the second half of the 19th century in such a way that there were and still are many who consider what the author describes here in a few sentences to be the only scientifically possible worldview. Let us consider what the author writes:

The basic assumptions of the materialistic-mechanical worldview

Let us first consider the most important basic assumptions of a materialistic-mechanical worldview. They can be summarized in the following teachings:

1. All events that we observe through our senses and perceive mentally follow a law, i.e. every state of the cosmos is necessarily determined by the temporally preceding state and also necessarily results in the subsequent states. All changes, i.e. all events, are inevitable consequences of the forces present in the cosmos.

Now, what the author is trying to analyze here as the basic assumption of the materialistic-mechanical world view has often been said in the course of our lectures. But if you compare what the author says here with the way it is said in our lectures, you will notice the difference. And for those who want to familiarize themselves with our spiritual-scientific consciousness, it is good to become aware of this difference.

Anyone who reads this first point, in which the materialistic-mechanical world view is characterized in a beautiful, astute and scientifically knowledgeable way, will see: that is very good; that hits the mark of the materialistic-mechanical world view. But when we try to give such a characterization in the lectures that are held for the purpose of our movement, it is attempted in just the opposite way, and it would be good if one would reflect on how differently we proceed in such matters.

Herr von Wrangell, on the other hand, presents what might be called a materialistic-mechanical world view. He speaks a few sentences from his own perspective, summarizing the impressions he has gained from the matter. You will have noticed – if you are at all inclined to notice such things – that I usually do not proceed in this way, but quite differently. I usually start from something that is there, that is there as a result of a historical process. And so, if I wanted to characterize this point, I did not simply say such sentences about myself, but I chose one of the essential, and indeed good, authors to express in the words and manner of such an author what the matter in question is.

Thus, I have often linked to the name Du» Bors-Reymond that which could serve as a basis for my lectures. As a result, you may often have gained the impression, if you do not see the whole in context, that I wanted to criticize Du Bois-Reymond. But I never want to criticize, I just want to pick out a representative characteristic example so that it is he who speaks, not I. This is what one might call the sense for facts that is necessary for us, the sense that we do not make assertions but let the facts speak. I have often related that Du Bois-Reymond gave a speech on the recognition of nature at the Leipzig Natural Science Convention in 1872. He also spoke about the way in which he had come to his view of the world through his scientific research.

Du Bois-Reymond is a physiologist in his specific field of research. His main work is in the field of nerve physiology. He has often spoken in elegant terms about the world view of the natural scientists. At the Leipzig Naturalists' Assembly in 1872, for example, he spoke about the limits of the scientific world view, about the limits of natural knowledge, and in doing so he also spoke of Laplacean minds. What is that? Du Bois-Reymond characterized it at the time. This Laplacian mind is that of someone who is well versed in mathematics, physics, biology, chemistry, and so on in the present day and forms a world view out of these sciences. Such a Laplacian mind thus comes to form a world view that starts from so-called astronomical knowledge of reality.

What is astronomical knowledge of reality, we might ask; what is astronomical knowledge? We can explain it in a few words.

The astronomer visualizes: the sun, the planets, the moon, the earth; he visualizes the planets orbiting around the sun or moving in ellipses around it, he visualizes the force of attraction, the gravitation, acting on the planets, he visualizes an inertia, and from this inertia he visualizes that the planets orbit around the sun.

Thus, the astronomer has in mind that he can follow what is going on around him in the universe as the great events; that he can follow them from the material entities that can be seen in space and from the forces that they exert on each other in space. The fact that the entities exert material forces on one another sets things in motion; that is, things come into motion when one imagines the solar system in this way and looks at it in this way. One has a picture of the things that are spread out in space and of the events that take place over time.

Now, anyone who wants to form a world view that is in line with the times, in the sense of Du Bois-Reymonds, says the following. We have to assume that all matter consists of the smallest parts, of atoms. Just as a solar system consists of the sun, the moon and the planets, so does the smallest piece of matter consist of something similar to the sun with the planets. And just as the sun exerts forces and the planets exert forces on each other, so do the forces between the individual atoms. This sets the atoms in motion. So we have motion inside every material particle. The atoms, like the sun and the planets, are in motion. These movements are small, but they are such that we can compare them with the great movements performed by the heavenly bodies out in space, so that if we take the smallest piece of matter that we can see, something is going on inside it, like what the astronomer imagines out in space. And now natural science came to imagine everything in such a way that wherever something is really in motion, it stems from the fact that the atoms are guided by their forces.

In the second half of the 19th century, especially the science of heat, as it was founded by Julius Robert Mayer, Joule, Tyndall and Helmholtz, and further developed by C. ausius and others, contributed to the formation of this world view. So, when you touch a body and feel warmth, you say: what you feel as the sensation of warmth is only an appearance. What really exists outside is that the smallest parts, the atoms of the substance in question, are in motion; and you know a state of warmth when you know how the atoms are in motion, when you have an astronomical knowledge of it, to use the words of Du Bois-Reymond. The ideal of the Laplacian mind is to be able to say: What do I care about heat? My world view depends on my being able to find out the motion of the atoms, which through their motion cause all that we have in the way of heat, light, etc. This Laplacian mind thus forms a world view that consists of space, matter with its effective forces, and motion. In the lecture he gave at the Leipzig Naturalists' Assembly on the limits of natural knowledge, Du Bois-Reymond posits this ideal of the Laplacian mind and asks: what would such a Laplacian mind be capable of?

You see, his ideal is astronomical knowledge of the world. If a mathematician takes the image of our solar system as it is at any given point in time, he only needs to insert certain numbers into his formula and he gets an image of what it was like an hour, three hours, ten years, centuries ago. How does one go about calculating whether a solar or lunar eclipse took place at a certain time in the first decade of our era? In this case, we have well-developed formulas based on the current state of science. All you need to do is insert the corresponding numbers into the formula to calculate each individual state. You can calculate when a solar eclipse will occur, let's say in 1970 or in 2728. In short, you can calculate every state that precedes or follows in time. And now Laplace's mind should have the formula that encompasses this entire solar system. So anyone with Laplace's mind, which included the atoms in space and all their states of motion, could - and Du Bois-Reymond says the same thing - calculate today, for example, when Caesar crossed the Rubicon from the world formula that he has of the atoms and their present states of motion. He would only have to insert the necessary information into the formula. It would only depend on the position of the atoms at that time, and the fact would have to follow: Caesar crosses the Rubicon. - If you insert certain values into the formula, a certain picture of the current state of the atoms should result, and then, for example, you would be able to recognize the Battle of Salamis. One would only need to proceed from differential to differential and one would be able to reconstruct the entire Battle of Salamis. That is the ideal of Laplace's mind: a knowledge of the world, which is called astronomical. Occasionally something more can be added about these things. Now I will only mention a small experience for those who are attentive to it. As a boy, I once came across a school program. Such school programs are printed, after all. They usually contain an essay written by one of the teachers. At the time, this essay was not that easy for me to understand, because it was titled “The force of attraction considered as an effect of motion”. Even then, I was dealing with an author who, so to speak, had also set himself the ideal of Laplace's mind; and he had expounded many other things in the same direction.

If you take all this together, you will see that I did not try to speak of an astronomical-materialistic world view as a mere idea, but to let the facts and the personalities speak for themselves. In a sense, then, I did strive to cultivate a style of presentation that excludes the personal. For if I were to relate what Du Bois-Reymond said on a particular occasion, I would let him speak for himself and not myself. My task is only to follow up what the personalities have said; I try to let the world speak. This is the attempt to exclude oneself, not to relate one's own views, but facts. When reading this point by Wrangell, one should be aware that our spiritual science already strives for the sense of fact in the way it presents the facts, the sense not merely to suckle at the objective, but the sense to immerse oneself in the facts, to really sink into them.

Now you will recognize what I have peeled out of the facts if you let the following lines of the booklet sink in again: “All events that we observe through our senses and perceive mentally proceed according to the laws of nature, that is, every state of the cosmos is necessarily conditioned by the temporally preceding state and just as necessarily results in the states that follow it. All changes, i.e. all events, are inevitable consequences of the forces present in the cosmos.

And now it says:

It does not affect the essence of the question whether one - for the sake of better clarity - calls the carrier of the forces “matter” or, according to the monists, imagines the concept “energy” as the only effective thing that, although it presents different forms of appearance to the human senses, basically represents an unchangeable sum of latent or current possibilities for movement.

I would only use such a sentence in the rarest of cases, and only when something else has already been summarized. Remember that I once spoke of what is expressed in this sentence. It says: “It does not affect the essence of the question whether, for the sake of better clarity, one calls the carrier of the forces ‘Stofb’ or, according to the process of the monists, conceives of the concept ‘energy’ as the only effective thing...”. I would not put it that way, but would point out that Haeckel's and Büchner's students, above all, look at the material that is spread out in space. According to the Swabian Vischer, they were the “Stoffhuber,” the “material boosters.”

Then came the man who is now the president of the Monistenbund: Ostwald. At a meeting of natural scientists, I believe it was the one in Kiel - I have spoken of it before - he gave a lecture on the overcoming of materialism through energetics, through energism. There he pointed out that it was not the matter that mattered, but the force. He thus replaced matter with force. Do you remember how I quoted his own words at the time? He said, in essence: when one person receives a slap in the face from another, it is not the matter of the substance that is dealt a blow, but the force with which the slap is dealt. Nowhere do we perceive the substance, but the force. And so, in place of substance, we find force, or, with a certain not merely descriptive but transformational meaning, energy. But this energism, which now calls itself monism, is nothing but a masked materialism. Again I have tried to show you by way of example how there really was a time when the “energy grabbers” took the place of the “substance grabbers”. I did not attempt to present a theoretical sentence, but tried to characterize from the real. And that must be our endeavor in any case. For it is only by having a sense for the real in the physical that we develop a sense for the real in the spiritual, and do not just mumble our own assertions.

So the author of the booklet says: “It does not affect the essence of the question whether one calls the carrier of the forces ‘matter’ for the sake of better clarity, or, according to the process of the monists, imagines the concept of energy as the only effective thing...

What the author means here by the expression “latent or actual possibilities of movement” can be explained as follows: Imagine some kind of counterweight here, and on top of it a tube, a glass tube, with water inside. This water presses on the floor here. In the moment when I pull away the counterweight, the water runs down. In the latter case, we are dealing with a current movement; before I pulled the support away, the same force was there, only it was not current, but at rest. Everything that then flowed down from the water and became current was previously latent, not current.

The course of all events is irrevocably predetermined, and man, in his thinking, feeling and willing, is just as unfree as, for example, a stone is in its fall.

That is the necessary consequence of the Laplacian world view. The Laplacian brain concludes that if I put my hand there, that is an image of the moving atoms, and if the Laplacian brain can still calculate the image, as I have indicated, then this excludes the freedom of man, that is, the Laplacian brain excludes the freedom of man.

This is the first point that Mr. von Wrangell makes on the basis of the materialistic-mechanical world view. The second point is as follows:

2. The inner experiences that take place in a person's consciousness (his feelings, thoughts, volitional impulses) are not essentially different from other processes in nature that a person observes through his senses. These inner experiences are only side effects of material processes within the human brain and nervous system.

This second point expresses that when I think, feel and will, it is only a concomitant of the inner processes that the Laplacian mind selects. We are therefore not dealing with independent thoughts, feelings and impulses of the will, but only with accompanying phenomena. If you follow what I said, for example, in the lecture 'The Legacy of the 19th Century' and in similar other lectures, if you study some of the material contained in 'Riddles of Philosophy', you will see how many minds in the second half of the 19th century, this view was taken for granted, that man is actually nothing more than the structure of material processes and their energies, and that thoughts, feelings and will impulses are only accompanying phenomena.

As the third point of the materialistic-mechanical world view, Mr. von Wrangell states the following:

3. After the physical death of man, the existence of the human individual finally ceases, because the so-called spiritual life of man is bound to his physicality and cannot exist without it.

This point can be understood by everyone as a consequence of the first point. The first point is the one that matters. The second and third are necessary consequences.

In the next essay, Mr. von Wrangell discusses what he calls:

examining these basic assumptions

What are the basic assumptions of the materialistic world view based on? Are they indisputably proven facts or only more or less probable hypotheses? The first of the three aforementioned assumptions, that all events are necessarily bound to follow a certain course, is the most important and has the most far-reaching consequences. It is not only regarded as beyond doubt by materialists, but also by many spiritualists, who, while accepting the independent existence of spiritual entities and believing in the continued existence of the spiritual being of man, their “soul”, after physical death, assume that there is an unalterable law within the spiritual world as well as within the sensory world. First of all, it should be noted that this idea of the absolute, unexceptional lawfulness, i.e. necessity of all events, also in the spiritual realm, excludes the concept of morality, of good and evil, because to act morally means to choose the good, when evil could be chosen.

In this chapter, Mr. von Wrangell tries to make it clear to himself that there can be no morality if the materialistic-mechanical world view is the only correct one. Because if I have to do every moment of my life what is only a by-product of atoms, then there can be no question of freedom, nor of morality, because everything is done out of necessity. Just as one cannot say that a stone that falls to the earth is good and one that does not fall to the earth is not good, so one cannot say that people's actions are good or not good. In the case of a criminal, everything happens out of necessity; in the case of a good person, everything happens out of necessity. Therefore there is something correct in the sentence: “First of all, it should be noted that this idea of the unconditional, unexceptional lawfulness, i.e. necessity of all events, also in the spiritual realm, excludes the concept of morality, of good and evil; because to act morally means to choose the good, when evil could be chosen.” But one cannot choose when everything is constrained by material necessity.

The next chapter is headed:

Freedom and Morality

As soon as there is no freedom of decision, there can be no question of morality in the sense in which this concept is understood by people and corresponds to our inner feelings. We can certainly speak of more or less useful, unfree actions and impulses, but a moral judgment of unfree actions or feelings has no justification, no sense. With the elimination of freedom, responsibility also ceases to exist. This undoubted connection between freedom and morality cannot be used as an argument against the concept of lawfulness; it is merely intended to remind us of the logical consequences associated with the assumption of absolute necessity.

So Mr. von Wrangell is trying to make it clear here that it absolutely follows from the materialistic-mechanical world view that one cannot actually speak of freedom and morality.

Now he is a scientific mind, and a scientific mind is accustomed to honestly and sincerely drawing the consequences of assumptions. Our time misses much that would immediately seem absurd to it if it had really already taken on the scientific conscience, if it did not stir and throw together all kinds of things without a scientific conscience. Mr. von Wrangell does not do that, but says: If we accept the materialistic world view, we can no longer speak of freedom and morality; because either the materialistic world view is correct, and then it is nonsense to speak of freedom and morality, or one speaks of freedom and morality, and then there is no sense in speaking of the materialistic-mechanical world view.

But since Hetr von Wrangell is a scientist who is already accustomed to drawing the consequences of his assumptions – that is an important fact – he is not accustomed to having things so sloppy in his thinking; because it is a sloppiness of thinking when someone says, “I am a materialist” and does not at the same time deny morality. He does not want to be guilty of this sloppiness of thinking. On the other hand, he also has the habit that one has when one has become a scientist, namely to say: May the world go to pieces, what I have scientifically recognized must be true! Therefore, one cannot simply discard the materialistic view, but if the materialistic world view is true, then it must be accepted and then one is faced with the sad necessity of having to throw morality overboard. So it is not just a matter of asking: where does morality take us? – he says that is not enough – but the materialistic world view must be examined, quite apart from the consequences this has for morality. So we have to tackle a different kind of materialistic world view.

The next chapter is called:

The World Enigma

Yes, one can say that the question of whether man is responsible for his actions, i.e., whether he has the possibility of regulating his volitional impulses according to motives that are unambiguously determined by his bodily organization, includes the whole world riddle for us humans, the question of freedom or unfreedom of will. For if this question is answered in the sense of the absolute necessity of all happenings in the whole universe, without exception, then materialism is the only correct view and the world, with all its agony and suffering, is a mechanism that runs to no purpose, without a recognizable beginning, but with the eternal death of the whole as its final goal.

When we started our spiritual science movement, I had occasion to read some poems by the poet Marie Eugenie delle Grazie, who, one might say, has come to terms with a materialistic-mechanical world view and even as a poet really draws the consequences from it. That is why she formed poems like “A dirty whirlwind is existence.” — One must come to that conclusion if one is not sloppy in one's thinking, if one lets one's thinking affect one's feelings. And only because people are so sloppy and cowardly in their thinking do they not ask themselves: What becomes of life under the influence of the materialistic-mechanical worldview? But it must be shown that it is inherently false, otherwise one would simply have accepted the consequence of delle Grazie.

Mr. von Wrangell continues:

The greatest minds and deepest thinkers have endeavored to solve this most important of all questions, and it seems presumptuous to want to say something new. However, it cannot be a matter of a generally valid answer here, but at most a reference to the train of thought that led to a subjective solution to the puzzle. Such a reference can sometimes be of help to a similarly minded soul.

Mr. von Wrangell thus points out that the greatest minds, poets and thinkers have endeavored to solve this question, and that it is unnecessary to say anything new about it. At most, it could be a hint at the train of thought that led to a subjective solution of this puzzle; that is, a hint at his own train of thought.

In the next chapter, he examines where the idea comes from that what precedes always follows what comes after in a lawful manner. It is called:

The origin of the law

From this point of view, it seems justified to raise the question: Where do we get the idea of the absolute lawfulness of all events? Is it perhaps an intuitive truth that underlies all thinking, or has humanity only gradually, through long and arduous mental work, come to this idea; an idea that now appears to the Europeans, who live off the cultural achievements of the past, as a self-evident truth?

So Mr. von Wrangell is asking here: Did man always believe in this unconditional law, or did people only come to it over time? Only then can one recognize the validity of this idea; for if man has always believed in it, then there must be something true about it that can be taken for granted; but if people have only just come to it, then one can examine how they have arrived at this idea. In this way one can form an opinion about its validity. He says further:

The latter is the case. This is an acquired, not an original insight. On the contrary, man's original, direct consciousness gives him the idea of inner freedom limited by external circumstances, of arbitrariness in his volitional decisions. The idea of conformity to law is only gradually being derived from experience.

Now, as you can see from my countless lectures, it is clear how slowly people have come to this idea of conformity to law, from the old clairvoyance to the time when the idea of conformity to law has come. In truth, the idea of conformity to law is only four centuries old, because it basically comes from Galileo. I have often discussed this. If you go back before Galileo, there is no idea at all that everything is permeated by such a law.

Mr. von Wrangell says: “This is an acquired, not an original insight... The idea of lawfulness has only gradually been taken from experience.” Now, I would like to know whether the child is compelled by its inner astral circumstances to reach for the sugar, that is, whether it is natural for it to do so, or whether the child thinks it already has a choice. I have told something like an anecdote before, which I would like to mention here as well. It was during my studies; I used to pace up and down in the lobby of Vienna's Südbahnhof with a fellow student. He was a hardened materialist and firmly held the view that all thinking is just a process in the brain, like the hands on a clock moving forward. And just as one cannot say that this is something special, but is connected with the mechanical substances and forces present in it, so he thought that the brain also makes these astronomical movements. That was a Laplacian head; we were eighteen to nineteen years old at the time. So I said to him once: But you never say “my brain thinks,” you say “I think.” Why do you keep lying then? Why do you always say “I think” and not “my brain thinks?” - Now, this fellow student had taken his knowledge, the ideas of volition and conformity to law, not from experience, but from complicated theories. He did not believe in inner arbitrariness, but he said “I think” and not “my brain thinks”. So he was in constant contradiction to himself.

The next chapter is called:

Freedom of the will cannot be proved by experience.

Can this contradiction be resolved rationally? It is obvious that an experience-based proof of the freedom of the will of people or other beings cannot be provided.

Mr. von Wrangell says that the truth of the freedom of the will of people cannot be proven by external experience, because one can only make one's own decision.

Mr. von Wrangell says, then, that one cannot prove the truth of the freedom of human will through external experience, because one can only make one decision. If one wanted to prove it, then one would have to be able to make two decisions. Now, I have already mentioned that one does not refer to experience at all in this question, but rather constructs an experience. For example, they once imagined a donkey with a bundle of hay on each side, the same tasty, equally sized bundle of hay. The donkey, which is getting hungrier and hungrier, is now supposed to decide whether to eat from one or the other bundle of hay, because one is as tasty as the other and as large as the other. And so he does not know whether he should turn this way or that. In short, the donkey could not come to a proper decision and had to starve between the two bundles of hay. Such things have been constructed because it was felt that one cannot get there experientially by observing freedom. Mr. von Wrangell draws attention to this and then asks the question:

But can the freedom of the will be refuted by experience? To answer this question, let us first recall some epistemological truths!

To answer this question, Mr. von Wrangell now speaks of some epistemological truths in the next chapter. This chapter is called:

Epistemological Retrospection

Man has direct awareness only of himself. He feels desires, which he seeks to satisfy and which trigger impulses of will in him; he receives impressions, of which he soon becomes convinced that they are dependent on certain sense organs of his body. When he closes his eyes, he receives no impressions of light and color; when he plugs his ears, he weakens his sound sensations or loses them altogether. Likewise, experience shows that the nose conveys the sense of smell and the mouth, in the parts covered by mucous membranes, conveys the sense of taste. Only the sense of touch seems to be tied to no particular part of the body, but can be exercised through the entire skin. The normal healthy person has five different senses in an awake state, each conveying its specific type of impression.

In this, Mr. von Wrangell is influenced by popular knowledge of the senses. Those who once listened to a small lecture cycle that I then titled “Anthroposophy” will have seen that one cannot get by with five senses, but rather has to assume twelve senses. Among these twelve senses is also the sense for the thinking of another person, for the other I. Therefore, anyone who has followed our spiritual scientific movement correctly can recognize the inadequacy of Wrangell's assertions. They are not incorrect, but they are only partially correct. We cannot say, “Man has direct consciousness only of himself.” That is incorrect. For then we could never perceive other I's.

In recent times, however, there has been a very complicated view, which is held by all sorts of people. Perhaps the philosopher and psychologist Lipps could be cited as a characteristic personality among those who hold it. They are not aware when a person confronts them that they have a direct impression of his ego, but they say: When I confront a person, he has a face; it makes certain movements, and he says certain things, and from what he says and does, one should be able to conclude that there is an ego behind it. So the ego is something inferred, not something directly perceived. A new school of philosophy, however, which has Max Scheler as its most prominent representative, takes a different view. It has already made the observation that one can have an immediate impression of the ego of another person. And what has been written about the ego, more rigorously scientifically by Husserl, the philosopher, and then somewhat more popularly, especially in his more recent essays, by Scheler, shows that more recent philosophy is on the way to recognizing that direct consciousness can also know something of another consciousness. — One can therefore say that Mr. von Wrangell has been infected by popular epistemology when he says: “Man has direct awareness only of himself.” And further: “He feels desires, which he seeks to satisfy and which trigger impulses of will in him.” And then he describes how man perceives the world through his senses.

I have already written about this sense physiology. Read in “Lucifer-Gnosis” and you will see that I tried to explain the impossibility of this sense physiology with the simple comparison of the seals. I said at the time: This sense physiology is materialistic from the very beginning. It proceeds from the assumption that nothing can enter into us from the outside, because it secretly conceives of the outside as materialistic. But it is the same as with the seal and the sealing wax: the seal always remains outside the sealing wax; nothing passes from the material of the seal into the sealing wax. But the name “Miller” engraved on it passes completely from the seal to the sealing wax. If we now place the main emphasis on what is spiritually expressed in the name Miller, and not on the material, of which nothing passes over, we can see that what is presented from the point of view of sensory physiology says nothing. But these are such horrible doctrines that have been hammered into people's brains that most people just don't follow them up, even if they want to become spiritualists. You can read more about this in my book “The Riddles of Philosophy”, in the chapter “The World as Illusion”.

Then Mr. von Wrangell continues:

Since man cannot imagine that an existing state can change without a cause, he assumes that the sensory impressions he feels are caused by forces that he locates outside of his own directly felt self. He calls these external causes of his internal sensory impressions “things” and, in their totality, “the world” or - epistemologically - the “not-me”, in contrast to the directly perceived “me”.

That's clear, you just have to get used to the fact that there is a bit of epistemological talk.

A thousandfold experience and the corresponding agreement with beings that he recognizes as being the same as himself - his fellow human beings - teach him that these “things,” this “not-I,” can exist independently of his consciousness.

Otherwise, man would have to believe that if he turns his eye away not only from living but also from inanimate things, things cease to exist.

