The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Today I would like to continue looking at certain elementary issues on which to build the more comprehensive view to be discussed today and in the next lecture.

It is natural that a person, who during his life begins to sense his I, begins as it were to awaken consciously in his I, should want to reach insight and clarity about it and its relation to the world. There is at the present time a strong longing and also a widespread striving to attain such insight. As people experience this longing for clarity about their own self, they encounter the many pitfalls and hazards bound up with the quest for self-knowledge. People tend to assume that they are seeking a more or less simple entity. The assumption that the human I is fairly uncomplicated has caused much disillusionment and made people turn to the kind of guidance to be found in the writings of Ralph Waldo Trine and others, a guidance sought by many today because of the belief that by delving into their inner being they will come to know themselves better and gain more insight and security in life.¹ What they actually experience is that self-knowledge is diminished rather than enhanced by embarking on such a path. If they endure this disillusionment which is already hard to bear, the pitfalls and hazards become all the greater.

It is well to be clear, at least in principle, why self-knowledge is so difficult to attain. There is no simple straightforward path along which self-knowledge can be sought. The self, the I, can be discovered, or at least sought, through thinking, through feeling, and through the will. In each case something is discovered which one can claim as the I. Whether the attempt is made to reach the experience in the realm of thought, in the realm of feeling, or else to attempt it through the will, one always gets the impression that through these soul powers one must be approaching one's inner being.

A person may at first try a path by means of his life of thought, i.e., attempt to depict the I to himself. Especially people who are philosophically inclined have in recent years become convinced that this is a secure path. They will say: That which I look upon as I remains from birth to death the same entity. If I look back in memory over my life, I find that I am always the same. However, this statement is contradicted daily for every normal human being, as I have often pointed out. Between going to sleep and waking the ordinary person has no means of knowing how things concerning the I really are. He has no external observation of the I during sleep. The I he depicts to himself he can only relate to the times he was awake; during sleep the chain of his life's external events is broken. This is easy enough to see. Therefore, he who believes that the I lives in his thoughts, in such a way that he can actually find it there, must recognize that it is blotted out every time he sleeps, at least as far as his consciousness is concerned. Something which plunges into darkness and becomes imperceptible every night cannot be regarded as having a secure existence.

Thus the person who seeks his I along the path of thought may, in a philosophical sense, have a clear enough picture of his I, but it will not offer him much satisfaction. Even if he fails, through simple reflection, to recognize that the mental picture of his I vanishes every night, it cannot give him any feeling of real security. His inner being as a whole, appearing more substantial than mere ideation, soon makes him aware of the unsatisfactory nature of the merely depicted I. What is found along this path in one's search for the I is, so to speak, too rarefied. But why is that the case?

You must realize that it is by no means easy to find the kind of ideas that will truly express and illumine the facts of spiritual life. The reason is simply that our speech, our language causes the greatest difficulty. One often feels as if entangled in a linguistic web when pondering and struggling to find adequate words. The drawback of the merely philosophical approach is the difficulty one has in getting free of the restrictions imposed by language. And quite apart from that struggle there is the feeling of dissatisfaction with what speech is able to convey, particularly when seeking the I through the mental activity of forming thought pictures. You will soon experience this when you study philosophers who have much to say about the I. You get the feeling that their thoughts are too rarefied, too thin, and you are left with a feeling of unreality and insecurity. There are people who believe that because one is able to think the I, this thought is in itself a guarantee that the I will go through the portal of death into the spiritual world. But one's life of feeling tells one that if the I is extinguished every night, then it is feasible that it is also extinguished at death. This feeling is one of the pitfalls that leaves one feeling insecure. But what causes it?