If, for example, he loses consciousness during sleep, he finds upon awakening that things persist in their “reality,” that is, in their ability to evoke sensations in him. Man also recognizes his own body as belonging in some respects to the world “outside him.”

This is good to emphasize, because we not only have things that are inside, but also things that are outside.

He can receive sensory impressions from his limbs, as from other things; for example, he can see, touch, etc. his hands, and here too he distinguishes between the inner process of his sensory impressions and their outer cause, which in this case he recognizes as one of his body parts. He soon becomes convinced that it is his body, that is, that this thing has a very special connection to his “I,” to that which feels and thinks, especially through the sense of touch, which shows him that when he brings his own body parts into contact with other things, he feels the contact directly, but he does not feel it directly when other objects are brought into contact with each other.” ²

It is very good to be made aware of something like this. So this is how Mr. von Wrangell answers the question of how it comes about that a person recognizes his own body among the things that are outside in a certain thing. Those who think sloppily simply say: thinking about something like this is nonsense; these people who think about something like this want to be scientists. But Wrangell says: When these two pieces of chalk collide, it doesn't hurt, but when I bump into something with my body, it hurts. That's the difference. And because one hurts and the other doesn't, I label the one as belonging to me and the other as not belonging to me. It is good to know that we have nothing but the consequence of this consciousness.

Now, you see, my dear friends, I had intended to finish discussing this brochure today. But we have only got as far as page 10. An attempt should be made to find the connection between what is written in the world and what, in the strict sense, belongs to our spiritual science. But the next chapters are still too interesting: the formation of concepts, ideas of space and time; the principle of causality; the application of the idea of arbitrariness to the environment; observation of phenomena that occur uniformly; the essence of all science; astronomy, the oldest science; uniform motion; measurement; the principle underlying clocks. It is so interesting that perhaps we will continue the discussion tomorrow at seven o'clock.

• 1. The quotations in this and the following lectures reflect the entire text of the Wrangell brochure.
• 2. In the brochure itself, the following footnote appears: “The ‘elimination of sensitivity in sensitives’ observed by de Rochas is a particular abnormal phenomenon that deserves in-depth study.”

In connection with Mr. von Wrangell's description of the materialistic-mechanical world view, I spoke yesterday of the poet Marie Eugenie delle Grazie as an example of someone who really took the materialistic world view seriously, I would even say at its word. One could indeed ask: How must a person who has elementary, strong feelings for everything human that has been instilled in people through historical development, how must such a person feel when they assume the materialistic-mechanical worldview to be true? That is more or less how Marie Eugenie delle Grazie – it was now 25 to 30 years ago – faced the materialistic-mechanical world view. She called Haecke/ her master and assumed that, to a certain extent, Laplace's head with its world view is right. But she did not express this world view in theory, but also allowed human feeling to speak, on the assumption that it is true. And so her poems are perhaps the most eloquent testimony to the way in which the human heart can relate to the materialistic-mechanical world view in our time, what can be sensed, felt, and perceived under her premise. And so that you may have a vivid example of the effect of the materialistic-mechanical view on a human heart, we will first present some of these poems by Grazia Deledda.

[Recitation by Marie Steiner]

At midnight

When tired and half intoxicated
From the day's colorful changing life
In blessed rest the earth dreams,
The moon's bluish glow
The desolate streets flood
And sacred forgetfulness
The gentle wings lifts
In these blessed hours,
So full of bliss and slumber
Why, heart pounding loudly,
Can only you not find any rest?
Why, forehead burning with fever,
Do you so sleep-robbing
And dream-scaring only yourself
Through the tormenting host of thoughts?

Calm change draws
The stars in the sky above,
And motionless lies the city,
The wide, wide city - for behold,
It is midnight and poor as rich, happy
Without distinction of the dream god's enticing cup,
The heavy, poppy-wreathed...

You only moan
And whimper into your pillows at midnight,
Unsel'ge, and weep and brood - because
It is a demon, dark and yet enchanting,
That floats around your bed and chases demon whispers
The dream fairy tale messengers from your proximity,
So that their lovely dance fades away lackluster
And the night fiends of madness encircle you.
And even if the enchantress Phantasie beckons to you with shining eyes,
With her golden wings,
The poppy dance and the rejuvenating fire potion
of enthusiasm – satanically grinning, And longingly, slavishly breathe towards him,
A sacrifice that willlessly surrenders itself.
Then he spreads the black demon wings
And shakes his curls nocturnal splendor,
Kiss frosty love and faith from your soul,
Gently drips the poison of despair into your chest,
Mauls your heart with convulsively twitching predator claws,
Encircles you like a vampire in a rut
And whispers, smiling icily: “My name is knowledge!”

2.

With brazen bands, And chains of dust and decay, Nature, thy witness, holds thee fast;
Nature, the enticing monster,
Sometimes smiling and sun-gilded,
To furious joy of existence inspiring thee, sometimes
Dread and distress giving birth,
Whipping you with the rod of sorrow, But always devastating and enigmatic, always Medusa and sphinx at the same time! Dutch your pulse chases And races in feverish beats Her ruthless law, The eternal law of destruction; She gave you will and strength
To destroy yourself – yourself
But you can never save yourself!
On her triumphal chariot we all pull
– panting, drenched in sweat, and yet
Also blissful: for as a mirage rocks
Hope before us and happiness and every illusion,
Which they created to mock us,
And we, the slave army poisoned by longing,
Call ideals! - So we rush in thirsty haste
And mad chase, until treacherously
The power leaves us, the breath fades and further
For ever our goal on golden clouds floats,
Until helpless and panting we
Break down - then she exults demonically,
Then she cries out her cruel: “Evoe!” and steers
Crushing over a thousand victims away
The brazen spokes of her biga!

3.

What cruel demon
The tormenting urge of love
Written in our throbbing hearts?
What treacherous hellish delusion
It is to tremble longingly and foolishly
To crave and thirst for divine bliss,
To an infinite
Consume itself in feverish heat
And over the seething swamp
The most enticing fairytale realm of dreams
Build – alas! plaintively and unresolved
This anxious question fades away into eternity...

Enchantingly, it smiles and beckons
In those moments of mystery
The divine to us
Alone, we want to grasp it,
And also captivate it, even in the garb of transience
And call, a second, foolish self
Chaining ourselves to our destiny: “Found - found!”

Only gods and fairy-tale heroes are refreshed by
the nectar of eternal folly,
little people are guided by reason,
and reason, the ravenous giantess,
she feeds and strengthens herself only
from shattered ideals!
Demystified and shivering, the heart and the sober everyday soul,
She smiles at the dream that once intoxicated her...
The shining star of divinity,
Not proud and titanic could
She tear it from heaven – no, she reached
And, more foolish than a foolish child,
Reached for its murky reflection
In the puddle of its own kind...

In the circle of the living goes
And wanders from mouth to mouth
A word whispered in terror
Its brazen sound, it makes
The rosy cheeks turn pale,
The jubilant anthems of madness,
The dazzling tales of lies
Of existence are torn apart for him, and
Fade away with him into eternity.
The crown of thorns of suffering,
The rosaries of happiness
And tiaras of glory
They all, all entwined,
Entwined and overgrown
With pale death's asphodel!
He whose wings change color,
Who trembles, and he whose hollow voice is heard,
Has lied for the last time...

Decay and mold ferment
In our veins, decay guides us
According to its law, and what lives and breathes there,
Decay has created it,
Decay destroys it too!
A dirty vortex of mystery and madness circles the glittering lie of existence away
and speaks, for all eternity
pointing to dust and decay,
the only eternal truth: “There is nothing!”

I believe that it is precisely in such an example that one can see where the materialistic-mechanical world view must lead. If this world-view had become the only one prevailing and if men had retained the power of feeling, then such a mood as that expressed in these poems must have seized men in the widest circle, and only those who would have continued to live without feeling, only these unfeeling ones could have avoided being seized by such a mood.

You don't get to know and understand the way of the world in the right way through those merely theoretical thoughts with which people usually build worldviews, but you only get to know the strength of a worldview when you see it flow into life. And I must say that it was a profound impression when I saw, now already a very long time ago, the mechanistic-materialistic worldview enter the ingenious soul – for she may be called an ingenious soul – of Marie Eugenie delle Grazie.

But one must also consider the preconditions that led to a human heart taking on the mechanistic-materialistic worldview. Marie Eugenie delle Grazie is, after all, by her very background, I would say a cosmopolitan phenomenon. She has blood of all possible nationalities in her veins from her ancestors. She got to know the sorrows of life in early childhood, and she also learned in early childhood how to rise to find something that carries this life to a higher power through a higher power; because her educator became a Catholic priest who died a few years ago. The genius of Delle Grazie revealed itself in the fact that she had already written a book of lyric poems, an extensive epic, a tragedy and a volume of novellas by the time she was 16 or 17. However much one might object to these poems from this or that point of view, they do express her genius in a captivating way. I came across these poems back in the 1880s, when they were first published, and at the same time I heard a lot of people talking about Delle Grazie. For example, I heard that the esthete Robert Zimmermann, who wrote an aesthetics and a history of aesthetics and was an important representative of the Herbartian school of philosophy (the Herbartians are now extinct), and who was already an old man at the time, said: Delle Grazie is the only real genius he has met in life.

A series of circumstances then led to me becoming personally acquainted with and befriending delle Grazie, and a great deal was said between us about worldviews and other matters. It was a significant lesson to see on the one hand the educator of delle Grazie, the Catholic priest, who, professionally immersed in Catholicism, had come to a worldview that he only expressed with irony and humor when he spoke more intimately, and on the other hand, delle Grazie herself. From the very first time I spoke to her, it was clear that she had a deep understanding of the world and life. As a result of her education by the priest, she had come to know Catholic Christology from all possible perspectives, which one could get to know if one was close to Professor Mäüllner - that is this priest - who, for his part, had also looked deeply into life. All this had taken shape in the delle Grazie in such a way that the world view she had initially been given by this priest – you have to bear in mind that I am talking about a seventeen-year-old girl – that life brings in the way of evil and wickedness, pain and suffering, so that the idea of a work of fiction arose from this, which she explained to me in a long conversation: she wanted to write a “Satanide”. She wanted to show the state of suffering and pain in the world on the one hand, and on the other hand the world view that had been handed down to her.

Now the materialistic-mechanical worldview fell into such a soul. This worldview has a strong power of persuasion, it unfolds a huge power of logic, so that it is difficult for people to escape it. I later asked Delle Grazie why she had not written the Satanide. She told me that, according to the materialistic-mechanical view, she did not believe in God and thus also not in the opponent of God, Satan.

But she had an enormous power of human experience and that is what shaped her in the great two-volume epic “Robespierre”, which is permeated throughout by such moods as you have heard. I heard her read many of the songs myself while she was still writing it. Two women became sick at one point. They could not listen to the end. This is characteristic of how people delude themselves. They believe in the science of materialism, but if you were to show them the consequences, they would faint.

The materialistic worldview truly makes people weak and cowardly. They look at the world with a veil and yet still want to be Christians. And that, in particular, seemed to Marie Eugenie delle Grazie to be the worst thing about existence. She said to herself something like the following: Everything is just swirling atoms, atoms swirling around in confusion. What do these whirling atoms do? After they have clumped together into world bodies, after they have caused plants to grow, they clump together people and human brains and in these brains, through the clumping together of atoms, ideals arise, ideals of beauty, of all kinds of greatness, of all kinds of divinity. What a terrible existence, she said to herself, when atoms whirl and whirl in such a way that they make people believe in an existence of ideals. The whole existence of the world is a deception and a lie. That is what those who are not too cowardly to draw the final consequences of the materialistic-mechanical world view say. Delle Grazie says: If this world of whirling atoms were at least true, then we would have whirling atoms in our minds. But the whirling atoms still deceive us, lie to us, as if there were ideals in the world.

Therefore, when one has learned to recognize the consequences that the human mind must draw when it behaves honestly in relation to the materialistic-mechanical world view, then one has again one of the reasons for working on a spiritual world view.

To those who always say, “We have everything, we have our ideals, we have what Christianity has brought so far,” it must be replied, Have we not brought about the powerful mechanistic-materialistic worldview through the way we have behaved? Do you want to continue like this? Those who want to prove the unnecessaryness of our movement because this or that is presented from other sides should consider that despite the fact that these other sides have been working for centuries, the mechanistic-materialistic worldview has grown. The important thing is to try to grasp life where it actually occurs. It does not depend on what thoughts we entertain, but on our looking at the facts and allowing ourselves to be taught by them. I have often mentioned that I once gave a lecture in a town on the subject of Christianity from the standpoint of spiritual science. There were two priests there. After the lecture they came to me and said: That is all very well and good what you say there, but the way you present it, only a few understand it; the more correct way is what we present the matter, because that is for all people. — I could say nothing other than: Excuse me, but do all people really go to you? That you believe it is for all people does not decide anything about the matter, but what really is, and so you will not be able to deny that numerous people no longer go to you. And we speak for them because they also have to find the way to the Christ. — That is what one says when one does not choose the easy way, when one does not simply find one's own opinion good, but lets oneself be guided by the facts.

Therefore, as you could see yesterday, it is not enough to simply read the sentences of a work like the Wrangell book in succession, but rather to tie in with what can be tied in. I would like to give you an example of how different writings in our branches can be discussed, and how what lives in our spiritual science can clearly emerge by measuring it against what is discussed in such brochures.

The next chapter in Wrangell's brochure is called:

Forming Concepts

The world around us is multifaceted. Each thing is different from every other. Even if several things have some of their properties in common, i.e., evoke the same or similar sensations, they differ in at least one attribute: each thing that I perceive through my senses currently occupies a certain part of space.

To make this multiform world more manageable, man groups similar things, i.e. things with similar properties, under common designations. He forms words for these concepts that he has created in his mind. He also uses words to describe the same or similar properties, such as red, hard, warm, hot, etc.

Here, Mr. von Wrangell expresses himself on the formation of concepts in a way that is very popular and is very often given. One says to oneself: I see a red flower, a second, a third red flower of a certain shape and arrangement of the petals, and since I find these the same, I form a concept about them. A concept would thus be formed by grouping together the same from different things. For example, the concept of “horse” is formed by grouping a number of animals that have certain similarities in a certain way into a single thought, into a single idea. I can do the same with properties. I see something with a certain color nuance, something else with a similar color nuance, and form the concept of the color “red”.

But anyone who wants to get to the bottom of things must ask themselves: is this really the way to form concepts? I can only make suggestions now, otherwise we would never get through the writing, because you can actually always link the whole world to every thing.

To illustrate how Mr. von Wrangell presents the formation of concepts, I will choose a geometric example.¹ Let us assume that we have seen different things in the world and that we find something limited one time, something else limited the next time, and something else limited the third time, and so on for countless times. We often see these similar limitations and now, according to Mr. von Wrangell's definition, we would form the concept of a “circle”. But do we really form the concept of a circle from such similar limitations? No, we only form the concept of a circle when we do the following: Here is a point that is a certain distance from this point. There is a point that is the same distance from that point, and there is another point that is the same distance and so on. I visit all the points that are the same distance from a certain point. If I connect these points, I get a line, which I call a circle, and I get the concept of the circle if I can say: the circle is a line in which all points are the same distance from the center. And now I have a formula and that leads me to the concept. The inner elaboration, the inner construction actually leads to the concept. Only those who know how to conceptualize in this way, who know how to construct what is present in the world, have the right to speak of concepts. We do not find the concept of a horse by looking at a hundred horses to find out what they have in common, but we find the essence of the horse by reconstructing it, and then we find what has been reconstructed in every horse.

This moment of activity, when we form ideas and concepts, is often forgotten. In this chapter too, the moment of inner activity has been forgotten.

The next chapter is called:

Concepts of Space and Time

The sense of touch in connection with seeing produces the idea of space. The direct experience of the succession of sensations leads us to the idea of time. Space and time are the forms of thought in which our ideas of the world outside us are formed, insofar as we perceive them through our five senses.

The concept of movement, as the change of the position of a thing in space within a period of time, is also an original concept, initially given by the movement of one's own body.

When the things we perceive with our senses evoke the same sensory impressions in us within a certain period of time, we gain the notion of “being” or “existence.” If, on the other hand, the impressions received from the same thing change, we gain the notion of “happening” or “occurrence”.

Thus, in a very neat way, as they say, Mr. Wrangell seeks to gain ideas about the concepts of space and time, of movement, being and happening. Now it would be extremely interesting to study how, in this chapter, everything is, I might say, “slightly pursed” despite everything. It would be quite good for many people - I don't want to say just for you, my dear friends, but for many people - if they would consider that a very astute man, an excellent scientist, forms such ideas and goes to great lengths to form ideas about these simple concepts. At the very least, a great deal of conscientiousness in thinking can be learned from this. And that is important; for there are so many people who, before they think about anything, the cosmos, do not even feel the need to ask themselves: How do I arrive at the simple ideas of being, happening and movement? - As a rule, that is too boring for people.

Now, a deeper examination would show that the concepts, as Mr. von Wrangell forms them, are quite easily linked. For example, Mr. von Wrangell says so offhand: “The sense of touch in connection with seeing creates the idea of space.” Just think, my dear friends, if you do not use the writing board to draw a circle, but draw the circle in your imagination, what does the sense of touch have to do with it, what does seeing have to do with it? Can you still say: “The sense of touch in connection with seeing creates the idea of space”? You cannot. Someone might object, however, that before one can draw a circle in one's imagination, one must have gained the perception of space, and that one gains this through the sense of touch in combination with seeing. Yes, but here it is a matter of considering what kind of perception we form at the moment when we touch something through the sense of touch. If we imagine ourselves as endowed only with the sense of touch and touching something, we form the idea that what we touch is outside us. Now take this sentence: “What we touch is outside us.” In the “outside us” lies space, that is, when we touch an object, we must already have space within us in order to carry out the touching. That was what led Kant to assume that space precedes all external experiences, including the experience of touching and seeing, and that time likewise precedes the multiplicity of processes in time; that space and time are the preconditions of sensory perception.

In principle, such a chapter on space and time could only be written by someone who has not only thoroughly studied Kant but also is familiar with the entire course of philosophy; otherwise, one will always have carelessly defined terms with regard to space and time. It is exactly the same with the other terms, the terms of “being” and “happening”. It could easily be shown that the concept of being could not exist at all if the definition given by Mr. von Wrangell were correct. For he says: “When things that we perceive through our senses evoke the same sensory impressions within a certain period of time, we gain the idea of ‘being’, of existence. If, on the other hand, the impressions received from the same thing change, we gain the idea of 'happening'. You could just as easily say: If we see that the sensations of the same thing change, we must assume that this change adheres to a being, occurs in a being. We could just as easily claim that it is only through change that being is recognized. And if someone wanted to claim that we can only arrive at the concept of being if the same impressions are evoked within a certain time – just think! – then if we wanted to arrive at the concept of being in this way, it would be quite possible that we would not be able to arrive at the concept of being at all; there would be nothing at all that could be connected to the concept of being.

In this chapter, “Concepts of Space and Time,” we can learn how to find concepts that are fragile in all possible places with great acumen and extraordinarily honest scientific rigour. If we want to form concepts that can survive a little in the face of life, then we must have gained them in such a way that we have at least to some extent tested them in terms of their value in life.

You see, that is why I said that I had only found the courage to talk to you about the last scenes of “Faust” because for more than thirty years I have repeatedly lived in the last scenes of “Faust” and tried to test the concepts in life. That is the only way to distinguish valid concepts from invalid ones; not logical speculation, not scientific theorizing, but the attempt to live with the concepts, to examine how the concepts prove themselves by introducing them into life and letting life give us the answer, that is the necessary way. But this presupposes that we are always inclined not merely to indulge in logical fantasies, but to integrate ourselves into the living stream of life. This has a number of consequences; above all, that we learn to believe that if someone can present seemingly logical proofs for this or that – I have mentioned this often – they have by no means yet presented anything for the value of the matter.

The next chapter is called:

The Causality Principle

The principle of causality on which our thinking is based forces us to assume that if something happens, i.e. a change occurs, a cause must have brought it about. All rational thinking is based on the “principle of sufficient reason”. Every thing has a reason why it is; every change in what exists is caused by a cause.

This proposition is not an empirical proposition; it precedes all experience, indeed, it is the very condition for experience, because without the premise expressed in it, coherent thought is impossible.

Mr. von Wrangell is taking the standpoint of the so-called principle of causality here. He says: All rational thinking must assume that everything we encounter is based on a cause. In a sense, one can agree with this principle of causality. But if you want to measure its significance for our vital world view, then you have to introduce much, much more subtle concepts than this formal principle of causality.

Because, you see, to be able to indicate a cause or a complex of causes for a thing, it takes much more than just following the thread of cause and effect, so to speak. What does the principle of causality actually say? It says: a thing has a cause. The thing that I am drawing here [the drawing has not been handed down] has a cause, this cause has another cause and so on; you can continue like this until beyond the beginning of the world and you can do the same with the effect. Certainly this is a very reasonable principle, but you don't get very far with it. For example, if you are looking for the cause of the son, you have to look for complexes of causes in the father and mother in order to be able to say that these are the causes of the child. But it is also true that although such causes may be present, they have no effect, namely when a woman and a man have no children. Then the causes are present, but they have no effect. With the cause, it just depends on whether it is not just a cause, but that it also causes something. There is a difference between “being the cause” and “causing”. But even the philosophers of our time do not get involved in such subtle differences. But if you take things seriously, you have to deal with such differences. In reality, it is not a matter of causes being there, but of their effecting something. Concepts that exist in this way do not necessarily correspond to reality, but they allow us to indulge our imagination.

Goethe's world view is fundamentally different. It does not go to the causes, but to the archetypal phenomena. That is something quite different. For Goethe takes something that exists in the world as an appearance, that is, as a phenomenon - let us say that certain color series appear in the prism - and he traces it back to the archetypal phenomenon, to the interaction of matter and light, or, if we take matter as representing darkness, to darkness and light. In exactly the same way, he deals with the archetypal phenomenon of the plant, the animal and so on. This is a world view that faces facts squarely and does not merely spin out concepts logically, but groups the facts in such a way that they express a truth.

Try to read what Goethe wrote in his essay “The Experiment as Mediator between Subject and Object” and also what I was able to publish as a supplement to this essay. Also try to read what I my introductions to Goethe's scientific writings in Kürschner's Deutsche National-Literatur, then you will see that Goethe's view of nature is based on something quite different from that of modern natural scientists. We must take the phenomena and group them not as they exist in nature, but so that they express their secrets to us. To find the archetypal phenomenon in the phenomena is the essential thing.

This is what I also wanted to imply yesterday when I said that one must go into the facts. What people like us think of the mechanistic-materialistic world view is of little consequence. But if one can show how, in 1872, one of its representatives stood before the assembled natural scientists in Leipzig and said that the task of natural science was to reduce all natural phenomena to the movements of atoms, then one points to a fact that also points to a primal phenomenon of historical development. The reduction of historical development to primal phenomena is demonstrated by pointing out what Du Bois-Reymond said, because that is a primal phenomenon in the materialistic-mechanical worldview process.

If you proceed in this way, you no longer learn to think like in a glass chamber, but to think in such a way that you become an instrument for the facts that express their secrets, and you can then test your thinking to see whether it really conforms to the facts.

I will relate the following not to boast but to tell of my own experiences as far as possible. I prefer to speak of things I have experienced rather than of various things I have thought out. If anyone absolutely insists on believing that what I am about to say is said to boast, let him believe it, but it is not so.

When I tried to describe Goethe's world view in the 1980s, I said, based on what one finds when one immerses oneself in it: Goethe must have written an essay at some point that expresses the most intimate aspects of his scientific view. And I said, after reconstructing the essay, that this essay must have existed, at least in Goethe's mind. You can find this in my introduction to Goethe's scientific writings. You will also find the reconstructed essay there. I then came to the Goethe Archive and there I found the essay exactly as I had reconstructed it. So you have to go with the facts. Those who seek wisdom let the facts speak. This is, however, the more uncomfortable method, for one must concern oneself with the facts; one need not concern oneself with the thoughts that arise.

The next chapter is entitled:

Application of the Idea of Arbitrariness to the Environment

Since our sensation is that from which we, as the directly given, start in all thinking, we also judge what we address as the external world, initially according to what is going on in us.