One learns to know the true nature of the I that is merely glimpsed in ordinary thought life when one becomes able to compare it with the I that can be discovered through spiritual science. This I is not extinguished in sleep even if ordinary consciousness is. It must be conceded that from a certain aspect—please note, only from a certain aspect—there is a measure of truth in what is said by 'some philosophers such as Ernst Mach: that the I cannot be saved for it is something unreal.² They maintain that all the many experiences we have our whole life long string together like pearls, and because they do we derive from them the picture of the I, but this is not a reality. Such philosophers regard the I as a mere thought and see no reason why a thought should be regarded as having real existence. Yet in our mental life we know of no other I than the rarefied entity which is extinguished every time we fall asleep. This I is only like a picture in the mind. The question we must ask is: In the light of spiritual science just what is this mental picture of the I?

Spiritual science reveals that the mental picture we commonly have of our I is not at all identical with the one we find through spiritual science. This discovery is of the greatest significance. The I of which we form a mental picture is deprived in the present incarnation of inner effective life. Purely on the basis of this I we could not in truth say, I exist now, at this moment in time. The mental picture we have of our I is no guarantee that we exist now, in the present. There is a constant danger that somehow a combination of mental pictures is conjuring up the I. That is the uncertainty; that is why we feel that what we are faced with is a mere picture and no reality. Why do we experience our inner self in this way? Because the I of which we form a mental picture contains already forces for our next incarnation. In this life it must necessarily exist in the form in which we encounter it. When we depict the I, we are dealing with a force belonging not to this life, but a force that will only evolve in our next incarnation. It is comparable to a plant which, if it could sense the seed within would say, This seed is in reality not me; it is the plant that will grow only next spring. In a similar way there lives in what we depict as our I the force that will evolve in our next incarnation. It has to exist the way it does, for if we wanted it to become more in the present incarnation, then it would unfold too soon and could not remain seed-like till our next life. Thus, the I we depict in thoughts must remain weak; it cannot be active now, for it has to retain the seed-like forces for the next incarnation.

You will realize the significance of this fact. When spoken of in this abstract manner, its immense importance may not be immediately evident. What we are talking about is something shadowy, belonging to the next incarnation. While it cannot develop in this life, it can be enriched so that it loses its shadowy character; otherwise it remains unsatisfactory and is experienced as a mere point, as it were, beyond which no progress is possible. However, the problem is how one sets about enriching this I that is felt to be no more than a point.

Nothing is achieved by merely brooding within oneself, for all we arrive at is what in this incarnation is a mere point, a seed for the next life. No matter how forcefully, how mystically one broods inwardly, or what beautiful precepts one sets oneself, the I is not reached. In the way in which this I that we depict in thought lives within us in this incarnation, it does not really belong to us. For the duration of this incarnation it actually belongs to the world. From what we see inwardly as a thought picture of our I, the world will prepare for our next incarnation what will then be active within us. That is why this I can become enriched only through our experiences of the world. When asked by our friends to write something in their album, I have often, in cases where it was appropriate, written: “To find yourself, seek in the world; to find the world, seek in yourself.”

In order to find oneself; i.e., in order to provide one's thought life with a richer, more living content than is possible in ordinary life, one must widen one's observation, and deepen one's experience of the world. However, in this respect ordinary sensory observations are of no help, for they also belong to the present incarnation. They are also dependent on the physical body whiCh is laid aside at death. We must make observations of a different kind, must become able to enter into the. more subtle aspects of life. We can enrich the thought picture of our I only by being aware of more than the obvious aspects of life. We must cease to think in the abstract manner so much preferred nowadays. To enrich the I one must make efforts to seek out the more hidden connections in life. I beg you not to misunderstand this remark. To seek out life's hidden connections would today be regarded as a useless pursuit because people are not striving to enrich the I. All modern people are concerned about are the kinds of thoughts that either depict external events or are useful for some action. But these things have a connection only with the present incarnation. In order to enrich the I we must make it an end in itself to seek out life's hidden connections. It must become an intimate pursuit of which we expect no other result than that it should enrich our inner life; i.e., enrich the thought picture of our I.