If I were to read you “Truth and Science,” I could show you the correct thought and the correct understanding, and show you how this is another example of superficial thinking. First of all, I would like to know how there could ever be a mathematics if we were to start from our sensations in all our thinking. Then we would never be able to arrive at a mathematics. For what should our sensation be when we ask: What is the magnitude of the sum of the squares of the two legs of a right-angled triangle in relation to the square of the hypotenuse? But Wrangell says: “Since our sensation is that from which we, as the directly given, start in all thinking, we also judge what we address as the external world, first of all, according to what goes on in us.” - You can't do much with this sentence. We want to see further:

We are aware that those changes in the environment that we ourselves consciously bring about through movements of our limbs are caused by internal processes that we call volitional impulses. Therefore, the unbiased person also initially assumes similar causes for other changes in the environment, i.e. he assumes that they too are caused by volitional impulses of beings similar to himself. The mythologies of all peoples are expressions of this anthropomorphic animation of nature, and the belief in spiritual entities, which even now serves many people to explain many events in their environment, has the same origin. Finally, the observation of the child shows that it even ascribes a will to inanimate objects, similar to its own. It bumps into the table and scolds the table for this bad habit.

I have said before: the child pushes against the table and beats the table because it attributes a will to it. It judges the table as its equal because it has not yet developed the idea of the table in itself. It is exactly the opposite, and the next chapter also suffers from this confusion:

Observation of regular phenomena

Therefore, although man initially attributes many events to free impulses of will, daily observation shows him that he can count on a regular repetition of some phenomena. He knows, for example, that the sun, after setting in the west, will appear again in the east the next day; that light and warmth are connected. He knows that the seasons influence the life of plants in their regular course, etc. This knowledge enables man to organize his actions accordingly. He soon finds that the more closely he observes nature, the more regularities he discovers in it, and the better he can harmonize with nature.

If we wish to speak of the regularities in nature in this way, then we must not forget that we speak of such regularities in quite different ways. I pointed this out in “Truth and Science”. Let us suppose, for example, that I get dressed in the morning, go to the window and see a person walking by outside. The next morning I get dressed again, look out the window again, and the person passes by again. The third morning the same thing happens, and the fourth morning as well. I see a pattern here. The first thing I do is get dressed, then I go to the window; the next thing is that I see the person walking outside. I see a pattern because the events repeat themselves. So I form a judgment, and it should be: Because I am getting dressed and looking out the window, that's why the man is passing by outside. Of course, we don't form such judgments, because it would be crazy. But in other cases it seems as if we do; but in reality we don't even then. But we do form concepts, and from the inner construction of the concepts we find that there is an inner lawfulness in the appearances. And because I cannot construct a causality between my getting dressed, looking out the window and what passes by outside, I do not recognize any causality either. You can find more details about this in “Truth and Science”. There you will find all the prerequisites, including the one presented by David Hume, that we can gain knowledge about the laws of the world from repetition.

The next chapter is called:

The Nature of All Science

This is probably the beginning of all science, the essence of which consists in summarizing facts of experience in a clear and concise way in order to extract rules from them that enable people to know in advance what will happen. Therefore, every science contains a descriptive part, the clear compilation of facts, and a theoretical part, the extraction of rules from these facts and the conclusions to be drawn from these rules.

Goethe objected to such conclusions: Did a Galileo need to see many phenomena like the swinging kitchen lamp in the dome of Pisa to arrive at his law of falling bodies? No, he recognized the law after seeing this phenomenon. That's how he understood it. It is not from the repetition of facts, but from the inwardly experienced construction of facts that we learn something about the essence of things. It was a fundamental error of modern epistemology to assume that we can gain something like the laws of nature by summarizing the facts. This so obviously contradicts the actual gaining of natural laws, and yet it is repeated over and over again.

The next chapter:

Astronomy, the oldest science.

If we take a look around at the vast realm of what we perceive through our senses, we find that the apparent movement of the stars is the group of phenomena in which the laws of what happens are most striking, most easily discovered and expressed. It is therefore understandable that astronomy is the oldest of all sciences based on sensory perception.

Above all, it is the regular apparent movement of the stars, repeating itself day after day, that captivates the attentive observer, inspiring him to observe and forming a vivid imagination. In the cloudless regions of the Near East and North Africa, the external conditions were particularly favorable for the study of celestial phenomena. Following their direct sensory impressions, the astronomers of antiquity assumed that the countless fixed stars, which remain unchanged in their mutual position, are attached to a transparent but firm celestial sphere, at the center of which the Earth rests. The celestial sphere, rotating evenly around an axis, provided a vivid representation of the perceived process.

The chapter is therefore called “Astronomy, the oldest science”. Now one would actually first have to go into what the oldest astronomy was like. Because the main thing to consider is that the oldest astronomy was such that people did not look at the regularity, but at the will of the spiritual beings that cause the movements. However, the author has today's astronomy in mind and labels it as the oldest science. Sometimes it is really necessary to pursue the truth in one's method quite unvarnished, that is, with no varnished method. And when the chapter here on page 13 is called “Astronomy, the oldest science,” I compare it - because I stick to the facts and don't worry about them - with what is on page 3. It says there, “that according to my studies I am an astronomer.” Perhaps it could be that someone who is a mathematician or a physiologist would come to a different conclusion; so one should not forget what is written on page 3. It is of great importance to point out a person's subjective motives much more than one usually does, because these subjective motives usually explain what needs to be explained. But when it comes to subjective motives, people are really quite peculiar. They want to admit as few subjective motives as possible. I have often mentioned a gentleman whom I had met and who said that when he did this or that, it was important for him not to do what he wanted to do according to his personal preference, but to do what corresponded least to his personal preference, but which he had to regard as his mission imposed on him by the spiritual world. It was of no use to make it clear to him that he must also count licking his fingers as part of his spiritual mission when he says to himself: I do everything according to my mission imposed on me by the spiritual world. — But he masked that, because he liked it better when he could present what he liked to do so much as a strict sense of duty.

The next chapter:

Uniform motion

When we speak of uniformity of motion, we mean that the object in question passes through equal portions of space in equal intervals of time.

Do you remember the lecture on speed that I once gave here? [In this volume.]

But to determine this, mere perception is not enough; one must be able to measure both spatial parts and time intervals. Only when we can express both spatial parts and time segments in numbers by measuring, i.e. by comparing with an unchanging, homogeneous size chosen as a unit, only then can the actual uniformity of a movement, as well as the effect of a certain cause, which is always the same in size, be proven by experience.

This is where the learned scientist begins to speak. You only need to look around a little to see what a desire for objectivity permeates scientists, to strive for what is independent of the subjective human being, to strive to apply objective standards. The most objective way to do this is to actually measure. That is why what is gained through measurement is considered real science. That is why Mr. von Wrangell talks about the measurement itself in the next chapter.

Measuring

Every measuring operation is based on the assumption that the unit chosen, for example a meter, a gram, a second, etc., is unchangeable. We cannot prove this unconditionally about our units, but we can be sure that our measuring operations are correct within certain limits that we can recognize. Let us cite a vivid example to illustrate what has been said: We want to compare the length of two objects and measure them with the same meter rule, assuming that it retains its length. However, we know that all bodies change under the influence of temperature, humidity, etc., so our meter rule may also have become longer or shorter. Without knowing the magnitude of the presumed change, we have, however, the well-founded conviction that the change in such a short time cannot have reached the magnitude of, say, 1 mm. We can therefore be sure that we have not made a mistake in this measurement that exceeds 1 mm for each meter measured. Through such a measuring operation, we have obtained an empirical fact – in our case, the ratio of two lengths – which is valid for us within the limits of accuracy established by the Dutch critics.

This is a very nice little chapter, which vividly demonstrates how, through measurement, something can initially be said about size ratios.

The next chapter:

The principle underlying clocks

The situation is similar when measuring periods of time. The instruments used for this purpose, the clocks, are essentially based on the conviction that the same causes produce the same effects. The ancients mostly used water clocks (clepsydras) for this purpose, in which the outflow of water from a container was made under conditions that were as uniform as possible (the water level was kept at the same height, the outflow tube was of a certain shape, etc.), and the amount of water that flowed out was used to determine the length of the time period. Our pendulum clocks are based on the realization that the speed of a pendulum swing depends on the length of the pendulum, all other conditions being equal. By ensuring that the length remains as constant as possible, that the resistance is as low as possible, and that the force that overcomes it acts evenly, a clock will run smoothly. There are methods for testing this, whereby one can precisely determine the maximum extent to which the clock has run too fast or too slow over the course of a day, for example.

You see, this chapter is so good because it allows us to visualize in simple terms how we take shortcuts in life. We can easily see this if we start with the old clocks, with the water clocks. Suppose a man who used the water clock had said, “It took me three hours to do this work.” What does that mean? What does that mean? You would think that everyone understands this. But you don't consider that you are already relying on certain assumptions. Because the person concerned should actually have said, if he had expressed facts: While I was working, so and so much water flowed out from the beginning to the end of my work. Instead of always saying: from the beginning to the end of my work, so and so much water has flowed out, we compared the outflow of water with the course of the sun and used an abbreviation, the formula: I worked for three hours. We then continue to use this formula. We believe we have something factual in mind, but we have left out a thought, namely, so and so much of the water has flowed out. We have only the second thought as an abbreviation. But by giving ourselves the possibility that such a fact becomes a formula, we distance ourselves from the fact. And now think about the fact that in life we not only bring together work and a formula, but that we actually talk in formulas, really talk in formulas. Just think, for example, what it means to be “diligent”. If we go back to the facts, there is an enormous amount of facts underlying the formula “to be industrious”. We have seen many things happen and compared them with the time in which they can happen, and so we speak of “being industrious”. A whole host of facts is contained in this, and often we speak such formulas without reflecting on the facts.

When we come back to the facts, we feel the need to express our thoughts in a lively way and not in nebulous formulas. I once heard a professor give a lecture who began a course on literary history by saying: “When we turn to Lessing, we want to look at his style, first asking ourselves how Lessing used to think about the world, how he worked, how he intended to use it, and so on. And after he had been asking questions like this for an hour, he said: “Gentlemen, I have led you into a forest of question marks!” Now just imagine a “forest of question marks,” imagine you want to go for a walk in this forest of question marks; imagine the feeling! Well, I also heard this man say that some people throw themselves into a “bath of fire.” I always had to think about what people look like when they plunge into a fire bath. You often meet people who are unaware of how far they are from reality. If you immerse yourself in their words, in their word-images, and try to make sense of what their words mean, you find that everything disintegrates and flies apart, because what people say is not possible in reality. So you can learn a great deal from these perceptive chapters on 'Measuring' and on 'The Principle Underlying Clocks', a great deal indeed.

I cannot say with certainty when I will be able to continue discussing the following chapters of this booklet. Today I would just like to note that, of course, I only wanted to highlight examples and that, of course, this can be done in a hundred different ways. But if we do this, we will ensure that our spiritual-scientific movement is not encapsulated, but that we really pull the strings throughout the world. Because the worst thing would be if we closed ourselves off, my dear friends.

I have pointed out that thinking is of particular importance and significance, and therefore it is important that we also take some of what has been placed before our souls in recent weeks, so that we think about it, understand it in the most one-sided way and implement it in life. For example, when people have spoken of “mystical eccentricity,” then that has happened for a good reason. But if people now think that one should no longer speak of spiritual experiences, that would be the greatest nonsense. If spiritual experiences are true, then they are realities. The important thing is that they are true and that we remain within spiritual boundaries. It is important that we do not fall from one extreme to the other. It is more important that we really try not only to accept spiritual science as such, but also to realize that spiritual science must be placed within the fabric of the world.

It would certainly be wrong to believe that one should no longer do spiritual science at all, but only read such brochures in the branches. That would also be an incorrect interpretation. One must reflect on what I meant. But the great evil that I have indicated, that many people write instead of listening, is prevented by the fact that we listen and do not write. Because if only the kind of nonsense that really happens when lectures are transcribed is produced when they are rewritten, and we believe that we definitely need transcribed lectures, then, my dear friends, I have to say, firstly, that we place little value on what has appeared in print, because there is actually plenty of material that has already been printed; and secondly, it is not at all necessary for us to always chase after the very latest. This is a quirk of journalism that people have adopted, and we must not cultivate it here. Thoroughly working through what is there is something essential and meaningful, and we will not spoil our ability to listen carefully by copying down what we hear, but will have a desire to listen carefully. Because scribbling something down rarely results in anything other than spoiling the attention we could develop by listening. Therefore, I believe that those of us who want to work in the branches will find opportunities when they think they have no material, but they do have such material. They no longer have to go to each person who has copied down the lecture to get rewritten lectures, just so that they can always read the latest one aloud. Really, it depends on the seriousness, and the fact that work in this direction has not been very serious has produced many phenomena, albeit indirectly, from which we actually suffer.

So, my dear friends, I don't know yet exactly; but when it is possible again, then perhaps on Saturday I will continue the discussion of the excellent, astute brochure by Mr. von Wrangell, which I have chosen because it was written by a scientist and has a positive and not a negative content.

• 1. This was apparently demonstrated on the blackboard; the drawing has not been handed down.

In the course of lectures on the life between death and a new birth which I gave in 1914, you will find many indications that may be regarded as a complement to what I have explained to you during the past days and weeks. To-day I want to speak in particular of the change which takes place in the conditions of life between death and a new birth, which greatly resembles the alternating states of waking and sleeping during the life between birth and death.

When we are awake we have our normal consciousness, and it is this which really gives us our human character between birth and death; and when we are asleep our consciousness is, as it were, dulled. Our consciousness then lies below the threshold of our waking life and we experience the processes in which we live from the moment of falling asleep to that of waking up, only in a blunt state of consciousness, either quite bluntly, quite asleep, or so that certain life-reminiscences or inner organic processes rise out of our sleep in form of pictures. A similar alternation may also be found in the life between death and a new birth, except that there, as you have seen, everything is, as it were, reversed in comparison with the conditions of our earthly life. I have described to you how radically different are man’s experiences between death and a new birth to his experiences on earth. This also applies to the alternating states of consciousness. As described in my last lecture, between death and a new birth our experiences show us the deeds, the will-impulses of our Ego. This state of consciousness in which our Ego then lives, is, as it were, the normal one, even as here, the waking state of consciousness is the normal one. We have seen that here we are built up, as it were, of our physical body, etheric body, astral body and Ego, and there, of the Ego, the Spirit-Self, the Life-Spirit and Spirit-Man, which exist, to begin with, as a preliminary foundation. Between death and a new birth, the Ego is therefore the lowest member. But even as here we are inward1y conscious of our Ego through our waking consciousness, so there, through the corresponding state of consciousness, we grow aware of our Ego as an outer experience; we are conscious of our Ego by looking back upon our past deeds and volitional impulses, which, as already described, we experience as if they were reflected to us from the earth. This condition alternates with another; here on earth we may speak of a waking and of a sleeping consciousness, to which we may add a sub-conscious state, whereas between death and a new birth we must speak of the state of consciousness described above and of a kind of super-consciousness, where higher Beings grow conscious within us, that is to say, where higher Beings are the vehicles of our consciousness.

During our earthly condition of sleep we sink down to a kind of plant existence, but in the super-conscious state between death and a new birth we rise up to a kind of Archangel-consciousness, to one which lies above our own. I said that when we are in a normal condition we have behind us, as it were, the Hierarchies of the higher Spiritual Beings. In this super-conscious condition we positively move back towards them. And then we live within them. From them we learn more than we could know as human beings. If between death and a new birth we only experienced what we can experience through our Ego, that sends its rays after us and yet belongs to us, if we were limited to this, we could not experience, as already described, all the processes through which we must pass in order to build up our organism anew, for a new earthly life. We can do this only because our normal states of consciousness alternate with states of existence in which the knowledge (Wissens-zustände) of the Archangeloi and even of the Archai penetrate into our human being, also into our normal consciousness, where they rise up like memories, in the same way in which here on earth dreams enter our consciousness from the sub-conscious spheres. Between death and a new birth we thus live in such a way as to have the consciousness described above, but in between there are always super-conscious conditions, in which we also acquire a super-human knowledge which enables us to build up our existence exactly as required for our next earthly life. Consequently there are analogies between the earthly life from birth to death and the other life from death to a new birth. But we should bear in mind the strong, radical difference between these two conditions of life.

It is possible to see still more clearly into such things by perceiving also the uniting element between the two, by becoming acquainted with what penetrates as an essence of a higher kind into both states of existence—into our earthly life, and into the life between death and a new birth. As we pass through our earthly life, we have, to begin with, the external sensory impressions. We have seen that volitional impulses and actions interweave with these external sensory impressions. But let us now envisage first of all the external sensory impressions.

Try for a moment to set before your soul the fact that throughout your earthly life all the human senses give you a whole complex of sensory impressions, out of which is woven the web of sensory impressions. Generally these sensory impressions are viewed in such a way as to say that they form part of the objects, that the single objects or beings appear, for example, in colours which leave an impression upon the eye, whereas other beings emit sounds and leave an impression upon the organ of hearing. But let us now consider the whole world of sensory impressions and ask what they really are.

I have often drawn your attention to the following: It is out of the question that behind the sensory impressions there should be that fantastic world of atoms dreamed of by the physicists; behind the sensory world there is instead a spiritual world. The spiritual thus exists also in the physical world, but, to begin with, it cannot be perceived by our ordinary consciousness. The ordinary consciousness has before it this web of sensory impressions. But what does it contain? In reality, it contains Beings described in my “Occult Science” as the Spirits of Form. Everything that appears to us in space has a certain form, an object even obtains form through the colour-surface. The Spirits of Form live in everything which we experience through the senses in space. In it live the same Beings named “Elohim” in the Old Testament. For the Elohim are the Spirits of Form. We rightly call this world of physical manifestations a world which manifests itself, a world of phenomena. But this is correct only because with our ordinary consciousness we human beings at first perceive in this world nothing but phenomena, manifestations, the external appearance and semblance, or—as Orientals say—Maya. But when our consciousness awakens and becomes imaginative this whole world of semblance becomes filled with images, or rather transforms itself into a world of weaving images.

This world of weaving images immediately reveals that the world of the Angeloi or Angels is woven into it. And when we reach the stage of inspiration, we obtain inspirations which come to us from everywhere in this world, for it has changed into a world of inspiration. Into this inspiration are interwoven the Beings of the Archangeloi or Archangels.

The world which we experience afterwards is that of intuitions. There we advance to the world of the Archai, whereas ordinarily we only have before us the physical world.

To be sure, when in the world around us we have advanced to the world of the Archai, it is the world of the Archai which also enables us to look back upon what we have already experienced through the higher Hierarchies in former lives between death and a new birth. In the intuitive world we perceive that the Beings whom the Bible calls Elohim, the Beings that are described in my “Occult Science” as Spirits of Form, lie behind the Archai.

We may therefore say: By looking out into the world through our senses we really look into the world of the Spirits of Form, into the physical world.

When we have thus set the physical world before our soul by saying that there we move in the world of the Spirits of Form, we may return to our inner self, but to that inner being that is still very intimately connected with the external world and has to depict for us inwardly the external world in such a way that we can bear it within us in the form of memories. In other words: We may advance from the sensory world to our inner being, to our world of thought.

The thought-world is, to begin with, given to us as a world of picture-thoughts. You will not be tempted to consider as a reality the thoughts that ordinarily live in you, the thoughts that arise in your ordinary consciousness. But in the same way in which realities conceal themselves in the physical world, namely the realities of the Spirits of Form, so there are also realities in the thought-world. Thoughts first appear to our ordinary consciousness as the fleeting inner forms we know; but even as spiritual beings may be discovered in the web of the physical world when we ascend, in the manner described, to higher knowledge through imagination and inspiration, so it is also possible to perceive the activity of spiritual beings in the world of thought. These spiritual beings live in the accompanying phenomena of thought which take place when we think.

From former lectures you know what happens when we think. Processes are then continually taking place within us which may be described by using a comparison, namely as if salt were to dissolve completely in a glass of water leaving it transparent. But if the water cools off a little it gets dim; for the salt crystallizes. Similar processes, which are processes of densification, take place within us when we think. A kind of mineralization process really takes place within us when we think. This mineralization process within us is connected with spiritual Beings that weave through the element of thought. They are the Beings we have always called Archai. We are thus able to know that when we live in our thoughts the Archai live in our life of thought, even as the Elohim, or Spirits of Form, live in our sensory perceptions. In the external world, these Spirits of Form can only be perceived through imaginative knowledge.

When we study the external world with the consciousness which is the normal one to-day, we come to the so-called laws of Nature. These laws of Nature are abstractions. As soon as we proceed to imaginative knowledge we do not have abstract laws of Nature formulated in sentences, but we have pictures, imaginative life. These pictures are not the same as those I have mentioned before, but images which penetrate in a condensed form into the pictures which we obtain when beholding the Elohim, and they penetrate into them as a dimming, tinging element, as it were. This is the influence of the Archai in the external world. We may trace it in the outer and in the inner world.

Perhaps it is now good to turn our gaze away from man’s inner being and to envisage one of life’s manifestations. Thought first lives within us, although thought connects us with the external world; the secrets of the external world are revealed to us through thought, yet, to begin with, thought lives within us. But thought comes to expression when we communicate it to other people. In human life speech is the element through which we give expression to our thoughts, through which thought can manifest itself outwardly.

After having considered the world of thought, let us now consider the world of speech. I have often drawn attention to the fact that the human being of course has more experiences in connection with his world of speech than with his world of thought. Although the will also streams into the element of thought, man’s ordinary consciousness only notices this very slightly. But into speech the human will flows in a way which is quite noticeable to the ordinary consciousness. Yet ordinary consciousness only grasps very little of what really lives in speech. What lives in sound is perceived in the present intellectual age at the most as a sign denoting something. For modern man the inner life of sound is something which has to a great extent withdrawn to the background of consciousness. In regard to modern man we can only point out that sound, the resounding of speech, contains something which can be grasped as a life-element of its own.

Take, for example, a word containing two E (pronounced A in German), the word “gehen”, to walk. If we have a feeling for such things, we may well experience in these two sounds of “gehen” a tranquil way of walking that does not excite us. But when the A-sound (German E) is replaced by an OW-sound (German AU), as in “laufen”, to run, you will feel in it something which you do not experience when you are not walking calmly, but when greater claims are made on your breathing. You feel what takes place when you breathe more quickly, and this is expressed in the OW-sound (German AU). You could not experience the calm way of walking, “gehen”, better than by the two A-sounds (German E), which convey the experience of calm and tranquillity, whereas the running movement, “laufen” is expressend in the OW-sound (German AU) which it contains. There is a spiritual essence in language and many examples which I have given you draw attention to the inner genius undoubtedly contained in speech. Modern men hardly know of its existence, but in past times, when the inner essence of sound could still be experienced, men felt in speech, more consciously than through sensory observation and thought, something which may indeed be felt as a spiritual weaving, a spiritual life.

In this element of speech, in this world of speech, live the Archangeloi, the Archangels, even as the Archai live in the world of thoughts. And because the Archangeloi live in the genius of speech, they are at the same time the Folk-Spirits, the leading spirits of the nations, a fact which I have often described in connection with the Archangels. They live in the element of speech. More than we suppose, man himself is the product of speech, in the same way in which he is, on the other hand, the product of his thought-world. We derive our form completely from the external world, and through our will we again pour form into the external world. What constitutes our life comes from the same region as our thoughts. The Archai live in it. What comes to expression in our language, through which we belong to a nation, brings to expression physical qualities which limit us far more as human beings than that which comes from the thought-element. People have the same thoughts, yet different languages. In regard to language they differ, yet it is nevertheless something which they have in common with others, for man belongs to a small or large nation.

Let us now descend to the sphere of the Angeloi. As often explained, also in this lecture, man has an individual connection with his Angel. This comes to expression in two ways. It expresses itself inwardly. Man may submit to his inner life in such a way as to transcend his inner self. In ordinary life, a Luciferic element will immediately enter because this is an intimate experience; nevertheless man may transcend himself inwardly and experience, as it were, an objective element in phantasy. In many respects, his phantasy is a creative force, but individually creative, like speech. And in reality, the force of phantasy lies at the foundation of speech. Through speech, man only experiences something abstract, he cannot always feel the Archangel, who is the genius of speech, unfolding his wings in speech; similarly man cannot perceive in his phantasy—which becomes a play of fancy when pervaded by Luciferic elements—that an Angel is slipping through his individual life; whenever he lives in his phantasy, an Angel passes through him. A genuine poet, a genuine artist, who has not become cynical, frivolous or superficial, knows that a higher spirituality pervades him whenever he is artistically creative. It is the same higher spirituality that carries him from life to life, as our individual guardian spirit, as his Angelos, his Angel. It is the Angel that enters sound human phantasy. In some of Goethe’s mottoes we can recognise that Goethe was aware of an unconscious element working in him, the one that is really active in phantasy.

When the human being does not inwardly transcend himself, but is outside himself during sleep, and in sleep enters the sphere which is the source of phantasy during his waking life, then the same forces which openly manifest themselves in his phantasy come to expression more sub-consciously in the form of dreams. Phantasy may degenerate into an empty play of fancy when it is pervaded by Luciferic forces, and in the same way dreams may degenerate, become abnormal, and man may take them for realities when they are pervaded by Ahrimanic influences. Dreams as such enter the Luciferic sphere, but they may be pervaded by Ahrimanic influences. When, however, our dreams are innocent and purely human, they also contain the Being whom we call our Angelos, the same that lives in our phantasy when we transcend ourselves inwardly, as it were.

The world of speech, ruled by the Archangel, is shaded off inwardly to a world which exists between feeling and thought, to a world of representations—we might also say, to a world of feeling representations. Phantasy and dreaming are shaded off to a world of feeling and to the element of feeling contained in the will—we might also say, to volitional feeling. But when we descend still further, below the Angeloi, what sphere do we reach? We reach our own sphere, we come to the human Ego. There we must transcend ourselves more intensively than when the Angel lives in us. This occurs when we transform impulses of the will into external actions, as explained yesterday.

Elohim—Spirits of Form World of the Senses.
Archai—World of Thought.
Archangeloi—World of Speech – Feeling Representation.
Angeloi—Phantasy—Dreaming—Volitional Feeling.
Human Ego—Volitional Action—Will.

When we dream, we are completely outside ourselves, but we go out of ourselves only spiritually. When we do something through our will, we do not of course go out of ourselves physically, but we move our physical body, and these impulses of the will are really the foundation of our Ego. We may therefore say: The will lives in our volitional actions, the will digs itself, as it were, into the external world.

We have descended as far as the physical world. In the physical world we develop ourselves in an independent way only through our will-actions, only in what remains to us as the sum-total of our actions when we pass through death. Our Ego, upon which we look back after death, lives in our actions. In everything else, in our phantasy and dreams, in world of speech, in our world of thought and in what we obtain through the senses, live higher spiritual Beings that constantly pervade us.

We have now been able to conclude from ordinary life how we are connected with the spiritual cosmos. But the following consideration will lead us to the results which spiritual science can reach through these concepts. Let us take human life in the physical-sensory world. You pass through this world, you derive certain impressions from it. Perhaps you may still remember these impressions on the following day. I do not say that tomorrow all the people who are now sitting in this hall will have an inner experience of the lecture they are now hearing. But as a rule we may say that the things which we perceive in our surroundings continue to live within us.

I will now make a schematic drawing, in order that we may continue along this line of thought. Here is the surrounding world and at this point let us imagine man. What constitutes the surrounding world continues to live in him, for what you experience in connection with your environment continues to live within you physically. The external world, which we can only perceive through the senses, continues to live in the soul in the form of abstract experiences, in thoughts and feelings which stimulate our will impu1ses. You may now say: What lives within me, what I thus carry about with me (let us envisage this very exactly!), is the result of my ex-periences between birth and death, or between birth and the present moment.

But let us now turn our gaze to something which we do not carry within our soul in such an abstract, picture-like form, but which lives within us—I might say—in a concretely material way: the organs that lie under our skin, the lungs, the heart, the liver, and so forth. This too is something which we carry within us. A true mystic will say: This does not interest me in the least! I am only interested in the spiritual, in the soul. I am content to have within me soul-impressions which come from the surrounding world. Material things are far too low for me. But the mystic shows by this how deeply materialistic he really is, because he does not yet know that what apparently reveals itself materially is in reality spiritual. Spiritual is not only what we bear within us abstractly, the soul-experiences which are echoes of external experiences between birth and death, but spiritual are also our lungs, our liver, etc. Only to our ordinary consciousness do they appear in a material form, but they are altogether products of the spirit. When you are sitting in your study you may have the thought that man consists of physical body, etheric body, astral body and Ego. This thought is your inner property. But once it lived outside. It may first have approached you through a book or a lecture; that is to say, from the outside world. But you also bear within you materially the lungs, the heart, the liver, the brain, etc. Also these are the result of experiences. These inner organs that live in you were of course not produced by the physical substance which only comes through conception and birth, but their inner form, their inner structure is the result of experiences between death and birth. You now hear what I am saying and my words will become a soul-experience; similarly your heart, your lungs, your liver, are the result of experiences made between death and a new birth. We may therefore say:

“What I carry with me psychically within my inner being is the result of my experiences between birth and death.”

“What I carry within me as my bodily organisation is the result of my life between death and birth.”

Materialists will of course object that all the organs which live in man were inherited physically from the forefathers. But this is quite mistaken; it is not so. Certainly, the physical substance is transmitted by the ancestors, but the germ is generally viewed quite wrongly. It must be viewed wrongly if it is only considered from the material aspect. Conception does not consist therein that the human being is drawn down materially through the generations, but there arises, as it were, a vacuum, substance is destroyed in man, and in this vacuum the whole universe begins to work, to build up man. Physical structure penetrates into the spiritual structure, for the lungs, the heart, the liver, etc. are altogether spiritual in their structure. But all the organising forces come from the whole universe, and they are formed by our experiences between death and a new birth. This is what we experience through a super wakeful consciousness when we rise up into the sphere of the Archangeloi and of the Archai. Between death and new birth we experience consciously, indeed we must say super-consciously, our organic structure, the way in which we build up our organs.

Our organs are built up in a way which is entirely in keeping with our Karma; they correspond with what we bring with us from a former earthly life. The merely physical processes which apparently take place in the line of the generations are therefore not only physical processes, but they are brought about by the whole cosmos.

When ordinary, superficial materialists come along and say: “Do not explain man’s origin and development in his mother’s womb by drawing in the whole cosmos, do not lead us out into the whole cosmos, for we can explain all this by describing the continuity of the germ’s plasma throughout the generations”—when these materialists come along, the following picture I have used has often been of help: You have a magnetic needle pointing north and south. Now a person may say: Certain mad physicists declare that the whole earth is a magnet and that the needle’s south-pole is attracted by the earth’s soul-pole. But the reason why the needle points to the south must be sought in the needle itself. What does the magnetic needle matter to the earth?—Our biologists talk more or less in the same way when they speak of the human germ. They see nothing but this germ. But even as the whole earth is active in the magnetic needle, so the whole universe is active in the development of the germ. Except that man’s share in it lies further back, in the unconscious sphere.

You see, if things are considered in this light, man and his whole existence are linked up with a material and with a spiritual universe. We say to ourselves: Whenever we think or cognise something through our ordinary consciousness we change the outer world into an inner world. Yesterday I explained to you from a certain aspect that when the human being passes through the portal of death his inner world becomes his outer world, and his outer world his inner. To-day I explained to you from another aspect that everything which lies before birth, i.e. before conception, should be regarded in such a way that the processes which prepare our inner bodily structure should be sought in the life between death and a new birth. Outer life becomes inner life. Our experiences which lie spread out, as it were, in the whole cosmos, quietly and unconsciously change into inner experiences and become our organs.

The organs within us indeed contain a whole universe. If we only bear in mind the ordinary descriptions of our organs in anatomy and physiology we have before as an illusion, a Maya, which is far stronger than the one which faces us in the external world.

I have told you that when we look out into the sensory world we look as far as the sphere of the Elohim. But when we look down into our inner bodily structure we must rise still higher in regard to that which lives within us and forms our organs. From my “Occult Science” you also know that there are Beings above the Spirits of Form. They do not only live outside man, but work within him. We learn something about them between death and a new birth, when we rise to the sphere of the Archai, but with our own consciousness. Through the Archai we learn to know these higher Beings. In this super-conscious state they show us what we pour into our organism. Throughout our life we really carry the world of the Hierarchies within our organic structure.

Now it is again possible to investigate such things. In past epochs they were known through a certain instinctive clairvoyant consciousness. People still spoke of the fact that the human organism is a temple of the gods, and knowledge of the whole cosmos was sought within man’s being, the microcosm; it was sought by interpreting the microcosm.

Do we not remember everything by drawing it out of our memory, in connection with the world which we have experienced since we gained consciousness in our earthly existence? We look into our inner self, and there we find the world which we experienced outside; it lives within us and we can, as it were, look upon the pictures which we carry within our soul in such a way that the life outside has entered these pictures. We understand our earthly life anew by looking back upon these pictures of memory. And when we consider our bodily organisation and understand it, then we understand cosmic processes. Our inner memories enable us to understand our experiences. And if we know how to consider our whole human organisation, we grasp the cosmic processes. To understand man through and through is Anthroposophy.

Anthroposophy is therefore also a cosmosophy. Our life rises up before us when we remember; similarly Anthroposophy is a cosmic memory that sets before us the whole world-process: Cosmosophy. It is impossible to think of these two things apart. Cosmosophy and Anthroposophy are one. Man is to be found in the cosmos and the cosmos in man. Consequently my “Occult Science” is still anthropomorphic when it describes the evolution through Saturn, Sun, Moon, Earth, etc., for it is at the same time the evolution of mankind. It gives the evolution of the cosmos and that of man. The further we penetrate into the mysteries of life, the more cosmos and man flow together, and the more evident it becomes that the separation between man and cosmos which exists in earthly life is only an illusion, for man belongs to the cosmos and the cosmos to man; man is to be found in the cosmos and the cosmos in man.

Today we shall study the human being in regard to his form, and from this standpoint widen and deepen what we have recently considered. If we envisage, to begin with, the fact that the human form, of course, depends in the widest sense on the whole life of man, we should then consider first of all man's life as a whole, in order to grasp the human form from within, in a concrete way. To begin with, the human being forms part of the whole universe, of the whole cosmos. And if you bear in mind that in regard to the formation of the head, the human being is in reality an image of the sphere, of the cosmic universe, you will find, as it were, that as regards the head, he is placed into the whole universe. But we can only understand the way in which he is placed into it, and is at the same time a self-contained being, by bearing in mind man's connection with the whole environing world.

Let us first consider the human form by saying: With his whole thinking, insofar as it is connected with the head, man turns towards the whole cosmos, and by bringing his head through birth, from the spiritual world into physical existence, the human being, enclosed within his body, may in a certain way look back upon his real, inner soul-spiritual being, as it existed during the time when he was not enclosed within a body. Perhaps we obtain the best picture of what I mean by this, when we consider how the human being attains knowledge by looking back, as it were, into his own self. For when we occupy ourselves with arithmetic and geometry, we look back into ourselves. We recognize the laws of geometry simply because we are human beings able to draw the spatial laws out of our own being. But on the other hand, we know that these laws fill out the whole universe. Consequently, when we look out into the world, we have something which we necessarily perceive through the eyes; but everything is arranged geometrically, also the eyes, which are focused geometrically. We may therefore say: insofar as man faces the world with his thinking that is connected with his head, he takes back, as it were, into himself, what is spread out in the universe. Let us therefore imagine this first stage of fitting himself into the cosmos by saying: man takes in the universe, he looks back upon the universe, as it were. By looking back upon ourselves, we discover the universe. (See Table).

This is man's most external connection with the universe out of which he is built.

We proceed further by envisaging in the second place how the human being activates within him what he takes in from outside. Consider that when the child is born, everything which it experienced from death to a new birth lives within its being; if the child could develop a consciousness in this direction, it would be able to look back on the experiences which it had before birth. But these prenatal experiences then begin to be active in the child. The human being does not only look back into his own self in order to discover the universe anew within himself, but he also looks out into the environing world. He sees the world that surrounds him. We may therefore say: He does not only take in the universe, but he looks out into the universe around him (see Table) and takes in the mobility of the universe. He grows inwardly mobile.

You only need to clasp your left hand consciously with your right one; you only need to touch yourself—in order to remain completely within yourself. You do something with your right hand, but you are taking hold of something which is your own self. You now touch yourself in the same way in which you feel about and touch an external object. Every perception of the Ego, of one's inner being, is really based upon this: To take hold of one's own self. We also do it indirectly with the eyes. When we envisage any point outside, the axis of the right eye crosses that of the left eye, in the same way in which our hands cross, when the right hand clasps the left one. Animals have less inner life, because they touch themselves much less. We may therefore say that the third thing is: To experience or touch ourselves (see Table). In reality, we are still in the external world, when we thus grasp ourselves. We are not yet within our skin.

But let us now envisage the boundary between the outer and inner life. Let us indicate this process by moving the right hand, clasping the left one, up and down, so as to describe a surface. This surface is everywhere on ourselves. With our body's covering sheath we enclose our inner being. We may therefore say that the fourth thing is to encompass ourselves. (See Table).

If you penetrate in a living way through feeling into your form, insofar as it is enclosed by the skin, you will obtain this process of encompassing yourself.

First:	We take in the universe and look back.
Second:	We look out into the universe. We take in its mobility.
Third:	We grasp ourselves. (Touch ourselves.)
Fourth:	We encompass ourselves.

These four things place before us the gradual process of man's formation from outside towards inside. We have, to begin with, the whole universe; but we are still outside. Then the imitation of the universe; but we have not yet reached our own being, for we imitate the universe. If we touch ourselves, we reach ourselves from outside. Only in the fourth stage we encompass ourselves.

In the fifth stage, we must seek something which is inside, which fills us out, surging and weaving through us. We may therefore say: Five: That which fills us out, surging and weaving through us.

Then comes the sixth stage: Through the fact that we do not only have a skin, but that it is filled out, and through the fact that we were thus able to penetrate into our own being, a process begins which dissolves the form, devolving it into something which does not only fill out the human being inwardly, but makes him like a fruit that has ripened. Let us follow the fruit's development to the point where it is just ripening; if it surpasses this point, it dries up. We may therefore say: Six: Ripening.

Imagine this ripening process. By growing mature, we begin, as it were, to decay inwardly. In a very small measure, we cease to become human beings. Although we are human beings, we become inwardly dust, so to speak. We grow mineralized. With this we again fit ourselves into the external world. We are completely within our being, with that body which fills us out. Then, when we become dust inwardly, we again fit ourselves into the mineral world. We become, as it were, a body which has weight. We may therefore say: Seven: We fit ourselves into the inorganic world.

I have once described to you that when we weigh a human being, he stands there like a mineral. This led us to the point of being able to say that he fits himself into the inorganic world. We might also say: He fits himself into the external forces of nature.

Eight: At this stage, we do not only fit ourselves into the external world, but we take in the external world. We breathe, we eat, we absorb the external world. In a preceding stage, we merely developed within us forces which already existed within us; this stage of development consisted essentially of this. Then comes our inner life, but there we take into ourselves the external world. When we reach this moment, we should, above all, realize quite clearly that everything a human being takes in from outside, is like something which should not really form part of him. There are many erroneous conceptions in the world regarding this process of absorbing substances and forces from outside. In reality, everything we eat, is a tiny bit poisonous. For life consists in taking in nourishment and our not allowing it to become completely one with us: we offer resistance, and life really consists in this resistance, this defense. But of course, the substances which we take in as nourishment are so slightly poisonous that we are able to offer resistance. For if we take a real poison, it destroys us, because we are unable to defend ourselves against it.

We may therefore say: When the external world penetrates into us, a kind of poisonous sting enters into us. (See Table.) We must use strong expressions which do not exist in ordinary speech and ordinary knowledge. When I explain these things to you, you must therefore try to grasp what I really mean.

Five:	That which fills us out.
Six:	Ripening.
Seven:	Fitting ourselves into the inorganic world and seeking the balance.
Eight:	Poisonous sting.

This brings us to the point of absorbing what is outside. Consequently we began with the forming of man out of the universe, proceeded to the forming of man from within, and arrived at the point where his inner life develops by offering resistance to the external world. (See Table.)

But the human being forms himself (at least, his life and to some extent also his real form) in accordance with his external attitude, his external activities. But in the present time, our activities no longer have a real connection with the human being; we must go back into earlier times if we wish to grasp man in his real connection with his environment, in which he participates in the world's processes. At this point we may say: The ninth stage represents one of man's activities. He participates in the external world, by taking his place culturally in the external life on earth. He is, to begin with, a hunter. Nine: Hunter.

He then progresses in his activities. He becomes a breeder of animals. This is the next stage. Ten: A breeder of animals. Eleven: He becomes a farmer; that is the next stage of perfection. And finally, Twelve: He becomes a trader. Later on you will see that I do not include the activities which followed. They are of secondary nature. Man's primary occupations are: Hunter, breeder of animals, farmer and trader. This characterizes man in regard to his form and the way he lives upon the earth as a hunter, breeder of animals, farmer, or trader. These are forms of human activities, of human occupations upon the earth.

Nine:	Hunter.
Ten:	Breeder of animals.
Eleven:	Farmer.
Twelve:	Trader.

The following drawing [The drawing, showing the earth in the universe, cannot be reproduced.] might be made, as an illustration for the schematic table. Let us say, to begin with, that here we have the earth. Let us suppose that we have the human being upon the earth. In regard to these four form principles, he would be dependent on the earth's circumference; that is to say, he would be formed from out the earth's circumference. Here (above), man is formed from within. Let us leave this aside for the moment, and consider how the human being is formed by the earth, as a hunter, or breeder of animals; the result would be the very opposite. For example, if here, at this point, we have the influence of the constellations; that is to say, an influence coming from the circumference, then the constellations below the horizon (for the earth covers them) would be able to influence man only by sending their influence through the earth. Here the human being would have to adapt himself to the earth in regard to his stars. And what lies in the middle, would offer him the possibility to develop himself inwardly.

We may therefore say: The four upper members of man's formation lead him out into the universe; the last four members lead him to the earth, and the stars come into consideration insofar as they are covered by the earth. In the four central members the stars and the earth maintain a balance.

Man dwells in his inner being.

You see, even in ancient times these things were felt and people said that a certain portion of the starry sky influenced man so as to form him from outside, from the universe. Of course, one had to accept different stars according to the seasons. The constellations change. But let us take, on a large scale, the epoch in which we are living. If we adopt the standpoint of a Greek reflecting over such things, we might say: The stars in the proximity of Aries send their influence from outside, also those in the proximity of Taurus, and similarly the stars near Gemini and near Cancer. These constellations, Aries, Taurus, Gemini, and Cancer enable man to look back, to be inwardly mobile, to take hold of himself and to encompass himself. (See Table.)

The other stars, on the opposite side below, which are covered by the earth, enable man to be a hunter through the influence of Sagittarius. He is able to live as a breeder of animals by taming the goat: Capricorn. He is able to live as a farmer, by—well, let us first take the simplest farming existence—by pouring out water, by walking over the fields with urns and pouring out water: Aquarius. And he becomes a trader through the influence of a star region holding that which carries him over the sea. For in ancient times every ship had the form of a fish. And two ships sailing side by side, traveling as trading vessels over the sea, are really the symbol of trade. So that by designating a ship as a “fish,” we would obtain here, as a twelfth sign: Pisces.

In the middle we have what lies in between, filling out man; that is to say, the influence of the blood, which fills the human being. How may this blood, contained in man, best be symbolized? Perhaps by taking the animal with the most intensive heart activity, the lion, Leo.

The maturing process—ripening: it suffices to look at the fields, at the ripening wheat or corn: the ear of corn represents the condition in which the fruit reaches the stage of maturity:

It is the Virgin with the sheaf: Virgo. The chief thing here is the sheaf.

And if we consider the moment when man once more fits himself into the external world, or in other words, seeks to establish the balance, we have Libra. And where he feels the poisonous sting, where he feels that everything is slightly poisonous, Scorpio.

During past epochs, people really experienced man's connection with the universe and with the earth; but modern people are no longer able to interpret such things. They say: Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, and draw the corresponding signs**, but in reality they do not have the slightest idea of what these things really mean. For it is necessary to consider them in the right way. If you look at an old picture of Aries, you will see that this is not a materialistic or naturalistic reproduction; its characteristic trait is that Aries is always looking back; this gesture of Aries looking back is the essential thing in the picture. We have this gesture of Aries in the human being who is looking back on himself, on the universe that lives in him. Aries should therefore not be viewed merely in a naturalistic-materialistic way. The picture reproducing Aries, the sign for Aries, is not materialistic or naturalistic, but its essential characteristic lies in the gesture of looking back.

If you look at old pictures of Taurus, you will find that he is always looking sideways and jumping. Also in this case the gesture is the essential thing, the gesture of looking around and activating the universal principle that lives within. Here, too, the gesture is the chief thing.

And if you look at Gemini, you will be confronted by one man on the right and another on the left, yet they are always depicted in such a way that the right hand of the man on the right is clasping the left hand of the man on the left. Again, it is the gesture which should be considered. It expresses the fact that man is touching himself, feeling himself. The right and left side of man are set forth as independent beings, because in a certain way man is still outside and takes in his prenatal being by touching or feeling himself.

Cancer is the self-encompassed being, closed to the external world. Modern people also view the sign of Cancer materialistically, naturalistically. But to the people who took Cancer as the symbol for encompassing oneself, the chief thing was that Cancer, the crab, can put its claws round its victim, thus encompassing it. This is contained in the word Cancer, which encompasses man. Cancer is the encompassing element. It is really the symbol of the human being who closes himself within his own self, who does not only touch or feel himself, but who closes himself from outside within his inner being.

Leo, with the strongly developed heart system, is the true “heart animal.” The lion may be considered as the “heart animal.” The lion's qualities set forth the fifth member which should be borne in mind.

On the stage of maturity, we find Virgo, the virgin with the sheaf, and the essential thing is the sheaf, in which the fruit is on the verge of drying up. And Libra, the scales, expresses that we seek to establish the balance. Scorpio is, of course, the poisonous sting. And Sagittarius is in reality an animal form ending in a human being armed with bow and arrow. The Zodiac sign for Sagittarius is a human being sitting like a centaur upon an animal's body. It symbolizes the hunter.

Capricorn is really a goat ending in a fish tail—something which we do not find in nature. For a goat with a fish tail does not exist. But man, the breeder of animals, makes wild beasts as tame as fishes. This is consequently an artificial symbol. Aquarius stands for agriculture. In this sign people, of course, see water and so forth, and this is spiritually justified. But in this Zodiac sign you will always find a striding character: A man striding along with two urns and pouring water out of them. He is watering the earth and is therefore a gardener, a farmer. Pisces, the fishes, is a sign which I have already explained; it symbolizes trade, for in the past, the ships were adorned with the heads of fishes, for example of dolphins—even though dolphins are not fishes—but the ancients thought that they were fishes. This symbol therefore indicates the character of trading.

We should not consider things schematically or superficially, as is so frequently the case today, but we should set out from this development of the human form, and from there endeavor to grasp man's connection with the universe and with the earth. This will gradually reveal the human being, from the aspect of his form, as a member, a part of the whole cosmos.

Let us now consider the question from the following aspect. If, to begin with, we take everything from the standpoint of the ancient Greeks—Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Aquarius, Pisces—we may say, when looking upon the human form: In regard to the shape of the head (consider everything I have already explained to you) the human being is formed from outside, from the cosmos. Then forces begin to work inside. They give man the possibility to become symmetrical. But in regard to the influence of the last groups of stars, we must reverse everything. The human being is also subjected to the influence of the earth. He is influenced by forces. If this is indicated more thickly on the drawing*, we may draw the other forces more thinly on the other side and say: If a human being particularly unfolds all that corresponds to Sagittarius, shown here (you know that this is the Zodiac sign of the upper thighs), he will have especially strong upper thighs and be a hunter. If he is a breeder of animals he must often bend his knees. If he is a farmer he must walk and is therefore depicted as a striding man, etc. And in regard to trading: If we look for a symbol connected with the human being himself, we come across the feet. These, in any case, are formed from outside.

In the middle we find the region where man forms himself. If I draw this form, it results spontaneously from the twelve Zodiac signs. We may therefore say: Here (in the middle), the universe or the stars send their influences more into man's inner being. Here (above), they influence him from outside, and here (below), they compress him. But you will recognize in this drawing the shape of the human embryo. When you draw the human embryo, you must draw it in this way, if you include the Zodiac; it can only be drawn in this way, in accordance with its own laws. When you draw a figure encompassing an angle of 180 degrees, you obtain a triangle. When you draw the Zodiac, transforming it so that it reveals its laws in regard to the earth, you obtain through inner laws the shape of the human embryo. This would constitute a direct proof that the human embryo is formed out of the whole universe, that it is the product of the cosmos.