Certain things are expected of man at the present time and it is important that he should concern himself with events in life which, though seemingly remote and unconnected, nevertheless belong together. It is important that we ponder the kind of deeper connections that must be sought, as it were, beneath the surface of life's events. To someone who is concerned only with superficial aspects, such connections will seem strange. Yet it will be found that we enrich the thought picture of our I the more we succeed in discovering riddles in life which, though remote, speak strongly to our life of soul. Such connections are not as easy to explain or point out as it is to point out and explain the obvious reason a stone becomes warm when a sunbeam falls on it. But the more we contemplate life's hidden connections, the stronger becomes the feeling that we are growing together with the thought picture of our I, that we are growing together with the inner life that will carry it over to the next incarnation.

What kind of connections do I mean? I mean quite real, concrete ones, except that we normally pay them no attention. I will give you an example: A clergyman once met a gypsy woman with her child, which was dirty and unkempt. Since the outbreak of the World War gypsies have practically disappeared but those who know them will also know that they are people who care very little about many things, one of which is cleanliness. Gypsy children are usually covered in layers of dirt, but apart from cleanliness these children are deprived of a great many other things. The clergyman, being a kind person, wanted to save this forlorn child. He told the mother that he would set aside a sum of money for the child's care and education so that he could grow up into a respectable person. The clergyman's intention was really the very best. The gypsy woman, whose normal life was one of beggary, would naturally gladly have accepted a gift. Nevertheless, her answer was not only significant but a refusal. Her exact words were that she would neither educate her child nor allow him to be educated, because her way of life made for more happiness than all scientific knowledge, all the repute and mutual esteem and all other so-called advantages of culture. This incident was reported by the man who met the gypsy woman himself, Fercher von Steinwand.³ You will know of him from my book The Riddle of Man.⁴ In his fine article about gypsies he describes the event. And it is something which those who like myself know gypsies and how they live can well believe. Many gypsies do hold such views. They really are convinced, as the gypsy woman said, that all culture, all education and learning, all the respect and esteem sought by other people, make one far less happy than the basic elementary life of the gypsy, the life of a child of nature.

The gypsy woman's answer is most revealing. One can, of course, accept it as simply a fact of life; most people do. But one can also discover in such opinions the kind of hidden connections in life of which I spoke. It may occur to someone—as it did to Fercher von Steinwand—that someone else's opinion is in a strange way related to that of the gypsy woman. This someone is a man from a background of culture and learning who nevertheless posed the question whether culture makes human beings happy or less happy in life. He submitted his answer in a long, learned treatise, but in essence it was the same as the one given by the gypsy. The man was Rousseau and the treatise in which he voices the same opinion as the gypsy was awarded a prize by the Academy of Science in Paris.⁵ Here you see a strange connection between widely disparate phenomena. The conviction felt by the gypsy Rousseau elaborates in a scientific paper that made him famous and influential. The sentiment, the viewpoint, was the same in both cases, the only difference being that the gypsy woman did not write a scientific treatise about it and was not awarded a prize by the Academy of Science.

This kind of thing happens quite often in life but is not noticed. If a habit is made of examining, from different points of view, issues normally looked at from one standpoint only, one discovers surprising points of reference as in the case of Rousseau and the gypsy. Life is extraordinarily many-sided, and entering into its various aspects means enrichment and strength for the I, in the sense that has been explained. If one seeks out such connections which are not normally noticed, then the I which we have only as a picture grows stronger. To be aware of this fact is of immense importance. In one's search for such hidden connections in life one is contemplating the world rather than brooding within oneself. Furthermore, it will be discovered that one's thinking, i.e., forming mental pictures—an activity connected with the I—becomes more mobile, more alive. As a consequence many more things occur to one than before, which is of great importance, because much dissatisfaction with life, and even ill health, is caused by the fact that so few things occur to us. We draw our thoughts as it were into a rather narrow circle, whereas if we attain the ability to view our experiences in life from many vantage points, seeking connecting threads between distant events, we strengthen our I and become better able to cope with life. That is why all education that introduces only one-sided thoughts and views is harmful. I will give you an example which comes into the same category as the previous one.