I told you just now that we should adopt the standpoint of the Greeks, but today we can no longer set out from Aires; we must set out from the sign of Pisces. We now live for many centuries under the sign of Pisces. It is the sign which marks man's transition to intellectualism. But if you go back to the point where it was still justified to set out from Aries and it was possible to speak of the Zodiac in the old meaning, you will not obtain more than the callings represented by Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius and Pisces; namely, hunter, breeder of animals, farmer, and trader. Everything connected with industrialism, etc., already pertains to the epoch of Pisces, and it is a repetition.

Consider the following: We now live in the age of Pisces. During this age developed everything which constitutes the present civilization of machines. But if we go back to the epoch of Aries, we still find the four honest callings, and although they had already become more complicated and modified, they placed man into nature. And by going back still farther, to the epoch of Taurus, to the third, second, first post-Atlantean ages, to the last Atlantean epoch and to the last but one Atlantean epoch, etc., we would finally come to Pisces. There we would find that man was a completely etheric being and that he had not yet come down to the physical world. In the age of Pisces we find that he was an etheric being and in the present time he is really repeating what he already passed through at that time, when he developed into a human being. Since the middle of the Fifteenth Century, he is repeating this stage, but in an abstract way. In the past, he grew concretely into his human development. Since the middle of the Fifteenth Century, he is growing into his abstractions, for a machine is also an abstraction. Since the return of the age of Pisces, man has really sailed into the forces which dissolve him. And when he will reach Aquarius this dissolution will have progressed in an essential way; he will then above all be unable to have the slightest connection with the universe unless he clings to the spiritual world. Just because of this repetition, man must penetrate into the spiritual world.

This also shows you that in reality man is a threefold being; he is formed out of the cosmos insofar as he has a head; he develops within his own self and is only in correspondence with the external world insofar as he has a thorax; he develops his extremities and his metabolic processes by inserting himself into the earthly sphere.

Also from another aspect we have before us a threefold being. Consider that when the human being reaches birth, the first four force impulses lie within him; he unfolds them, but even then he is in a certain sense a complete human being, except that the other eight members are still in a rudimentary stage. The head is a complete human being; the other members attached to it, are rudimentary. The thorax, too, is a complete human being, but the first four force impulses and the last four are rudimentary. Also the limbs form a complete human being, but the thorax and the head attached to it are rudimentary. Three human beings are thus contained in man. The first one, the head, is in reality the transformation of the preceding incarnation. The thorax man is in reality the present incarnation as such. And what the human being does, the way in which he is active in the external world, particularly what comes to expression in his limbs and in his metabolic processes, carry him across into the next incarnation. Man is therefore a threefold being also in this connection. The human form may thus be studied as a complete whole.

We should really say: If we wish to make a drawing of the human being we should have to draw his head. We then have before us a complete human being. You will gather this from the following fact: In the lower jaw you really have the legs, except that there they are turned backwards and the head is sitting on its legs. The head is a complete human being, but its legs are reversed; they form the lower jaw and man is sitting on it, so that here I can draw a complete human being in a sitting posture.

Also the thorax is a complete human being. The arms are, as it were, the external representatives of etheric eyes. And again, the limbs are a complete human being. There, for example, the kidneys would be the eyes. Also in regard to the human form we thus have three human beings which are linked together. They interpenetrate in such a way that the human being that has hidden itself into the head which has become a sphere, reveals to us what penetrated into the present life from the preceding incarnation; the human being in the thorax is really the human being of the present incarnation, and the human being running about is the one that penetrates into the next incarnation.

But in a certain sense we may say: Also man's whole attitude in the present reveals this threefold character. Take the limbs and the metabolic processes. In regard to these, man is able to produce a complete human being. You only need to consider the human germ, the human embryo in the mother's body, in order to obtain metabolic man with his limbs, seeking to become a complete human being. Take thoracic man and observe how the head and the thorax still form a whole in the child, during its infancy. This threefold aspect thus appears also in the growing human being.

When man outgrows infancy he must be educated. The human being living in the head is the educator and educates the other human being—the childish head teaches the child (“Kindskopf den Kindskopf”)—for in reality the human being always remains a child in regard to his head. He only grows old, that is to say, middle-aged, in regard to the middle part, the thoracic man, and quite old in regard to the metabolic-limb man. People notice this, as they grow old. Even in accordance with the old riddle, “When young, it walks on four legs; in middle age on two, and in old age on three,” people notice that they grow old in this connection. Also in regard to his head, man always remains, as it were, the result of his past incarnation. The head really remains a child throughout life. Indeed, we may say: The science of education should try to solve the problem of how the childish head, which is the teacher, should treat the childish pupil in the right way.

These things are apparently humoristic, but they conceal a deep truth which should be borne in mind, in order to obtain a correct view concerning man.

Consider that in reality man's head is the passenger conveyed by the remaining human being—a passenger who is a spy. The head's legs are always in a sitting posture, the head does not even attempt to walk independently. It is always being carried, like a man traveling by coach. In reality, the head is the passenger in man.

Thoracic man is instead the human being's nurse. And limb-man is the worker, who is employed as a slave, for it is really he who is passing through life. We are head, as far as Cancer. We have this from heaven, without any cooperation on our part. Here (in the center) we must breathe and eat; this is our nurse. And the real worker belongs to the sphere of Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius, and Pisces.

You see, this enables us to obtain man's form in its connection with the whole universe. It is only necessary to take things quite earnestly, even if they are set before you more lightly and not pedantically. They will show you that everything I have explained to you today contains, on the one hand, the possibility to grasp the human form out of the whole cosmos, but on the other hand lies what may fill us, I might say, with great reverence for the primeval wisdom of men who were able to place into their Zodiac symbols such a tremendously significant science of Man, drawn out of their instinctive clairvoyance. Today, we have instead a science in which people stare at Aries without knowing that its characteristic lies in the fact that it turns backwards; that the characteristic of Gemini lies in the fact that they touch each other, clasp hands, and so forth. Everything in the Zodiac symbols is immensely profound, deeply significant—each gesture, every single sign. And when the gesture itself is not the essential thing, as in Leo, then the symbol is chosen in such a way that the sign itself, I might say, expresses the gesture; the Lion is chosen, because he has the strongest heart pulsation. The Lion is the representative of the forces which fill out the human being.

In this way it is possible to draw to the surface again the primeval wisdom of the ages, by finding it within ourselves.

We have been studying how the living form of man, his soul and his spirit, are related to the cosmos. The various aspects of this subject presented in recent lectures may be summarized in somewhat the following way:—

In the deep foundations of man's being lies the will. In many respects the will is the most mysterious and secret element in human nature. It is obvious that aberrations, inclinations that often run counter to the world's well-being surge up from fathomless depths of the moral life; everything experienced by the soul in the form of pricks of conscience or self-reproach streams up from the deep ground of the will.

The reason why the will is so mysterious and secret is that in many respects it is a highly indeterminate force; there is in it an instinctive element over which we have little control and which drives us hither and thither on the turbulent waves of life often without our being able to claim that any conscious impulses are racing effect. In another respect too, namely in respect of our knowledge of the operations of the will, it has again and again been emphasized that these operations of the will are as withdrawn from human consciousness as the experiences of deep, dreamless sleep; so that in this respect too, the will is an indeterminate, mysterious element.

But when we think of man's spiritual nature we cannot conceive that this spirituality is active in him only during his waking hours or in his conscious mental life; the fact is that this spirituality is at work in him during sleep too, within that part of his being where his will lies and which, like the experiences of deep sleep, is wrapt in unconsciousness.

Spirit is therefore also present and at work in the sleeping human being. Two aspects of the will can be distinguished.—There is first of all the will which—unless we are out-and-out idlers—spurs us to activity from the time of waking until that of falling asleep. True, we cannot perceive the will in actual operation, but the effects rise into our consciousness inasmuch as we can form mental concepts and images of them. We do not know how the will-impulse works in us when we are walking; but we can see ourselves stepping forward. We form mental images of the workings of our will and in this sense are conscious of its effects. That is one aspect of the will.

The other aspect is that the will is also active in us while we sleep; for then inner processes are taking place, processes that are also operations of the will, only we are not aware of them—precisely because we are asleep. But just as the sun also shines during the night on the other side of the earth where we are not living, so does will stream through our being while we are asleep, although we have no consciousness of it.

Thus two kinds of will can be distinguished: an inner will and an outer will. The workings of the outer will are made manifest to us while we are awake; those of the inner will take effect while we are asleep. Strictly speaking, the inner will is not revealed to us; nevertheless when we look back, its effects can be apprehended afterwards, as having been part of the condition of sleep.

The will is present as it were in ocean depths of the soul. It surges upwards in waves. But just because we must admit that the will is at work during sleep, when the bodily part of our being is engaged in purely organic activity, neither pervaded with soul nor illumined by spirit, it follows that the will as such has to do with this organic activity. The will that is working while we are asleep has to do with organic activity, inasmuch as organic processes, life-processes take place in us. These processes are essentially connected with the will.

But during waking activity too, that is to say when our will is in flow, life-processes are taking place. The will takes effect in the processes of internal metabolism. So that here again we can point to organic activity.

Out of the ocean-depths of will in the human being, waves which come to expression in the form of feeling, surge upwards. We know that feeling is a dimly apprehended experience, that so far as actual consciousness is concerned it has really only the intensity of a dream. But at any rate it is clearer than the workings of will. It raises into greater clarity what lies in the ocean-depths of man's being. Feeling brings a certain light into, intensifies, consciousness; the two poles of the will rise into this intensified consciousness and in it both the inner will and the outer will are made manifest.

Thus we distinguish two kinds of feeling, as we did in the case of the will: an inner will in the sleeping state, an outer will in the waking state. One kind of feeling surges upwards from the will that is connected with man's sleeping condition. This kind of feeling lives itself out in the antipathies—taking the word in the widest sense—unfolded by the human being. This is feeling which tends towards antipathy. Whereas the will that is involved in outer activity and therefore leads man into the external world, manifests in all those experiences of feeling which have in them the quality of sympathy. The dreamlike experience of feeling which comes to expression in sympathies and antipathies aroused by different forms of life, by forms of art or of nature, or in sympathies and antipathies connected more with the organs and arising in us through smell or taste or through a sense of well-being or comfort—all this weaving activity belongs to the soul. Will therefore reveals itself in organic activity, feeling in activity of the soul.

If the life of soul is studied from this point of view, great illumination will be shed upon it. Waking life arouses in us sympathy with the surrounding world. Our antipathies really come from more unconscious realms. They press upwards from the sleeping will. It is as though our sympathies lie more on the surface, whereas antipathies rise up through them from unplumbed depths. Antipathies repel; antipathies draw us away from the surrounding world; we isolate ourselves, shut ourselves within our own being. Inwardly up-streaming antipathies are the antecedents of human egotism. The greater a man's egotism, the more strongly is the element of antipathy working in him. He wants to isolate himself, to feel enclosed within his own being.

In normal life we do not notice the constant interplay of sympathies and antipathies in the life of soul. But we become aware of it when our connection with the outer world becomes abnormal, and when the antipathetic element that derives from sleep also works in an abnormal way. This happens when our breathing, for example, functions irregularly during sleep and we have nightmares. In a nightmare, the soul is putting up an antipathetic defence against something that is trying to penetrate into us, preventing us from full experience of our egohood.

We are gazing here into deep secrets of human experience. If a man unfolds the element of antipathy in his life of feeling so strongly that it plays into his waking life, his whole being is permeated with antipathy which then lays hold of his astral body; his astral body is steeped in the element of antipathy; antipathy streams out from him like an abnormal aura. It may then happen that he begins to feel antipathy to people to whom his attitude was otherwise neutral, or indeed even to those he loved or knew intimately. These conditions can give rise to persecution mania in all its forms. When feelings of antipathy not to be explained by outer circumstances are experienced, this is due to the overflowing antipathies in the soul, that is to say, to an abnormal intensification of the one pole in the life of soul which forces its way upwards out of sleep. If this antipathy gets the upper hand in a human being, he becomes a world-hater, and such hatred can assume incredible proportions. The aim of all education and all social endeavor should be to prevent human beings from becoming world-haters.

But think of it.—If what surges up from the ocean-depths of man's being can promote overweening egotism when it gets the upper hand—and persecution mania in all forms is nothing but superabundant, excessive egotism—if all this is possible, what is there to be said of the inner will itself, which a beneficent creation conceals by means of sleep? We have no knowledge at all of how this inner will permeates our limbs, our entire organism. The most that can be said is that now and then, through strange dreams, something comes up into the consciousness of what lies in the will that works in our organism during sleep. What lives in this will lies—and rightly so for the ordinary consciousness—on yonder side of the Threshold. He who comes to know it, learns to know the force by which the human being can be led to uttermost evil. The deepest secret of human life is that we have the counterbalance of our organic activity in the very forces which, were they to gain control in the conscious life of a man, would make him into a criminal.

Let it be remembered that nothing in the world is in itself evil or good. What is radically evil when it breaks into our conscious life, is the counterbalance for our spent life-forces when it take effect in its right place, namely as the regulator of organic activity during the sleeping state.

If you ask: What is the nature of the forces which make compensation for the spent life-forces?—the answer is: They are the forces of evil. Evil has its mission—and it is here. If this becomes known to anyone through spiritual training, it is for him as it was for earlier seers, something of which they said: Of its essential nature it is not lawful to speak, for sinful is the mouth that speaks of it, and sinful the ear that hears of it.—Nevertheless man must realize that life is a process fraught with danger and that evil lies in its deep foundations as a necessary force.

Now these waves of the will surge even higher—into the conceptual life, the mental life. The sleeping will lights up in feeling, and when it surge upwards into mental life, it becomes still clearer but at the same time denuded qualitatively—it becomes abstract. In feeling fraught with antipathy there is still a certain lively intensity. When this element of antipathetic feeling surges into the conceptual life, it comes to expression in the form of negative judgments, judgments of rejection or denial. Everything we negate in life, everything the logician calls “negation”, negative judgment, is the uprush of antipathetic feeling, or of the inner will, into the conceptual life.

And when sympathetic feeling—which has its origin in the will of waking life, in the outer will—rises up into the conceptual life, our judgments are affirmative. We have arrived at something which, as you see, lives in us as abstraction only. In feeling, inasmuch as we unfold sympathies and antipathies, there is still intensity of life. Whereas in acts of judgment—which are a mental, conceptual activity—we are, as it were, immobile, contemplative observers of the world. We affirm and negate. We do not come to the point of actual antipathy; we merely negate. It is an abstract process. We do not rouse ourselves to antipathy: we merely say, no. In the same way we do not rouse ourselves to sympathy: we merely say, yes. We are raised above our relation to the outer world—to the level of abstract judgment.

This, then, is a purely mental, concept-forming activity, which can be called spiritual activity. But will, feeling and conceptual activity can surge even higher—into the domain of the senses. When negative judgment surges into the domain of the senses, what is the result? The condition wherein we perceive nothing. If we think of it in relation to the most obvious process of perception, we can say: It is the experience of darkness—where we see nothing. On the other hand, affirmative judgment becomes experience of light. The same could be said with regard to the experience of silence, or of tone and sound. To all the twelve senses it would be correct to apply what has here been said in connection with the experiences of light and of darkness.

And now let us ask: What, in reality, is this activity in the domain of the senses? I We have spoken of organic activity, activity of the life of soul, spiritual activity. Spiritual activity is merely a concept-forming activity but it is still our own. What takes place between the senses and the outer world is in truth no longer our own activity, for there the world is playing into us. It would be quite correct to depict the eye as an independent entity; what takes place in the eye is that the outer world penetrates into the organism as it were through a gulf. We are no longer standing in the world with our own activity, but this is divine activity. This divine activity weaves through the world surrounding us. Darkness inclines in the direction of negation, light in the direction of affirmation.

The influence of this divine activity upon man in his relationship to the world was an especially vivid experience in the wisdom of the second Post-Atlantean epoch.—God in the Light—that is to say, the Divine with a Luciferic quality; God in the Darkness—the Divine with an Ahrimanic quality.—Thus did the ancient Persians experience the world. And to them the sun was the representative of the outer world. The sun as the divine source of Light—so it was experienced in the second Post-Atlantean epoch. On the other hand in the third Post-Atlantean epoch (Egypto-Chaldean) men experienced more strongly the sphere lying between judgment and feeling. At that time they did not feel so intensely that the Divine in the outer world is experienced in light or darkness, but rather in the impact between conceptual activity and feeling. Experience of divine activity among the Egyptians and Chaldeans caused men to bring an element of antipathy into negative judgments and sympathy into affirmative judgments. And only when we are able to decipher and understand the pictorial or other records of the Egypto-Chaldean epoch shall we realize that all were created and shaped out of sympathetic affirmation or antipathetic negation. When you look at Egyptian statues, figures on tombs, and so forth, you can still feel that their forms give expression to sympathetic affirmation or antipathetic negation. It is simply not possible to create a sphinx without bringing into it sympathies and antipathies inhering in the conceptual life. Men did not experience merely light and darkness but something of the element of life that is present in sympathies and antipathies. In that epoch the sun was experienced as the divine source of Life.

And now we come to the Greco-Latin epoch when man's experience of direct communion with the outer world was largely lost. In my book Riddles of Philosophy, I have shown that although in that age man still felt his thoughts as we today feel sense-impressions, he was already approaching the condition in which we live at the present time, when owing to the development of the ego we no longer feel any really living connection with the external world, when with our ego we are practically asleep within the body, are in a state of slumber. This condition was not so pronounced in the Greeks, but to some extent it was certainly present. To understand the Greek nature we must realize that the Greek had already begun to live very intensely in his body—not as intensely as we do, but nevertheless intensely.—Not so the ancient Persians. The wise men among them did not believe that they were living enclosed within their skins but rather that they were borne on the waves of the light through the whole universe. In the Greek, this experience of cosmic life was already losing intensity, falling into slumber within the body. When we ourselves are asleep, the ego and astral body are outside the physical body; but our waking, in comparison with that of the ancient Persians, really amounts to sleep. When the Persians woke from sleep—I am speaking of course of the ancient Persians as described in my An Outline of Occult Science, it was as though the light actually penetrated into them, into their senses.

We no longer feel that at the moment of waking from sleep we summon the light into our eyes. For us the light is outside, phantomlike. Nor could the Greeks any longer see in the sun the actual source of Life; they felt that the sun was something that pervaded them inwardly. They felt the element in which the sun lives within the human being as the element of Eros—the element of Love. Thus: the sun as the divine source of Love. Eros—the sun-nature within the human being—this was what the Greek experienced. Then, from about the fourth century A.D. onwards, came the time when, fundamentally speaking, the sun was no longer regarded as anything but a physical orb in space, when the sun was darkened for man. To the ancient Persians the sun was the actual reflector of the Light weaving through space. To the Egyptians and Chaldeans the sun was the Life surging and pulsating through the universe. The Greeks felt the sun as that which infused Love into the living organism, guiding Eros through the waves of sentient existence.

This experience of the sun sank more and more deeply into man's being and gradually vanished into the ocean-depths of the soul. And it is in the ocean-depths of the soul that man bears the sun-nature today. It is beyond his reach, because the Guardian of the Threshold stands before it; it lies in the depths of being as a mystery of which the ancient teachings said: Let it not be uttered—for sinful is the mouth that speaks of it and sinful the ear that hears of it.

In the fourth century A.D. there were schools which taught that the sun-mystery must remain untold, that a civilization knowing nothing of the sun-mystery must now arise. Behind everything that takes place in the external world lie forces and powers which give guidance from the universe. One of the instruments of these guiding powers was the Roman Emperor Constantine. It was under him that Christianity assumed the form which denies the sun.

Living in that same century was one whose ardor for what he had learnt in the Mysteries as the last remnants of the ancient, instinctive wisdom, caused him to attach little importance to the development of contemporary civilization. This was Julian the Apostate. He fell by the hand of a murderer because he was intent upon passing on this ancient tradition of the threefold Mystery of the Sun. And the world would have none of it.

Today, of course, it must be realized that the old instinctive wisdom must become conscious wisdom, that what has sunk into the subconsciousness, into purely organic activity and even into sub-organic activity, must once again be lifted into the light of consciousness. We must re-discover the Sun-Mystery.

But just as when the Sun-Mystery had been lost, bitter enemies rose up against the one who wished this mystery to be proclaimed to the world, and brought about his death, so again enemies are working against the new Sun-Mysteries which must be brought to the world by spiritual science. We are living now at the other pole of historical evolution. In the fourth century A.D. there was sunset; now there must be sunrise.

In this sense Constantine and Julian the Apostate are two symbols of historical evolution. Julian the Apostate stands as it were upon the ruins of olden times, intent upon building again out of these ruins the forms of the ancient wisdom, upon preserving for humanity those ancient memorials which Christianity, assuming a material form for the first time in the days of Constantine, had destroyed. Countless treasures were destroyed, countless works of art, countless scripts and records of the ancient wisdom. Everything that could in any possible way have given men an inkling of the ancient Sun-Mystery was destroyed.

It is true that in order to reach inner freedom, it was necessary for men to pass through the stage of believing that a globe of gas is moving through universal space—but the fact is that physicists would be very astonished if they could take a journey in space; they would discover that the sun is not a globe of gas giving out light—that is nonsense—but that it is a mere reflector which cannot itself radiate light but at most throw it back. The truth is that in the spiritual sense, light streams out from Saturn, Jupiter, Mercury, Venus and the Moon.

Physically it appears as though the sun gives the planets light, but in reality it is the planets that radiate light to the sun and the sun is the reflector. As such it was recognized by the wise men of ancient Persia with their instinctive wisdom, and in this sense the sun was regarded as the earthly source of Light—not indeed as the source itself, but as the reflector of the Light. Then, among the Egyptians and Chaldeans, the sun became the reflector of Life and among the Greeks, the reflector of Love.

This was the conception that Julian the Apostate wanted to preserve—and he was done away with. In order to reach freedom it was indeed necessary that men should hold for a time to the superstition of the sun as a globe of gas in space, giving out light—a superstition enunciated as a categorical truth in every book of physics today. But our task must be to penetrate to the reality.

In truth, Julian the Apostate and Constantine stand before us as two symbols ... Julian the Apostate was bent upon preserving those ancient memorials of the world which could, in a certain way, have made it possible for the true Sun-Mystery to find its way to men. Indeed during the first centuries of Christendom, Christ was still a Sun-Figure—an Apollo.

This Sun-Mystery was felt to be the greatest spiritual treasure possessed by mankind. And it was symbolized by what was known as the Palladium. It was said that the Palladium had once been in Troy and that the priests of the Mysteries there saw in it the means whereby, in sacred ritual and cult, they revealed to the people the true nature of the sun. Then the Palladium was taken to Rome, and its presence there was a secret known to the initiate in Rome. The initiated priests of the Romans, and even the first Emperors—Augustus, for example—worked in the world out of a direct consciousness that the greatest of all treasures was represented in Rome, at all events in an outer symbol, inasmuch as beneath the foundations of the most venerated Roman temple, lay the Palladium, its existence known only to those who were initiated into the deepest secrets of Roman existence and destiny. But in a spiritual sense it had become known to those whose task it was to bring Christianity to the world. And out of the knowledge that the Palladium was guarded in Rome, the early Christians made their way thither. A spiritual reality lay behind these journeys.

But when, under Constantine, Christianity was secularized, the Palladium was taken away from Rome. Constantine founded Constantinople, and he caused the Palladium to be buried in the earth under a pillar erected there by his orders. Thus it transpired that in its further development Roman Christianity was deprived of the knowledge of the Sun-Mystery by the very Emperor who established Christianity in Rome in its rigid, mechanical forms. In the secularization of Christianity brought about by Constantine, the cosmic wisdom was lost to Christianity—and this comes to expression in the removal of the Palladium from Rome to Constantinople.

In certain Slavonic regions—people always interpret things according to their own conditions—a belief reigned for centuries, lasting indeed until the beginning of the twentieth century, that in a none too distant future the Palladium will be removed from Constantinople to another place—to a Slavonic town, as the people believed. At all events the Palladium is waiting, expecting to be removed from the darkening influence shed upon it by Constantinople to that locality which, by its very nature, will bring it into complete darkness. Yes, the Palladium goes to the East, where the decadence of the ancient wisdom still survives but is passing into darkness. And in the further evolution of the world, everything depends upon whether—just as the sun is the reflector of the light bestowed upon it from the universe—the Palladium-treasure is illumined by a wisdom born from the riches of the knowledge living in the West. The Palladium, the ancient heritage brought from Troy to Rome, from Rome to Constantinople, and which, as it is said, will be carried still farther into the darkness of the East—this Sun-treasure must wait until it is redeemed spiritually in the West, released from the dark shadows of a purely external knowledge of nature. Thus the task of the future is bound up with the holiest traditions of European development.

Legends are still extant, even today, among; those who are initiated into these things—often they are quite simple people going about here and there in the world. These legends tell of the removal of the Palladium, the treasure of wisdom, from Troy to Rome, from Rome to Constantinople when Roman Christianity was secularized; they tell of its future removal to the East when the East, denuded of the ancient wisdom, will have fallen into utter decadence; and they tell of the necessity for this sun-treasure to receive new light from the West.

The Sun-Mystery has disappeared into the nether regions of human existence. Through spiritual-scientific development we must find it again. The Sun-Mystery must be found again—otherwise the Palladium will vanish into the darkness of the East. It is wrongful today to utter a saying as untrue as Ex Oriente Lux. The light can no longer come from the East, for the East is in decadence. Nevertheless the East waits—for it will possess the sun-treasure, even though it be in darkness—it waits for the light of the West. But today men are groping in darkness, arranging conferences in the darkness, are looking expectantly towards—Washington! Only those “Washingtons” that speak with the tones of the spiritual world—not conferences looking for the darkness that surrounds the Palladium, for an open door for trade in China—only those conferences will bring salvation which are conducted in the West in such a way that the Palladium can be kindled once again to light. For like a fluorescent body, the Palladium, in itself, is dark; if it is suffused with light, then it becomes radiant. And so it will be with the wisdom of the East: dark in itself, it will light up, will become fluorescent when it is permeated by the wisdom of the West, by the spiritual light of the West.

But this the West does not understand. Only when the Palladium legend is brought into the clear light of consciousness, only when men can again feel true compassion for one like Julian the Apostate who felt constrained to ignore the age in which the light of freedom could germinate in the darkness, who longed to preserve the old instinctive wisdom and therefore met with his death—only when men realize that Constantine, in giving an externalized form of Christianity to the Romans, took from them the light, the wisdom, and sent Christianity into the darkness—only when men realize that the light whereby the Palladium can again be made to shine must be born out of modern nature-knowledge in the best sense—only then will an important chapter of world-history be brought to fulfillment. For only then will that which became Western when the Greeks see Troy on fire, become Western-Eastern. The light that flamed from Troy is present even to-day; it is present but it is shrouded in darkness. It must drawn forth from the darkness; the Palladium must again be illumined.

If our hearts are in the right place, knowledge of the course of history can fire us with enthusiasm; and this same enthusiasm will give us the right feeling for the impulses which spiritual science would fain impart.

Only if it is regarded as a time of trial and testing can anything propitious emerge from the period of grave difficulty through which humanity has been passing. I cannot help thinking to-day of the lectures given in this very town many years ago, before the war, and those of you who have studied what was then said, will have realised that certain definite indications were given of the terrible times ahead. The lectures dealt with the Folk-Souls of the European peoples (The Mission of Folk-Souls. Eleven lectures, Christiania 7th—17th June, 1910), and as a reminder of them—in order, too, that you may realise their purport more clearly—I would like, by way of introduction, to speak of a certain interesting episode.

In the year 1918 I had a conversation in Middle Europe with someone who in the autumn of that year played a brief but significant part in the catastrophic events which were then assuming a particularly menacing form. Those who were able to follow the course of events, however, realised already in the early months of that year that this particular man would be in a key position when matters came to a point of decision. As I say, I had a talk with him in the month of January, 1918, and in the course of our conversation he spoke of the need for a psychology, for teaching on the subject of the Folk-Souls of the European peoples. The chaos into which humanity was falling would make it essential—so he said—for those who desired to take the lead in public affairs to understand the forces at work in the souls of the peoples of Europe. And he expressed deep regret that there was really no possibility of basing the management of public affairs upon any knowledge of this kind. I answered that I had given lectures on this very subject and I afterwards sent the volume to him, having added a foreword dealing with the situation as it then was—in January, 1918. I tell you this merely in order to indicate the real purport of the lectures. Their aim was to give true guiding lines for counteracting the forces which were leading straight into confusion and chaos. And it was for the same reason that I again made use of them in the year 1918, in the way I have indicated. But it was all quite useless, in spite of the preface dealing with the necessities of the situation that had later arisen, because ripeness of insight was required to understand the strength of the forces leading to decay, and although this ripeness of insight would have been within the reach of many leading men, they were not willing to strive for it.

And it is the same to-day. People are still terribly afraid to envisage, in their true form, the forces that are leading straight into chaos. Instead of facing these forces of decay, they prefer to spin all kinds of fantastic notions, believing that if they take refuge in them, life will go on quite peacefully. But those who will have nothing to do with this kind of thinking and who face the realities of the situation, hold no such belief. Far from it.

Precisely here in Norway destiny made it necessary to speak of the relations between the European Folk-Souls, and indeed I have been speaking of the same theme, with its different ramifications, more or less in detail for many years. I have said more than once that a time will come in European affairs when much will depend upon whether Norway can count among its people, men who will range themselves on the side of true progress and devote their powers to furthering it. The geographical position of Norway renders this imperative and indeed possible. Up here there is a certain detachment from European conditions and this can help many things to ripen. But this ripeness must unfold, gradually, into fruit—into a true and quickened spiritual life.

In the years that have passed since we were last together, you yourselves have had many experiences in connection with the great European War, but only those who lived in the very midst of things were able to realise their full significance. It is difficult to find words of human language that can give any adequate idea of the awful catastrophes. One is tempted to use the word ‘senseless’ about it all, because nearly everything, in the domain of the public affairs of Europe up to the beginning of the twentieth century resulted in some form of senselessness. What went on between the years 1914 and 1918 was a kind of madness, and since then matters have not greatly improved although it may perhaps be said that the senseless actions of the materialistic world are not so outwardly patent as they were during the actual years of the war.

To-day it ought to be realised much more fully than it is, that Europe is bound to come to grief if attention is not turned to the spiritual foundations of human life, if merely for purposes of convenience men brush aside all that is said with the intention of helping humanity to emerge from the chaos of anti-spirituality. The fact that my lectures on Folk-Psychology were ignored by one who held a leading position during this period of senseless action, seemed to me to be deeply symptomatic. And it is still the same to-day. Everything is brushed aside by those who have any influence in public life.

It is a pity that the significance of certain words spoken by an Anglo-South African statesman has not been grasped in Europe. The words were not spoken from any great depth, but none the less they indicated a certain feeling for the way in which affairs are shaping at the present time. This statesman said that the focus of world-history has shifted from the North Sea to the Pacific Ocean—that is to say from Europe in general, to the Pacific Ocean. And this too may be added:—That for which, up till now, Europe was a kind of centre, has ceased to exist. We are living in its remains. It has been superseded by great world-affairs as between the East and the West. What is going on now, all unsuspectingly in Washington, is nothing but a feeble stammering, surging up from depths where mighty, unobserved impulses are stirring.

There will be no peace on the Earth until a certain harmony is established between the affairs of East and West, and it must be realised that this harmony has first to be achieved in the realm of the Spirit. However glibly people may talk in these difficult times about disarmament and other ‘luxuries’ of the kind—for luxuries they are, and nothing more—it will amount to no more than conversation, as long as the Western world fails to discover and bring to light the spirituality that is indeed contained, but allowed to lie fallow in the culture which has been developing since the middle of the fifteenth century. There is a store of spiritual treasure in this culture, but it lies fallow.

Science has acquired a magnificent knowledge of the world and we are surrounded on all hands by really marvellous technical achievements. It is all splendid in its way, but it is dead—dead as compared with the great currents of human evolution. And yet in this very death there lies a living spirituality which can shine into the world even more brilliantly than all that was given to man by oriental wisdom—although that must never be belittled. Such a feeling does in truth exist in all unprejudiced observers of life.

We do right to turn to the great wisdom-treasures of the East—of which the Vedas, the wonderful Vedanta philosophy and the like are but mere reflections; and we are rightly filled with wonder by all that was there revealed from heavenly heights. It has gradually fallen into a certain decadence, but even in the form in which it still lives in the East, it arouses the wonder and admiration of anyone who has a feeling for such things.

In vivid contrast to this there is the purely materialistic culture of the West, of Europe and America. This materialistic culture and its equally materialistic mode of thinking must not be disparaged, yet it is, after all, rather like a hard nutshell—a dying nutshell. But the kernel is still alive and if it can be discovered its radiance will outshine all the glory of oriental wisdom that once poured down to man. Let there be no mistake about it—as long as the dealings of Europeans and Americans with Asia are confined to purely economic and industrial interests, so long will there be distrust in the hearts of Asiatics. People may talk as much as they like about disarmament, about the desirability of ending wars... a great war will break out between the East and the West, in spite of all disarmament conferences, if the people of Asia cannot perceive something that flows over to them from the Spirit of the West. Western spirituality can shine over to Asia and if it does, Asia will be able to trust it, because with their own inherent, though somewhat decadent spirituality, the Asiatic peoples will be able to understand what it means. The peace of the world depends upon this, not upon the conversations and discussions now going on among the leaders of outer civilisation.

Everything depends upon insight into the Spirit that is lying hidden in European and American culture—the Spirit from which men flee, which for the sake of ease they would fain avoid, but which alone can set the feet of humanity on the path of ascent. People like to put their heads in the sand, saying that things will improve of themselves. No, they will not. The hour of a great decision has struck. Either men will resolve to bring forth the spirituality of which I have spoken, or the decline of the West is inevitable. Hopes and fatalistic longings for things to right themselves are of no avail. Once and forever, man has passed into the epoch when he must manipulate his powers out of his own freewill. In other words: it is for men themselves to decide for or against spirituality. If the decision is positive, progress will be possible; if not, the doom of the West is sealed and in the wake of dire catastrophes the further evolution of humanity will take a course undreamed of to-day. Those who would strive for true insight into these matters should not, nay dare not, neglect the study of the life of soul in mankind at large and in the different peoples, especially of East and West.

In these preliminary remarks I have tried to convey that if in this particular corner of Europe, qualities to which the Scandinavian Spirit is peculiarly adapted, can be unfolded, insight can ripen and work fruitfully upon the rest of the Western world. Indeed it will only be possible for a spiritual Movement to be taken seriously when with inner understanding men are prepared to ascribe to it a mission of the kind here indicated.

Modern thought studies everything in the universe beyond the Earth in terms of mathematics and mechanics. We look at the stars through telescopes, examine their substance by means of the spectroscope and the like, reducing these observations to rules of calculation, and we have finally arrived at a great system of ‘world-machinery’ in which our Earth is placed like a wheel. Fantastic notions are evolved about the habitableness of other planets, but no great significance is attached to them because we fall back upon mathematical formulae when it is a question of speaking of extra-terrestrial space. Man has gradually come to feel himself living on Earth just as a mole might feel in his mound during the winter. There is an idea that the Earth is rather like a tiny mole-hill in the universe. There is also a tendency to look back with a certain superciliousness to ‘primitive’ periods of culture, for instance to the culture of ancient Egypt, when men did not speak of the great mechanical processes in the Universe but of divine Beings outside, in space and beyond space—Beings to whom man was known to be related just as he is related to the beings of the three kingdoms of Nature on Earth.

The ancient Egyptian traced the origin of the spirit and soul of man to the higher Hierarchies, to super-sensible worlds, just as he traced the origin of his material, bodily nature to the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms. In our age, people speak of what is beyond the Earth out of a kind of weak and ever-weakening faith that much prefers to avoid scientific scrutiny. Science speaks only of a great system of world-machinery which can be expressed in terms of mathematics. Earthly existence has finally come to be regarded as confined within the walls of a little mole-hill in the universe.

Yet there is a profound truth, namely this: When man loses the heavens, he loses himself. By far the most important elements of man's being belong to the universe beyond the Earth and if he loses sight of this universe he loses sight of his own true being. He wanders over the Earth without knowing what kind of being he really is. He knows, but even then only from tradition, that the word ‘man’ applies to him, that this name was once given to him as a being who stands upright in contrast to the quadruped animals. But his scientific view of the world and technical culture no longer help him to discover the true content of his name, for that must be sought in the universe beyond the Earth, and this universe is considered to be nothing but a great system of machinery. Man has lost himself; he has no longer any insight into his true nature.

A feeling of sadness cannot but overtake us when we realise that the heights of culture to which the West has risen since the middle of the fifteenth century have led man to wrench himself from his true nature and to live on the Earth divested of soul and spirit.

In the lecture to educationists yesterday, I said that we are prone to speak of only one aspect—and even that merely from tradition—of the eternal being of man. We speak of eternity beyond death but not of the eternity stretching beyond birth, nor of how the human being has descended from spiritual worlds into material, physical existence on the Earth. And so we really have no word which corresponds, at the other pole, to ‘deathlessness’ or immortality. We do not speak of ‘unborn-ness’ (Ungeborenheit) but until it becomes a natural matter of course to speak of deathlessness and unborn-ness, the true being of man will never be understood.

The meaning attaching to the word ‘deathlessness’ nowadays is very far from what it was in times when men also spoke of ‘unborn-ness.’ Innumerable sermons are preached to-day, and with a certain subjective honesty, on the eternal nature of the human soul. But get to the root of these sermons and see if you can discover their fundamental trend. They speculate strongly upon the egotism of human beings, upon the fact that man longs for immortality because his egotism makes the idea of annihilation at death distasteful to him. Think about all that is said along these lines and you will realise that the sermons are directed to the egotism in the members of orthodox congregations. When it comes to the question of pre-existence, of the life before birth, it is not possible to reckon with human egotism. Nothing in the egotistical souls of men arises in response to teaching about the life before birth, because no interest is taken in it. The attitude is more or less this: If indeed there was a life before birth, we are experiencing a continuation of it. One thing is certain! we are in existence now. What, then, is the object of speaking of what went before? It is, in short, only egotism that makes man hold fast to the teaching that death does not bring annihilation. And so, in speaking of the life before birth, one has to appeal to selflessness, to the quality that is the very reverse of egotism. It is, of course, quite right to speak also of the life after death, although the appeal there is to the egotism of the soul. That is the great difference.

It is clear from this that egotism has laid hold of the very depths of the human soul. The anathema placed upon the doctrine of pre-existence is a consequence of the egotism in the soul. It behoves all who are earnest in their striving for spiritual insight to understand these things. Man must find himself again and be true to the laws of his innermost being. Interest must be awakened in the whole nature of man, instead of being confined to his outer, physical sheaths. But this end cannot be achieved until man is regarded as belonging not only to the Earth—which is conceived as a little mole-hill—but to the whole Cosmos, until it is realised that between death and a new birth he passes through the world of stars to which here on Earth he can only gaze upwards from below. And the living essence, the soul and the spirit of the world of stars must be known once again.

The first thing we observe about a human being is his outer, physical structure, but the essential principle, namely its form, is generally disregarded. Form, after all, is the most fundamental principle so far as physical man is concerned. Now when we embark upon a theme like this—which has been dealt with from so many angles in other lectures—it will be obvious at once that only brief indications can be given. Knowing something of the spiritual teachings of Anthroposophy, however, you will realise that what I shall now say is drawn from a deeper knowledge of the world and is something more than a series of unsubstantiated statements.

The human form is a most marvellous structure. Think, to begin with, of the head. In all its parts, the head is a copy of the universe. Its form is spherical, the spherical form being modified at the base in order to provide for the articulation of other organs and systems. The essential form of the head, however, is a copy of the spherical form of the universe, as you can discover if you study the basic formation of the embryo.

Linked to the head-structure is another formation which still retains something of the spherical form, although this is not so immediately apparent—I mean the chest-structure. Try to conceive this chest-structure imaginatively; it is as if a spherical form had been compressed and then released again, as if a sphere had undergone an organic metamorphosis.

Finally, in the limb-structures, we can discover hardly anything of the primal, embryonic form of man. Spiritual Science alone will make us alive to the fact that the limb-structures too, still reveal certain final traces of a spherical form although this is not very obvious in their outer shape.

When we study the threefold human form in its relation to the Cosmos, we can say that man is shaped and moulded by cosmic forces but these forces work upon him in many different ways. The changing position of the Sun in the zodiacal constellations through the various epochs has been taken as an indication of the different forces which pour down to man from the world of the fixed stars. Even our mechanistic astronomy to-day speaks of the fact that the Sun rises in a particular constellation at the vernal equinox, that in the course of the coming centuries it will pass through others, that during the day it passes through certain constellations and during the night through others. These and many other things are said, but there is no conscious knowledge of man's relationship to the universe beyond the Earth. It is little known, for example, that when the Sun is shining upon the Earth at the vernal equinox from the constellation of Aries, the solar forces streaming down into human beings in a particular part of the Earth are modified by the influences proceeding from the region in the heaven of fixed stars represented by the constellation of Aries. Neither is there any knowledge of the fact that these forces are peculiarly adapted to work upon the human head in such a way indeed, that during earthly life man can unfold a certain faculty of self-observation, self-knowledge and consciousness of his own Ego.

During the Greek epoch, as you know, the Sun stood in the constellation of Aries at the vernal equinox. In the Greek epoch, therefore, Western peoples were particularly subject to the Aries forces. The fact of being subject to the Aries forces makes it possible for the head of man to develop in such a way that Ego-conscious-ness, a faculty for self-contemplation, unfolds.

Even when the history of the zodiacal symbols is discussed to-day, there is not always knowledge of the essentials. Historical traditions speak of the zodiacal symbols—Aries, Taurus, Gemini, and so forth. In old calendars we frequently find the symbol of Aries, but very few people indeed realise the point of greatest significance, which is that the Ram is depicted with his head looking backwards. This image was intended to indicate that the Aries forces influence man in the direction of inwardness—for the Ram does not look forward, nor out into the wide world—he looks backwards, upon himself; he contemplates his own being. This is full of meaning. Once again, and this time in full consciousness not with the instinctive—clairvoyance of olden times—once again we must press forward to this cosmic wisdom, to the knowledge that the forces of the human head are developed essentially through the forces of Aries, Taurus, Gemini and Cancer, whereas the forces of the chest-structure are subject to those of the four middle constellations—Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio. The human head receives its form from the in-working forces of Aries, Taurus, Gemini and Cancer—forces which must be conceived as radiating from above downwards, whereas the zodiacal forces to which the chest-organisation of man is essentially subject (Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio), work laterally.

The other four constellations lie beneath the Earth; their forces work through the Earth, not directly down upon it as those of Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, nor laterally as those of Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio, but from below upwards. They work upon the limb-structures, and in such a way that the spherical form cannot remain intact. These are the constellations which in the instinctive consciousness of olden times, man envisaged as working up from beneath the Earth. When the constellations lie beneath the Earth, they work upon the limb-structures. And in days of yore there was consciousness of the fact that the forces by which the limbs are given shape are connected with these particular constellations.

The spherical form of the head—this was known to be connected with Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer; the forces working in the limbs were also conceived of as fourfold. Now it must be remembered that this knowledge was the outcome of ancient clairvoyance, hence the terms employed are concerned with conditions of life prevailing in those days. Thus, according to the wisdom of the stars, a man might be a hunter—one who shoots; the constellation which stimulated the corresponding activity in his limbs, making him a hunter, received the name of Sagittarius, the archer. Or again, a man might be a shepherd, concerned with the care of animals in general. This is implied in Capricorn, as it is called nowadays. In the true symbol, however, there is a fish-tail form. The Capricorn man is one who has charge of animals, in contrast to the hunter, the Sagittarius man.

The third constellation of this group is Aquarius, the water-carrier. But think of the ancient symbol. The true picture of this constellation is a man walking over hard soil, fertilising or watering it from a water-vessel. He represents those who are concerned with agriculture—husbandmen. This was the third calling in ancient times when there was instinctive knowledge of these things: huntsman, shepherd, husbandman.

The fourth calling was that of a mariner, In very early times, ships were built in the form of a fish, and later on we often find a dolphin's head at the prow of vessels. This is what underlies the symbol of Pisces—two fish forms intertwined—representing ships trading together. This is symbolical of the fourth calling which is bound up with activities of the limbs—the merchant or trader.

We have thus heard how the human form and figure originate from the Cosmos. The head is spherical; here man is directly exposed to the forces of the heavens of the fixed stars or their representatives the zodiacal circle. Then, working laterally, there are the forces present in the chest-organisation which only contains the human figure in an eclipsed and hidden form—Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio. And lastly there are the forces which do not work directly but by a roundabout way, via the earthly activities, through the influence upon man's calling. (For example, the archer—Sagittarius—is also portrayed as a kind of centaur, half horse, half man, and so forth).

Again in our time we must strive for a fully conscious realisation of man's place in the Cosmos. The form and shape of his physical body are given by the Cosmos. The upper part of his structure is a product of the Cosmos; the lower part a product of the Earth. The Earth covers those constellations which have a definite connection with his activities in life. Not until man's connection with the whole Cosmos is thus recognised and acknowledged will it be possible to understand the mysteries of the human form and its relation to earthly activities. And at the very outset the human form leads us to the zodiacal constellations.

This teaches us that to work as a husbandman, for instance, is by no means without significance in life. In the following lectures we shall hear how these things apply in modern times, but we shall not understand them until we realise that just as in earthly life between birth and death, man belongs to the powers of the Earth, so between death and a new birth he belongs to the Heavens; the powers of Heaven shape his head and it is left to the forces of Earth to shape and mould his limbs.

In the same way too, we may study man's stages or forms of life. For think of it—in the life of man there are also the same two poles. There is the head-life and the life that expresses itself in his activities, through the limbs more particularly. Between these two poles lies that part of his being which manifests in the rhythms of breathing and the circulation of the blood. At the one extreme we find the head-organisation; at the other, the limb-organisation.

The head represents the dying part of man's being, for the head is perpetually involved in death. Life is only possible because through the whole of earthly life, forces are continually pouring from the metabolic process to the head. If the head were to unfold merely its own natural forces, they would be the forces of death. But to this dying we owe the fact that we can think and be conscious beings. The moment the pure life-forces flow in excess to the head, consciousness is prone to be lost. Basically speaking, then, life makes for a dimming of consciousness; death pouring into life makes for a lighting-up of consciousness. (See Fundamentals of Therapy, by Rudolf Steiner and Dr. Ita Wegman, Chapter I, pages 14—15.) If only very little of what is rightly located in the stomach, for example, were to pass up to the head, the head would be without consciousness—like the stomach. Man owes the consciousness of his head merely to the circumstance that the head is not permeated with life in the same way as the stomach. Lowered consciousness means that the forces of nourishment and of growth are acting with excessive strength in the head. On the one side, man is a dying being; on the other, a being who is continually coming to birth. The dying part—which, however, determines the existence of consciousness—is subject, in the main, to the forces working down upon the Earth from the outer planets: Saturn, Jupiter, Mars. That man is an integral part of the universe is not only due to the working of the fixed stars, but also to the working of the planetary spheres.

Saturn, Jupiter, Mars—the so-called outer planets—contain the forces which work chiefly towards the pole of consciousness in man. The forces of the inner planets—Venus, Mercury, Moon—work into his metabolic system and limb-structures. The Sun itself stands in the middle and is mainly associated with the rhythmic system.

Moreover the three first-mentioned are the three stages of life which rather represent the damping-down and suppression of life which is necessary for the sake of consciousness. Through this, we, in our earthly life, are liken to heaven, related to more distant planetary realms beyond. On the other hand, through the essentially thriving principle of life itself in us—that is through the forces of metabolism, the motor forces of the limbs—we are related to the nearer planets: Mercury, Venus and Moon. The Moon, after all, is directly connected with the most thriving, with the most rampant life of all in man, namely the forces of reproduction.

When we study the human form, we are led to the spheres of the fixed stars, that is to say, to their representatives, the zodiacal constellations. When we study the life of man, to discover where it is a more thriving and where a more declining life, we are led to the planetary spheres.

In the same way we can study man's being of soul and of spirit. This shall be done in the following lectures. To-day I only wanted to indicate very briefly that it must become possible for man once again to regard himself not merely as an earthly being, connecting his form and his life simply and solely with earthly forces of heredity, digestion, the influences of autumn, spring, wind, weather and the like. He must learn to relate both his life and his form to the universe beyond the Earth. He must find what lies beyond the earthly realm—and then he will discover his true being, he will find himself.