Many people embrace so-called pantheism, which as you know I have always rejected. Such people will say: We seek the spirit everywhere. Spirit! Spirit! Everything is spirit and with that they are satisfied. Nowadays this is often called panpsychism because people will have nothing to do with theism. I have often commented on it by pointing out that one would not get very far if this approach was applied to the physical world. It corresponds to someone walking through a meadow and instead of naming the individual flowers as lilies or tulips and so on, just saying “flowers, flowers,” which is an abstraction of them all. So too is it an abstraction to speak of nothing but spirit, spirit and ever more spirit, and yet reject knowledge of real individual spirits. When one speaks about Angels, Archangels and Archai as of individual beings with their own defined spiritual existence just as one speaks of individual beings in the physical world, it is rejected. However, there is a tendency in man to think in a pantheistic way, to simplify everything, always to seek abstractions. That is why the example connected with the gypsy is so interesting, for it illustrates that looking everywhere for abstractions is in a way a gypsy-like trait.

The person who had the experience with the gypsy woman came across another gypsy who, with good appetite, was eating meat from an animal he had found lying dead in a field. Gypsies think nothing of eating dead animals they happen to find, nor do they suffer any ill effects. The person who found the gypsy eating, wanted to impress upon him that one does not eat animals that are found dead, only animals that have been slaughtered. And here the gypsy showed his inclination for abstractions saying: Well, the animal I am eating was slaughtered by God.—So you see, like pantheists he applies the concept of God to everything. Naturally if one's view, one's thinking is pantheistic it must be assumed that an animal found dead must have been slaughtered by God, and there can be no objection to eating what God has slaughtered.

Wider, less obvious connections can be found between one's experiences in life; they vitalize the thought picture of our I. There are, of course, those who will say: Surely, all that is required is the ability to combine facts. Yet, that is very abstract. What I mean is something much more alive, something that relates to the ability to combine facts as a living organism relates to a machine.

When we make the effort to enrich our I by bringing together and relating disparate events, we become aware of a force which lives in us already but belongs to our next incarnation. It is easy to be deluded into thinking that the I is enriched by brooding within oneself. That is an illusion. We enrich it by entering into aspects of life that lie beneath the surface, and by truly fostering the ability to ponder and reflect about life, instead of being merely engrossed in ourselves. One must take hold of life lovingly and be willing to seek out the relation between remote events for no other purpose than to enrich the I and make it stronger. The attempt can be made with the most ordinary situations in life; opportunities are there all the time. Try to let everyday experiences reverberate in such hidden connections. One must of course remain realistic and not read into such connections things they do not contain or try to become more knowledgeable through them. That is not the purpose; what matters is their effect on us, enabling us to experience a force which lives in us in this life in the form of a thought, whose reality will become evident only in our next incarnation.

When we become conscious of such hidden connections the possibility arises for us to become aware not only of the fact that the thought picture of our I is the foundation of our next incarnation, but also of how it exists between death and new birth. This requires a greater awareness of how we adapt to life, indeed of how people in general adapt to and deal with life. Here again, the more obvious aspects are not the most important for the attainment of the inner sensitivity that enables us to become aware of the way we exist between death and new birth. The insight one seeks to attain of the beings and events of the spiritual world must be sought in subtler ways than is customary today. Life in the physical world is completely different from life in the spiritual world. It is not really surprising that, just as they are, our ordinary thoughts, feelings and will impulses cannot be applied to the spiritual world, which requires a much more delicate approach.

To strengthen and enrich our life of thought, efforts must be made to discover hidden connections between events, as I have described. But for the awareness of the I as it lives between death and new birth; in fact, for awareness of the realm in which we are between death and new birth, it is necessary that these connections are related to human beings themselves. Indeed, life provides plenty of opportunity for such hidden connections to be discovered. And if they are noticed and treated with the necessary sensitivity, one will soon find one is on the right path. Unfortunately, because the words one must of necessity use are too often taken in a materialistic sense, a certain difficulty arises when the attempt is made to explain things of this nature. I shall illustrate what is meant by an example.