It would augur dire misfortune for the progress of Western humanity if the conception of the Cosmos as a great system of machinery to which the scientific view of the world since the middle of last century has led, were to remain, and if man were to wander on Earth knowing nothing of his true being. His true being has its origin and home in the Universe beyond the Earth, therefore he can know nothing of himself if he sees only what is earthly and thinks that what is beyond the Earth can be explained in terms of mathematics and mechanics. In deed and truth, man can only find himself when he realises his connection with the universe beyond the Earth and incorporates its forces into his moral and social life—indeed this must be, if moral and social life are to thrive. No real wisdom can arise in moral and social life unless a link is forged with cosmic wisdom. And that is why it has been imperative to infuse something of Anthroposophy into the domain of moral and social life too, for we believe that these impulses can lead away from the forces of decline to the forces of upward progress.

We have heard how in accordance with anthroposophical knowledge, the being of man must be viewed in relation to the whole universe. We considered the human form and figure and its relation to the fixed stars, or rather to the representative of the fixed stars—the Zodiac. We heard how certain forces proceed from the constellations of these stars when combined with the Sun forces, and how the shape and structure of the human head and the organs connected with it, are related to the upper constellations of the Zodiac: Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer. The structure of the human chest-organisation is connected with the middle constellations; Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio. Finally the metabolic-and-limb system is connected with the lower constellations: Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius, Pisces—that is to say with their forces when they are, in a sense, covered by the Earth. So that we can say: The fixed stars—for the Zodiac is only the representative of the fixed stars—work upon the human form and structure.

The planetary spheres work upon man's stages or forms of life. It must indeed be quite clear to us that man has various kinds of life in him. We should not be able to think, the head would not be an organ of thought, if life were as rampant there as it is in the metabolic system, for example. When metabolism becomes too strong in the head, consciousness is extinguished; we lose our consciousness of self.

From this it may be concluded that for consciousness, for mental presentation, a damped-down, suppressed life, a declining life is necessary; while a thriving life, vehement and intense, is necessary for what works more from out of the unconscious, to become will.

We have therefore among the various stages of life some which tend towards self-extinction, and some in which strong, intense organic activity manifests, as in a child, in whom thought is not yet operating. We have this child-like life continually within us; but into this child-like life, the life that is involved in a gradual process of death, inserts itself.

These different stages of life are connected with the planetary spheres. Whereas the fixed stars work in man through his physical forces, the planetary spheres work through his etheric forces. The planetary spheres, therefore, work upon man in a more delicate way. But the human physical body has already received its form, its shape from the fixed stars, not from anything earthly; and its stages of life from the planetary spheres.

We have thus considered the form of man's physical body, the life-stages of his ether-body. We can now proceed to consider his life of soul-and-spirit. But here our mode of study must be different. What is it that our physical and our ether-body provide for us in waking life? They provide what we perceive through our senses and what we can work over in our thoughts. We are only really awake in our acts of sense-perception and when we work over them in thought.

On the other hand, consider the life of feeling. It is obvious, even to superficial study, that feeling does not indicate a state of awakeness as complete as that of thinking and sense-perception. When we wake in the morning and become aware of the colours and sounds of the outside world, when we are conscious of the conditions of warmth around us, we are fully awake and then, in our thoughts, we work over what is transmitted by the senses. But when feelings rise up from the soul, it cannot be said that we are conscious in them to the same extent. Feelings link themselves with sense-perceptions. One sense-impression pleases us, another displeases us. Feelings also intermingle with our thoughts. But if we compare the pictures we experience in dreams with what we experience in our feelings, then the connection between dream-life and the life of feeling is clearly noticeable.

Dreams have to be grasped by the waking life of thought if they are to be valued and understood aright. But feelings too must be observed, as it were, by our thought-life if we are to understand them. In our feelings we are, in reality, dreaming. When we dream, we dream in pictures. When we are awake, we dream in our feelings. And in our will we are asleep, even when fully awake. When we raise an arm, when we do this or that, we can perceive what movements the arm or hand is making, but we do not know how the power of the will operates in the organism. We know as little about that as about the conditions prevailing from the time we fall asleep until we wake up. In our willing, in our actions, we are asleep, while in our sense-perceptions and our thoughts, we are awake. So we are not only asleep during the night; we are asleep, in part of our being, during waking life too. In our will we are asleep and in our feelings we dream. What we experience during actual sleep is withdrawn from our consciousness. But in essence, the same is true of feeling and willing. It is therefore obviously important to realise what it is that the human being experiences in these realms of which ordinary life is quite unaware.

You know from many anthroposophical lectures that from the time of going to sleep until that of waking, the Ego and astral body are outside the physical body and the ether-body. Now it may be of very great importance to learn about just those experiences which the Ego and the astral body pass through from the time of falling asleep to that of waking up. When we are awake, we are confronted by sense-perceptions of the material world. To a certain extent we reach out and encounter them; but with our sense-perceptions, our waking thoughts, we reach no further than the surface of things.

Of course someone may object, saying that he can get further than the surface of things, that if he cuts a piece of wood which is there before him as a sense-perception, then he has penetrated inside it. That is a fallacy, however, for if you cut a piece of wood, you have again only a surface, and if you cut the two pieces again, still you have only surfaces; and if you were to get right to the molecules and atoms, again you would have only surfaces. You do not reach what may be called the inner essence of things, for that lies beyond the realm of sense-perception. Sense-perceptions can be conceived as a tapestry spread out around us. What lies this side of the tapestry we perceive with our senses; what lies on the other side of the tapestry we do not perceive with the senses. We are in this world of sense from the time we wake up until we fall asleep. Our soul is filled with the impressions made upon us by this world of sense. Now when we pass into sleep, we are not in the world this side of the senses, we are then in reality inside things, we are on the other side of the tapestry of sense-perceptions. But in his earthly consciousness, man knows nothing of this and he dreams of all sorts of things lying beyond the realm of sense-perception. He dreams of molecules, of atoms; but they are only dreams—dreams of his waking consciousness. He invents molecules, atoms and the like, and believes them to be realities. But study any description of atoms, even the most recent... you will find nothing but minute objects which are described according to the pattern of what is experienced from the surface of things. It is all a tissue woven from the experiences of waking consciousness on this side of the tapestry of sense.

But when we fall asleep, we emerge from the world of sense and penetrate to the other side. And whereas we experience Nature here with our waking thoughts, in yonder world, from the time of falling asleep until the time of waking, we live in the world of Spirit, that world of Spirit through which we also pass before birth and after death. In his earthly development, however, man is so constituted that his consciousness is extinguished when he passes beyond the world of sense; his consciousness is not forceful enough to penetrate to the spiritual world. But what Spiritual Science calls Imagination, Inspiration, Intuition—these three forms of super-sensible cognition—give us knowledge of what lies on the other side of the tapestry of sense. And what we discover first, is the lowest stage of the world of the Hierarchies.

When we wake from sleep we pass over into the world of animals, plants, minerals—the three kingdoms of Nature belonging to the world of sense. When we fall asleep, we pass beyond the world of sense, we are transported into the realm of the first rank of Beings above man—the Angels. And from the time of falling asleep until waking, we are connected with the Being who is allotted to man as his own Angel, just as through our eyes and ears we are connected with the three kingdoms of Nature here in the world of sense. Even if at first we have no consciousness of this connection with the world of the Angels, it is nevertheless there. This connection extends into our astral body.

If, living in our astral body during sleep, we were suddenly to wake up, we should contact the world of the Angels, in the first place the Angel who is connected with our own life, just as here in the earthly world we are in contact with animals, plants, and minerals.

Now even in the earthly world, in the world of sense, if a man is attentive and deliberately trains his thinking, he sees much more than when he is unobservant and hasty. His connection with the three kingdoms of Nature can be intimate or superficial. And it is the same with regard to the world of spiritual Beings. But in the world of spiritual Beings, different conditions prevail.

A man whose thoughts are entirely engrossed in the material world, who never desires to rise above it, or to acquaint himself with moral ideas extending beyond the merely utilitarian, who has no desire to experience true human love, who in his waking life has no devotion to the Divine-Spiritual world—on falling asleep, such a man has no forces which enable him to come into contact with his Angel. Whenever we fall asleep, this Angel is waiting as it were for the idealistic feelings and thoughts which come with us, and the more we bring, the more intimate becomes our relation to the Angel while we are asleep. And so throughout our life, by means of what we cultivate over and above material interests, we garner, in our waking life, forces whereby our relation to the Angel becomes more and more intimate.

When we die, all sense-perceptions fall away. The outer world can no longer make any impression upon us, for this must be done via the senses, and the senses pass away with the body. In like manner, the thinking that is connected with sense-perception is extinguished, for its realm is the ether-body. This ether-body only remains with us for a few days after death. We see it at first as a tableau—a tableau which under certain circumstances can be glimpsed during life but which will inevitably arise before us after death.

This ether-tissue dissolves away into the universe, just as the ordinary thoughts acquired from the world of sense pass away from us. They do not remain. All purely utilitarian thoughts, all thoughts connected with the material world, drift away from us when we pass through the Gate of Death. But the idealistic thoughts and feelings, the pure human love, the religious feelings which have arisen in our waking life and have united us with our Angel, these accompany us when we pass through death.

This has a very important consequence during the period lying between death and a new birth. Even during earthly life we are connected with the higher Hierarchies and it is correct to say that when we fall asleep and our idealistic experiences reach to the Angel, this Angel is in turn connected with the Archangels, the Archangels with the Archai, and so on. Our existence continues in a rich and abundant world of Spirit. But this spiritual world has no special significance for us between birth and death. This world of the higher Hierarchies acquires its real significance for us when it becomes our environment between death and a new birth. The more we have delivered over to our Angel, the more conscious life is this Angel able to infuse into us after death when we are beings of soul-and-spirit, the more gifts are bestowed by the Hierarchies upon the conscious life of soul. What our Angel unfolds, together with the higher Hierarchies (that is to say, what the Beings of the First Hierarchy unfold together with higher Hierarchies through our Angel) is for our consciousness in the spiritual world between death and rebirth what our eyes and ears are in the physical world. And the more idealistic thoughts and feelings, human love and piety we have brought to our Angel, the clearer does our consciousness become.

Now between death and a new birth there comes a time when the Angel has a definite task in connection with us. The Angel has now to achieve a more intimate relation with the hierarchy of the Archangels than was formerly the case. I have described the time through which man lives between death and a new birth from many different points of view, notably in the Lecture-Course given in Vienna in 1914, entitled The Inner Nature of Man and the Life between Death and a new Birth. I will now describe certain other aspects.

When a somewhat lengthy period has elapsed after death, the important moment comes when the Angel must as it were deliver up to the Archangels what he has received from us through the ‘idealistic’ experiences described. It is as though man were placed before the world of the Archangels, who can then receive these experiences he has unfolded in his soul and Spirit during his life between birth and death. There are great differences among human souls living between death and a new birth. In our epoch there are persons who have brought very little in the way of idealistic thoughts and feelings, of human love, of piety, when the time comes for the Angel to pass on to the Archangel for the purposes of cosmic evolution, what has been carried through death. This activity which unfolds between the Angel and the Archangel must, under all circumstances, take place. But there is a great difference, dependent upon whether we are able to follow consciously, by means of the experiences described, what takes place between the Angels and the Archangels or whether we only live through it in a dull, dim state, as must be the lot of human beings whose consciousness has been purely materialistic. It is not quite accurate to say that the experiences of such human beings are dull or dim. It is perhaps better to say: they experience these happenings in such a way that they feel continually rejected by a world into which they ought to be received, they feel continually chilled by a world which should receive them with warmth. For man should be received with loving sympathy into the world of the Archangels at this important moment of time; he should be received with warmth. And then he will be led in the right way towards what I have called in one of my Mystery Plays: “The Midnight Hour of Existence.”

Man is led by the Archangels to the realm of the Archai where his life is interwoven with that of all the higher Hierarchies, for through the Archai he is brought into relation with all the higher Hierarchies and receives from their realms the impulse to descend to the Earth once again. The power is given him to work as a being of soul-and-spirit, to work in what is provided, later on, in material form, by the stream of heredity.

Before the Midnight Hour of Existence man has become more and more estranged from earthly existence, he has been growing more and more into the spiritual world—either being received lovingly (in the sense described above) by the spiritual world, being drawn to it with warmth, or being repelled, chilled by it. But when the Midnight Hour of Existence has passed, man begins gradually to long for earthly life and once again, during the second part of his journey, he encounters the world of the Archangels. It is really so: Between death and a new birth, man ascends, first to the world of the Angels, Archangels, Archai, and then once again descends; and after the world of the Archai his most important contact is with the world of the Archangels.

And now comes another important point in the life between death and a new birth. In a man who has brought through death no idealistic thoughts or feelings, no human love or true piety, something of the soul-and-spirit has perished as a result of the antipathy and chilling reception meted out by the higher world. A man who now again approaches the realm of the Archangels in the right way has received into him the power to work effectively in his subsequent life on Earth, to make proper use of his body; a man who has not brought such experiences with him will be imbued by the Angels with a longing for earthly life which remains more unconscious. A very great deal depends upon this. Upon it depends to what people, to what language—mother-tongue—the man descends in his forthcoming earthly existence. This urge towards a particular people, a particular mother-tongue may have been implanted in him deeply and inwardly or more superficially. So that on his descent a man is either permeated with deep and inward love for what will become his mother-tongue, or he enters more automatically into what he will have to express later on through his organs of speech.

It makes a great difference in which of these two ways a man has been destined for the language that will be his in the coming earthly life. He who before his earthly life, during his second passage through the realm of the Angels, can be permeated with a really inward love for his mother-tongue, assimilates it as though it were part of his very being. He becomes one with it. This love is absolutely natural to him; it is a love born of the soul; he grows into his language and race as into a natural home. If however a man has grown into it the other way during the descent to his next earthly life, he will arrive on the Earth loving his language merely out of instinct and lower impulses. Lacking the true, inward love for his language and his people, he will be prone to an aggressive patriotism connected with his bodily existence. It makes a great difference whether we grow into race and language with the tranquil, pure love of one who unites himself inwardly with his folk and language, or whether we grow into them more automatically, and out of passions and instincts express love for our folk and our language. The former conditions never come to expression in chauvinism or a superficial and aggressive form of patriotism. A true and inward love for race and language expresses itself naturally, and is thoroughly consistent with real and universal human love. Feeling for internationalism or cosmopolitanism is never stultified by this inner love for a language and people. When, however, a man grows into his language more automatically, when through his instincts and impulses he develops an over-fervid, organic, animal-like love for language and people, false nationalism and chauvinism arise, with their external emphasis upon race and nationality.

At the present time especially, it is necessary to study from the standpoint of life between death and a new birth what we encounter in the outer world in our life between birth and death. For the way we come down into race and language through the stream of heredity, through birth, depends upon how we encounter, for the second time, the realm of the Archangels.

Those who try to understand life to-day from the spiritual vantage-point, know that the experience arising in the period between death and a new birth when man comes for the second time into the realm of the Angels, is very important. All over the Earth to-day the peoples are adopting a false attitude to nationality, race and language, and much of what has arisen in the catastrophe of the second decade of the twentieth century in the evolution of the Western people, is only explicable when studied from such points of view. He who studies life to-day in the light of anthroposophical Spiritual Science must assume that in former earthly lives many men became more and more deeply entangled in materialism. You all know that, normally, the period between death and a new birth is lengthy. But especially in the present phase of evolution, there are many men whose life between their last death and their present birth was only short, and in their former earthly life they had little human love or idealism. Already in the former earthly life their interests were merely utilitarian. And as a result, in their second contact with the realm of the Angels between death and a new birth, the seeds were laid for all that arises to-day in such an evil form in the life of the West.

We shall have realised that man can only be understood as a spatial being when it is known that his form and structure derive from the realm of the fixed stars and his life-stages from the planetary spheres. As a spatial being, man draws the forces that are active in him, not only from the Earth but from the whole Cosmos. Now just as it is necessary to go beyond what is earthly in order to understand man as a spatial being, so it is necessary to go beyond life between birth and death in order to understand social life, racial life on the Earth.

When we carefully observe the life of to-day we find that although men claim their right to freedom so vociferously, they are, in reality, inwardly unfree. There is no truly free life in the activities which nowadays manifest such obvious forces of decline; instincts and lower impulses are the cause of the misery in social life. And when this is perceived we are called upon to understand it.

Just as a second meeting with the Archangels takes place, so when man once again approaches earthly life, he enters into a more intimate union with his Angel. But at first he is somewhat withdrawn from the realm of the Angels. As long as he is in the realm of the Archangels, his Angel too is more strongly bound with this realm. Man lives as it were among the higher Hierarchies and as he draws near to a new birth he is entrusted more and more to the realm of the Angels who then lead him through the world of the Elements, through fire, air, water and earth, to the stream of heredity. His Angel, leads him to physical existence on Earth. His Angel can make him into a man who is in a position to act freely, out of the depths of his soul-and-spirit, if all the conditions described have been fulfilled by the achievements of a former earthly life.

But, the Angel is not able to lead a man to a truly free life, if he has had to be united automatically with his language and his race. In such a case the individual life also becomes unfree. This lack of freedom shows itself in the following way. Instead of forming free concepts, such a man merely thinks words. He becomes unfree because all his thinking is absorbed in words. This is a fundamental characteristic of modern men.

Earthly life in its historical development, especially in its present state, cannot be understood unless we also turn with the eyes of soul, to the life which runs its course between death and a new birth, to the world of soul-and-spirit.

To understand the human form, we must turn to the heaven of the fixed stars; to understand the stages of life in man we must turn to the planetary spheres. If we wish to understand man's life of soul-and-spirit, we must not confine our attention to the life between birth and death, for as we have seen, this life of soul-and-spirit is rooted in the world of the higher Hierarchies and belongs to the higher Hierarchies just as the physical body and ether-body of man belong to the physical and etheric worlds.

Again, if we wish to understand thinking, feeling and willing, then we must not merely confine our attention to man's relation to the world of sense. Thinking, feeling and willing are the forces through which the soul develops. We are carried as it were through the Gate of Death by our idealistic thoughts—by what love and religious devotion have implanted in these thoughts. Our first meeting with the Archangels depends upon how we have ennobled our thinking and permeated it with idealism. But when we have passed through the Midnight Hour of Existence, our thinking dies away. It is this thinking which now, after the Midnight Hour of Existence, is re-moulded and elaborated for the next earthly life. And the forces which permeate our physical organs of thinking in the coming earthly life are shaped by our former thinking. The forces working in the human head are not merely forces of the present life. They are the forces which have worked over into this life from thinking as it was in the last life, and give rise to the form of the brain.

On the other hand, it is the will which, at the second meeting with the Archangels, plays its special part in man's life of soul-and-spirit. And it is the will which then, in the next life on Earth, lays hold of the limb-and-metabolic organism. When we enter through birth into earthly life, it is the will which determines the fitness or inadequacy of the limbs and the metabolic processes.

Within the head we really have a physical mirror-image of the thoughts evolved in the previous life. In the forces of the metabolism and limbs we have the working of the newly acquired forces of will which, at the second meeting with the Archangels, are incorporated into us as I have described—either in such a way that they are inwardly active in the life of soul, or operate automatically.

Those who realise how this present life which generates such forces of decline in humanity of the West, has taken shape, will look with the greatest interest towards what was active in man between death and a new birth during the period of existence preceding this present earthly life. And what they can learn from this will fill them with the impulse—now that the dire consequences of materialism are becoming apparent in the life of the peoples—to give men who already in their last incarnation were too materialistic, that stimulus which can lead once again to a deepening of inner life, to free spiritual activity, to a really intimate, and natural relation to language and race which does not in any way run counter to internationalism or cosmopolitanism.

But first and foremost our thinking must be permeated with real spirituality. In the Spirit of modern man, there are, in reality, only thoughts. When man speaks to-day of his Spirit, he is actually speaking only of his thoughts, of his more or less abstract thinking. What we need is to be filled with Spirit, the living Spirit belonging to the world lying between death and a new birth. In respect of his form, his stages of life, his nature of soul-and-spirit, man must regard himself as belonging to a world which lies outside the earthly sphere; then he will be able to bring what is right and good into earthly life.

We know how the Spiritual in man is gradually absorbed by other domains of earthly existence, by political life, by economic life. What is needed is a free and independent spiritual life; only thereby can man be permeated with real spirituality, with spiritual substance, not merely with thoughts about this or that. Anthroposophy must therefore be prepared to work for the liberation of the spiritual life. If this spiritual life does not stand upon its own foundations, man will become more and more a dealer in abstractions, He will not be able to permeate his being with living Spirit, but only with abstract Spirit.

When a man here, in physical life, passes through the Gate of Death, his corpse is committed to the Earth, or to the Elements. His true being is no longer within this physical corpse. When a man passes through birth in such a way that through the processes described he has become an ‘automaton’ in his relation to his nation, language and conduct—then his living thinking, his living will, his living nature of soul-and-spirit die when he is born into the physical world and within physical existence become the corpse of the Divine Being of soul-and-spirit.

Our abstract, rationalistic thinking is verily a corpse of the soul-and-spirit. Just as the real human being is no longer within the physical corpse, so we have in abstract thinking, a life of soul that is devoid of Spirit—really only the corpse of the Divine-spiritual. Man stands to-day at a critical point where he must resolve to receive the spiritual world once again, in order that he may pour new life into the abstract thinking that is a corpse of the Divine-Spiritual, opening the way for instincts, impulses and automatism.

What I said at the end of my lecture to students here (On the Reality of Higher Worlds. 25th November, 1921.) is deeply true: If he is to pass from a decline to a real ascent, man must overcome the abstraction which, like a corpse of the soul is present in the intellectualistic and rationalistic thinking of to-day.

An awakening of the soul and spirit—that is what is needed! The social life of the present day points clearly to the necessity for such an awakening. Anthroposophy has indeed an eternal task in regard to that living principle in man which must continue beyond all epochs of time. But Anthroposophy has also a task to fulfil for the present age, namely to wean man from externalisation, from the tendency to paralyse and kill the Divine-Spiritual within him. Anthroposophy must bring back this Divine-Spiritual life. Man must learn to regard himself not merely as an earthly but as a heavenly being, realising that his earthly life can only be conducted aright if the forces of heavenly existence, of the existence between death and a new birth, are brought down into this earthly life.

The two previous lectures dealt with important questions relating to the nature and destiny of man. We heard that the human physical body and ether-body are not connected merely with the external world perceived by the senses and that this bodily nature of man can only be understood aright when we also recognise its relation with the Zodiac. And we then tried to understand how the heaven of the fixed stars and the planetary spheres work upon what lies within the outer covering of man, shaping and imbuing it with life. In the last lecture we also heard how the inner, spiritual core of man's being is related to the world of the higher Hierarchies. It was indicated that this connection with the world of the higher Hierarchies becomes especially noticeable when we observe how in his physical life on Earth, man can achieve union with the spiritual world through morality, religious devotion and love for his fellow-men; in this way he enables his Guardian Angel so to order his descent at the end of his life between death and a new birth that he again acquires the full power of individuality and is able, as a free individual, to take hold of his human nature. We also heard that if a man has not established this relation to the spiritual world in some incarnation, his link with his nation, for example, is of a purely external kind, and that this, in its extreme form, leads to chauvinism.

Such studies show us that man's life can only be truly understood when the other side, too, is considered, that is to say, the life stretching between death and a new birth. As soon as we come to study the inner nature of man, this life between death and a new birth must be taken into consideration.. For life here on the Earth is in truth a reflection of the life between death and a new birth. Life in matter is the bodily life and what we have developed in the world of spirit-and-soul before birth expresses itself in this bodily life.

What we must acquire anew, what must be built up anew in the core of our being, is the element appertaining to the will, and in a certain respect also to the life of feeling. The faculty of thinking that is bound up with the head—this we bring with us from the spiritual world—to the extent to which thinking is unmixed with feeling. Our thinking faculty per se comes with us at birth into physical existence and we have only to develop it during physical life or allow it to be developed by education. What we mainly acquire in the new incarnation through intercourse with the outer world are the qualities inherent in feeling and in will, which for this reason play an extremely important part in education.

In the sphere of education, if through our own short-comings as teachers we are incapable of helping the child to think properly, we may leave undeveloped much that by virtue of his previous incarnations he could have brought to expression. If, however, we are unable to work on the child's life of feeling and of will through our natural authority and our example as teachers, then we fail to impart to him what he ought to receive in the physical world, and thus we do injury to his subsequent life after death. In the modern world this is a cause of deep pain to anyone who understands these things. In the world of education to-day people insist upon the importance of the child being made to use his brain, upon the cultivation of his intellect. True, much that the child brings with him through birth is brought out by these means. But it can only be of real use when earthly life, too is presented to the child in the right way, that is to say, when we are able through example and authority to impart to him the intangible qualities belonging to feeling and to will. We injure the child's eternal life if we fail to cultivate in him the right kind of feeling and. will.

The faculty of thinking which we bring with us at birth, comes to an end here, in the material world, it dies with us. Only what we cultivate through feeling and will—which is nevertheless unconsciously permeated with new thoughts—this and this only we take with us through the Gate of Death. In our present very difficult times, religion, education, indeed every domain of mental and spiritual life must begin to take account of man's eternal nature, not merely of human egotism.

Religions of the present day speculate far too much upon human egotism. On the one side they encourage inertia by not spurring men on to acquire those things which are eternal by inner individual effort in the life of feeling and of will; and on the other side they enhance egotism by speaking only of eternal life after death, not of what was there before birth or conception and has come down with us into the physical world. I have said before that this life before birth is connected with selflessness in man, whereas human egotism comes into play whenever mention is made of the life after death. Life after death assumes an egotistic form in the religious concepts of to-day. The idea is put before man in such a way that his longings are satisfied. When the religions believe that they have helped the egotistic life of soul in man, they think they have done what is expected of them. But through a truly spiritual understanding of the world, mankind must be brought to realise how essential it is for the whole life of the human being to be viewed in the light of eternity, free from every trace of egotism and moulded accordingly by those whose task it is to teach and educate.

Now this has a significant bearing upon public life too, and it is of this that I want to speak to-day. For it is in the highest degree necessary that what we gain from an anthroposophical knowledge of higher worlds should be carried into actual life, that we should know how to bring it to expression in life. Abstract theories are really of little use. Life on the Earth is many-sided, full of variety. If, for example, we consider the life of the peoples, it is not only obvious that Indians differ from Americans or Englishmen, but Swedes are often said to differ from Norwegians although they live in such near proximity. We cannot let ourselves be guided entirely by general principles; concrete, individual conditions prevail everywhere and it is these that are important. It is just these individual conditions that we shall fail to recognise if we do not take our start from the Spiritual. Modern man does not really know the world. He talks a great deal about the world but he does not know it, for he is unaware that the soul-and-spirit extends into physical existence and that, fundamentally, this physical existence is governed by the Spiritual. This knowledge is not acquired by studying abstract, general principles. These abstract principles are often perfectly correct, but they do not carry us very far in the world as it actually is.

Certainly it is quite correct to say: ‘God rules the world.’ But in face of the manifold variety of the world it is purposeless to keep repeating: ‘God rules the world in India, God rules the world in England, God rules the world in Sweden, God rules the world in Norway.’ Certainly, God rules the world everywhere, but for the purposes of life in its immediate reality, it is necessary to know how God rules the world in India, in England, in Sweden, in Norway. In spiritual study the individual conditions must be observed in every case. Of what use would it be, for example, to take a man into a Geld, show him a plant with yellow flowers and round petals and merely tell him, “That is a plant”—and then take him to a plant with thorns and pointed, tapering petals, repeating: “That is a plant.” It is the specific and individual properties of the plant that must be made clear to him. But in spiritual matters man has become so easygoing and slack that he is content with general principles. He only wants to hear: ‘God rules the world,’ or ‘Man has a Guardian Angel’ and he feels no desire for detailed knowledge of how life is differentiated in the various regions of the Earth, or how its various manifestations have been influenced by the spiritual world.

This, then, will be the theme of the lecture.

It is precisely in these days of tumult, when people all over the world are so utterly at sea in public affairs, when congresses and conferences produce no result, and in spite of high-sounding programmes, men disperse without having come to any real decision—it is precisely now that deeper questions should be raised concerning all that is revealing itself from the spiritual world in the different regions of the Earth.

Think of the peninsula which you, together with the Swedes, have as your earthly dwelling-place. There is something about it that presents a kind of riddle to those who do not live in Sweden or Norway, as well as to those who actually live here. There was certainly a great difference in the way in which since 1914, let us say, you thought about the tumultuous events going on in the world. These events have struck their blows in manifold ways but man to-day is largely unaware of their effects; he does not realise what deeper forces have been and are in operation. Looking down to Middle Europe, to the South of Europe, to Africa, even to regions of Asia, the events will have seemed to you to be the direct expression of violent, elemental passions, whereas up here you were merely experiencing the consequences and reverberations of those events. People up here in the North may well have been perplexed, for it really was as though men had suddenly become frenzied with desire to tear one another to pieces. Those who were only onlookers must certainly have been perplexed when they thought about these happenings more deeply.

But such things cannot be explained by studying only the one period—even a period fraught with happenings as momentous as those of recent years. True, someone may say that it seems to him as though he had lived through centuries in these few years, but in general there will only be a very gradual realisation that this is actually so. Most people are living and thinking to-day exactly as they did in 1914. In countries like these in the North, this is in a way understandable. But that it is also the case in Middle Europe is terrible. The normal feeling would be one of having lived through events which would otherwise have come to pass only in the course of centuries. Everything was compressed into a few short years. Events like those of 1914-1915 embraced within a brief space of time as much as about ten years of the Thirty Years War, and a measure of illumination can only be shed upon them when they are studied in a much wider historical perspective.

From the vantage-point of your Northern peninsula you will be able to realise that it is only since the beginning of the present epoch that things have been happening South of you in which your participation has been different from that of the peoples who live in the South of Europe, in Western Asia, or in Middle Europe. There has really been an utter contrast between the South and the North of Europe in this respect.

I want you to think of the fourth century A.D., or rather of the period which reaches its climax in that century. In the South, on the Greek peninsula and especially on the Italian peninsula—also in the life of Middle Europe which was in contact with Italy—you see the spread of Christianity. But something else as well is to be perceived. Christianity makes its way from the East into the Pagan world of Europe, expressing itself in many different forms. When we consider the early centuries, the first, second and even the third centuries, we find the old, inherited wisdom being brought to bear upon Christianity. Efforts are made to understand Christianity through the Gnosis, as it is called, to interpret Christianity in the light of the highest form of wisdom. A change comes about in this respect, but not until the fourth century, just at the time when Christianity begins to spread more towards the regions of Middle Europe. The Gnostic conceptions, the wisdom-filled conceptions of Christianity now disappear. A writer like Origen who wants to introduce something of the old Gnostic wisdom into Christianity is branded as a heretic: Julian, the so-called Apostate, who wants to unite the old pagan wisdom with Christianity, is ostracised. And finally Christianity is externalised by the deed of Constantine into the political form of a Church. In the fourth century, that which in Christianity had once been quite different, those secrets which were felt to need the illumination of the highest wisdom if they were to become intelligible—all this begins to take on a more superficial character. Men are called upon to lay hold of Christianity in a more elementary way, with a kind of abstract feeling. Christianity makes its way from the South towards the North. It is, of course, true, that from the fourth to the fifteenth centuries, the Christian life which develops in the South and especially in Middle Europe, is rich in qualities of soul, but the Spiritual in its living essence, has receded. The Gnosis is regarded as an undesirable element in Christianity... There you have one or two cursory flashlights upon happenings among the peoples of Europe more towards the South.

Christianity spreads out, finds its way into the Greek world, the Roman world, into the life of Middle Europe, and there, in a certain sense it is stripped of spirituality. Think now of your Northern world in the third and fourth centuries, that is to say in the same early centuries of the post-Christian era. External history gives no true account of the conditions then prevailing. This period must be studied with the help of Anthroposophy. In connection with the European Folk-Souls this was done here some years ago (1910) but to-day we will think more of the external character of the peoples.

At the time when, in the South, the Spirit withdrew more and more towards the East—that is to say, shortly after the period I have described—the old Athenian Schools of Philosophy were closed and the last philosophers of Athens were obliged to make their way to the East, where they attached themselves to the mysterious academy of Gondi Shapur from which at that time a remarkable spiritual life was spreading via Africa and Southern Europe towards the rest of Europe, deeply influencing the spiritual life of later times. Yet it can truly be said that there, in the South, men looked back to a lofty spirituality they had once possessed.. The mighty Event of Golgotha had taken place. In the first centuries it had still been found necessary to understand the Mystery of Golgotha with the help of this sublime spirituality. This spirituality had been gradually swept aside; the human element had more and more taken the place of what may be called the working of the Divine in the life of man.

The Gnosis still helped man to realise the existence of the Divine-Spiritual within him. This Divine-Spiritual reality was more and more put aside and the human element brought to the fore. In this respect much was contributed by those peoples who took part in the migrations. In their migrations towards the South, in their conquests of the Southern regions, the Germanic peoples of Middle Europe who brought with them souls more naturally bound to the physical, contributed to this repression of the Spiritual. For they did not understand the old spirituality and brought a more fundamentally human influence to the South. And so the lofty primeval wisdom which had once been alive in men receded from the spiritual culture of the West. And at the same time when this repression of the Spiritual was taking place—in the third and fourth centuries A.D.—we find that up here in the North, teachings about the Gods were being spread among men.

In those days human beings who were inspired in an instinctive way were held in high esteem. These were times which had long since passed away for the Southern people. Up here in the North it still happened that here and there a man or a woman living in isolation would be sought out and listened to, when in a mysterious way, through faculties arising from their particular bodily constitution, they gave revelations concerning the spiritual worlds. These faculties were a natural gift in certain individuals who worked in this way among their fellows. And when the people were listening attentively to these isolated seers, they realised, when they went into the hut of one of these ‘God-intoxicated,’ ‘God-revealing’ men or women, that it was not really the physical man or woman to whom they were listening, but that it was the Divine-Spiritual itself which had descended and was inspiring such individuals in order that they might give forth the teaching of the Gods to their fellow-men.

It is very striking for the anthroposophical student of European history to find that the men of the North were still so constituted as to be able to receive divine teachings, to feel that the Gods—the Beings of the higher Hierarchies—were still living realities among them; whereas in the South, during the same period, the Spirit is becoming weaker and weaker and the human element which man brings to expression in his life on the physical Earth comes to the fore and supersedes the Divine. So it was in the decisive fourth century, when the men of the South were becoming more and more eager for human doctrine.

These individual revelations, springing as they did from obscure depths of spiritual life must be taken in all seriousness. It is verily as if in those times the Gods moved as teachers among the still childlike peoples of the North. This condition which was still present in a particular form in the North during the first centuries of the Christian era had long since vanished in the South. But it is a remarkable and significant fact in the destiny of the peoples that the men of the North became for the men of the South, the bearers of what had been learnt from the Gods —not from men.

This must be taken earnestly. The people who belonged, in the main, to the population of the West of your peninsula, whose descendants are the Norwegians of to-day, journeyed towards the West, towards the South West, and as a result of their wanderings, their sea-voyages and conquests, their influence reached right down to Sicily and North Africa The sons of the Gods went to the sons of the World, bringing them what they had learned from their Gods.

It is an interesting chapter of history to study the migrations of the Northern peoples towards the South West and to see how—in continual metamorphosis, of course—the teachings of the Northern Gods spread towards the South West, deeply influencing the British Isles, France, Spain, Italy, Sicily and North Africa. Moreover, the effect of this influence is perceptible even to-day. The Roman, Latin form of life which makes its way from the South towards the North is permeated with the Northern influence. Whatever consciousness of the Divine has remained in the stream of civilisation from the South is here influenced by the Northern teachings of the Gods. But it takes on a peculiar character which is not fully noticeable until we look towards the Eastern side of this Northern peninsula—towards Sweden.

We need remind ourselves only of one fact—how the peoples of Eastern Europe turned to the Vareger, and how in the East of the Northern peninsula the trend is more towards the East. It is a really remarkable picture. The form of life that later on tends more towards the civilisation of Norway, streams towards the South West, and the life that later on tends towards the civilisation of Sweden, streams towards the South East. Everywhere, of course, there are the teachings of the Northern Gods, but they are presented in different ways.

The peoples who later on became the Norwegians, carry the element of activity, of strength, of enthusiasm, towards the South West. In this way the languishing Latin culture is stimulated and imbued with life. The influence of the Northern Gods in these migrations is such that it is a stimulus to activity in the whole life of the peoples. This is apparent everywhere and it is a most fascinating study.

But we also see what is happening in the East of this peninsula.—It is of course influenced by geographical conditions, but these geographical conditions are also reflected in the character of the people, for the human being does not grow out of the Earth but is born on the Earth, he comes down from world of soul-and-spirit and there is a real difference between being born as a Norwegian or as a Swede. We shall not get anywhere by simply saying that the geographical conditions are such and such, but we must question further as to why one soul has the urge to become a Norwegian, and another a Swede. But now think of the remarkable character—and this applies even at the present day—of the Eastern Scandinavian, the Swedish impulses which make their way towards the East.

These impulses stream towards the East but as they advance they are everywhere deflected. They do not become really active. They cannot maintain their stand against what is brought over from the East, first by other Asiatic peoples and later by the Mongols and Tartars, nor against the early, more characteristically Eastern form of Christianity. This stream flows towards the, South East but meets with obstacles everywhere and takes on a more passive character. The impulse as a whole is deeply influenced by the North. But what streams from the West of the Northern peninsula towards the South brings activity everywhere; whereas the influence that makes its way towards the East, is seized by the inactive, the more reflective element of the East and its own activity is in a way blunted.

As the Northern Gods send their impulses towards the West, they unfold, paramountly, their nature of will. As they send their impulse towards the East, they unfold their life of reflection, their contemplative nature.

External wars and conflicts are ultimately only the material images of what takes place in the way I have just indicated. Those who are abstract theorists, who view the whole world from the standpoint of some theory—and the empiricists of to-day are fundamentally the greatest theorists of all, for they never get down to realities, they think about things instead of trying to know them from inside—these theorists will bring forward all sorts of characteristics displayed by the Norwegians and the Swedes. The inhabitants of these countries themselves often emphasise the existence of outward divergencies simply because people to-day will not penetrate to the depths of human nature in order to acquire a real knowledge of life. But life must be observed in the way indicated in the two lectures I have given here. External life must be viewed not only from the standpoint of life between birth and death, but also from the standpoint of life between death and a new birth; we must be mindful not only of those things which satisfy the egotism of the human being who merely wants to be happy after death and because he still has physical life before him, does not trouble about the life before birth. We must study how we can apply in this earthly life what we have brought with us through birth from worlds of soul-and-spirit.

Then we begin to see that there are connections in the life of men and in the life of the peoples which are only revealed when we perceive what man is and has become through many earthly lives, when we have knowledge of the periods he spends between death and a new birth.

A most remarkable connection is then revealed, helping us to understand what comes to pass on Earth. In the external national character of the Norwegian of the present day there are traits which have been inherited from those men who once migrated towards the South West and by their revelations of the Gods poured life and activity into the Roman-Latin form of civilisation. At that time something developed in the great plan of the world which gave the Norwegians their special character, their particular task. And those who are born in Norway to-day will understand their destiny and task in the world as a whole, only if they look back with spiritual understanding to the times when Norway was able to develop in a particular way, when the Northern people went forth on their migrations, their raids and their campaigns of conquest towards the South West, to fulfil a task on Earth. The task sprang out of the character of the people who inhabit these countries. Their character, it is true, was different in those times but something remains as a heritage in the present-day Norwegian and endows him with certain faculties which are important from the point of view of man's eternal life, of man's immortality.

From the Eastern part of this peninsula where the Swedish character has developed, the old teachings of the Gods were carried towards the East, to men whose own religious doctrines had been preserved in a certain mystical, oriental form. What was more a revelation from Nature met with little response in the East; those who wandered towards the East, therefore, were destined to lead a more contemplative life.

But this again has left a heritage which has set its stamp upon the character of the people. And if we are to understand the western and the Eastern parts of the Scandinavian peninsula, we must look back to what these peoples have experienced through the centuries, realising what they have become to-day as a result of these experiences. We have every reason at the present time to think about these things. It is, after all, quite easy to realise in an elementary way that spiritual forces must be working in the world, in the whole international course of events, in the whole racial life of man, and that the missions of each particular people must be understood in the light of spiritual knowledge.

Now when the power of super-sensible cognition is brought to bear upon this connection between the tasks of the modern Norwegians and Swedes and the course of their historical evolution, remarkable things come to light. Norwegians have a definite gift—nor does this gift depend upon actual birth into a Norwegian milieu. What develops in the life of Norway can be seen even in the physical world; it can be described by anthropologists, historians, or even journalists. Their statements will be more or less correct but will give no true account of the forces at work in the depths of the human soul. For man has a mission not only here on Earth; he has a mission also in the spiritual worlds after death. And this mission in the spiritual worlds after death takes shape here, on the Earth.

What we experience in the period immediately following death is a consequence of our Earth-evolution. What we experience on the Earth immediately after birth—this again is a consequence of our life in the world of soul-and-spirit, and it is of the highest importance to study the mission of the Norwegian people not only on the Earth but in the period after death, with the means at the disposal of spiritual investigation.

Because of their physical and racial character, because of the special constitution of their brains and the rest of their bodily make-up, it can—I repeat, it can—fall to the lot of those souls who pass through the gate of death from the soil of the Western part of the Scandinavian peninsula, to give a very definite stimulus to other souls after death. They can give to other souls after death something that only the Norwegian characteristics are able to impart. In this epoch especially, the Norwegian character is so constituted that subconsciously and inwardly it understands certain secrets of Nature.

I am not now referring to your external, intellectual knowledge but to the kind of knowledge which you develop in your spiritual body, without using the physical senses, between the time of falling asleep and waking, when you are outside your bodies. When during sleep you experience the spirit in the plant-world, in stone and rock, in the rustling trees and the roaring of the waves, you become aware of the reality of forces living in the plants, hidden in the rocks, operating in the waves of the sea as they break in upon the shores, in the sparsely flowering rock-plants. A great picture arises in your souls during sleep, in the form of an intimate knowledge of Nature of which the intellect and the life of the senses are unconscious. And when, as I described in the last lecture, you develop a real connection with the Angel-Being, then you can bear into the spiritual world this unconscious Nature-wisdom, this concrete knowledge of spirituality in the plants, the stones and the other phenomena. of Nature.

Those who in the true and real way have lived a Norwegian life become the stimulators and teachers of their fellow-souls after death in regard to the secrets of Nature here on the Earth. For in the spiritual world, souls must be taught about the secrets of the Earth, just as here, on the Earth, they must be taught about the secrets of the spiritual world.

In the Eastern portion of this peninsula, where the heritage from olden times is as I have described it, a different mission is carried through the gate of death. What the souls there carry through death into the spiritual world is not so much what is experienced during sleep but during waking consciousness in connection with the external world, in contemplation and study of the sense-world and in a kind of understanding—permeated with feeling—of the external world.

But this after all, is something which fundamentally speaking, has significance only for the earthly life. Yet while man is developing just this element in earthly life, something very significant develops in the subconscious region of the soul. I have pointed out to you that even in waking life a certain part of our being sleeps and dreams. The life of feeling is really only another form of dream life. In our feelings we dream and in the operations of our will we are asleep. What we know of our will is only the illumination thrown upon it by our thinking. But the kind of will that is kindled in the Swedish soul is less capable of penetrating the secrets of Nature during sleep. What enters the Swedish soul more unconsciously in the life of will and of feeling during contemplation of the outer world and in the operations of intellect and reason—that is what is carried through death. So the mission of the souls belonging to the Eastern part of the Scandinavian peninsula who pass through death is to impart to other souls an element pertaining more to the will—exactly the opposite of what they were able to impart to their physical fellow-beings during the times of their old historical connection with them.

Let me put it like this—A special gift in connection with the element of will developed in the Eastern part of the Scandinavian peninsula as a primary and then as an inherited quality of the character of the people. The people of Europe have lived a long time without asking in this concrete way what they really have to do after death, for they have contented themselves with the egotistical answer: We shall be happy. But if the world is to be prevented from falling into complete decadence, this egotistical answer will not suffice. It will only be possible for men to lead a true and proper life when they are willing to accept the selfless answer, when they not only ask about the happiness in store for them after death but when they also ask: What am I called upon to do, in view of my particular situation in earthly life? Only when people are willing to frame the question in this way will they put their situation in life to proper use and so prepare truly for their mission. And then the preparation will no longer be difficult.

The two lectures—indeed the three—which I have given you here, are all connected in this respect. In view of this special mission, it is essential that the spirituality in the anthroposophical attitude to the world should be understood here in Norway. For when you consider that it is a specific task to create out of the subconscious life a natural science for the next world—however paradoxical this may seem, it is indeed so—then you must deliberately and consciously prepare your life of feeling in such a way that your souls, while you sleep every night, are not unreceptive to the knowledge of Nature which should be infused into them during sleep. But the bodies of to-day are not always a help in this process of preparation. The souls of the Northern peoples are, through ancient heritage, fundamentally fitted for the spiritual world. Here above all, the bodies must be influenced by a spiritual form of culture.

And now a great question arises which can be illuminated by comparing the mission of the peoples of Middle Europe with that of the peoples of the North.

The state of the people of Middle Europe, if they will not accept the Spiritual, was not badly described by a man who gave no thought at all to the possibility of a spiritual regeneration of humanity. Oswald Spengler has written his book on the Decline of the West, that brilliant but thoroughly pessimistic book—although he has repudiated the pessimism in a subsequent pamphlet. Of course, it is pessimism to speak of the decline of the West. But Spengler is actually speaking of the decline of culture, of something that is of the soul. Without spiritual regeneration the people of Middle Europe will suffer injury to their souls. But in this corner of Northern Europe, human beings cannot be injured only in the life of soul; when they are injured in the soul, their very bodily nature is injured at the same time. In a way this is fortunate, for if the people of Middle Europe do not accept spirituality, they become barbarian, they degenerate in soul. The Northern people can only die out, in the bodily sense, for everything depends here upon the particular constitution of the body.

The influence of a new stream of spiritual culture is profoundly necessary. For Middle Europe will degenerate, will become barbarian will go to its decline if it does not allow itself to be influenced by the spirit. The Northerner will die out, will suffer physical death if he does not allow himself to be influenced by the Spirit.

And so what is developed here, during physical life, is connected with the mission of Northern souls after death. They cannot fulfil their mission if they allow their bodies—which are so well-adapted for spirituality—to degenerate.

These earnest words must be uttered to-day for the evolution of our epoch demands that men shall speak together of such matters. And it is for this reason that I wanted to speak to you from the general, human standpoint, to say to you what a man says to his fellow-beings on this Earth if he has the destiny of Earth-evolution deeply at heart. For those human beings who do not prepare themselves selflessly for an eternal life, will not be leading their earthly life between birth and death aright.

That is the thought I should like to leave with you. Those who feel themselves Anthroposophists should realise that they are a tiny handful of people in the world who must apply all their energy to shaking a lazy humanity out of its lethargy and helping it onwards. Those who hate Anthroposophy to-day—this may be said. among ourselves—hate it because their love of comfort and ease prevents them from being willing to grapple with the great tasks of humanity. They are afraid of what they must overcome if they are to transform their easy-going thoughts and feelings and experience something much more profound. For this reason we see many a storm of opposition arising against what is taking place in Anthroposophy and developing out of it. You too will have to accustom yourselves to violent attacks being made against Anthroposophy or Spiritual Science by reactionaries of every kind, by all who love to saunter along their old beaten tracks. Those however who let this opposition deter them from developing their powers, are not firmly rooted in the real task of Anthroposophy. When people see how Anthroposophy is being attacked to-day from all sides, they may become timid and say: Would it not be better to go forward more quietly so that the opposition may be less violent? Or again they may ask, if they find praise being meted out to them by men who in a decadent age hold leading positions: What have I done wrong? This is a matter of great importance from the anthroposophical point of view. Attacks and abuse are usually explicable for the reasons given above. But if praise were to come from the same quarters, it would be a bad augury for anthroposophical world! It is just because the opponents of Anthroposophy to-day do attack it, that we can be reassured—but only, of course, in the sense that we must apply all the more energy in order to introduce Anthroposophy into the world, not out of personal idiosyncrasies but out of a deep realisation of the needs and tasks of the world.

On this note, then, we will conclude. Let me express to you my heartfelt thanks for your active and energetic co-operation. I assure you that I mean it seriously when I say that separation in space is no separation to those who know the reality of the spiritual bond between souls. In taking my leave, I remain together with you, I do not really go away from you. I believe you can always realise this, if you wish it to be so. You may be quite sure that there are already numbers of people who feel this bond and who look with love in their hearts towards this region in the North West with its special task—the importance of which is so well known to Anthroposophy.

I take leave of you with this love in my heart for those who feel that they truly belong to us, to our Anthroposophical Movement. May our next meeting, too, be full of the inner strength that is necessary and right among Anthroposophists.