What I want to explain can best be observed in the case of people who through their whole disposition have what could be said to be a dreamlike inner life; not that they are complete dreamers, but their soul life has a dreamlike quality. This quality is more pronounced in people living in countries towards the eastern hemisphere. The further west one goes, the less do human beings reveal in themselves those subtle connections which point to the hidden spiritual realm I have indicated. That is why the Western Europeans, who have to resort to connections of a cruder nature, find it so extraordinarily difficult to understand the soul characteristics of the Russians. And such understanding is more essential now than ever before. It could be said that Russians are a fraction less awake than Western or even Central Europeans. That is why what we are now speaking about is easier to relate to the inner life of a Russian than to the inner life of a Western European. It does of course relate to people in the West, but it is not so easy to detect there.⁶

A German writer, Eduard Bernstein, has an interesting description of an incident which I would like to use as an example of what I want to illustrate.⁷ He will surely not be pleased to know that I regard the experience he describes as mystical. Nevertheless it is a good example of those hidden connections in life which materialists regard as mere chance. Eduard Bernstein relates that, in London, he used to be a frequent guest at the house of Engels, the friend of Karl Marx.⁸ Engels' household was a hospitable one, where many people often met, where in fact an international group would frequently gather. It was here that Bernstein met Sergius Kratschinsky, a writer who had adopted the name Stepniak, by which he is quite well known. Bernstein's description of Stepniak is most interesting; to begin with, he mainly describes the more external aspects saying that Stepniak was

a powerfully built man with an impressive head; in looks he corresponded exactly to the picture we normally have of a Slay. He was sensitive, of a somewhat dreamy disposition. Yet in Russia he had been very much a man of action, not only prominently involved in the liberation from prison of Peter Krapotkius, but also in the successful attack on Msenzow, the police dictator of St. Petersburg. In England he was the soul of the society “Free Russia,” founded for the purpose of collecting money to support Russian freedom fighters. On their behalf, he had repeatedly undertaken lecture tours in England and one across America, where he had been particularly befriended by the American humorist Mark Twain. Stepniak was a respected figure in certain literary circles in England having made a name also as a novelist.

At Engels' parties or at any other gathering he was usually quiet and seldom spoke unless one addressed him directly. However, it was obvious that he greatly appreciated his friendship with Engels and like coming to his parties. A friendship also sprang up between Stepniak and myself.

It so happened that at a meeting of the society “Free Russia,” attended by both Bernstein and Stepniak, a quarrel broke out. It was one of those quarrels that easily breaks out among people with a deep emotional commitment to life's greater issues. The quarrel concerned the relationship between Russians and Poles. In such a situation it is a safe bet that the average Central European will side with the Poles. A fierce disagreement ensued in which Bernstein and others spoke up for the Poles, Bernstein defending them against the Russians. As a consequence of this quarrel Stepniak no longer came to the society. And for many years Bernstein heard nothing of Stepniak, who had severed all connection with people in the society. Then after a long time Bernstein received a letter from someone not connected with the society, inviting him to a party on one of the following evenings. The writer of the invitation said he was aware that Bernstein was not on good terms with Stepniak, so he was to come only if he did not mind meeting the latter. Bernstein did not mind; in fact, he welcomed the opportunity to meet Stepniak again. And so the two men met once more.

One may, of course, not find it so remarkable that two people who used to like seeing one another meet again after several years. It may be regarded as a mere chance meeting, and it is only natural that materialists should do so. However, Bernstein's whole description of the mood in which the meeting took place that evening makes it clear that, especially for Stepniak, it was an occasion of very great significance. They spent the evening in a happy mood. Before parting Stepniak said how pleased he was that they had found one another again and how much he looked forward to them spending time together. Two days later Bernstein read in the paper that Stepniak was dead. It appeared that on the day after their meeting he had been reading a book while out walking, had crossed a railway line and been hit by a train. It was absolutely clear that it was an accident; there was no question of suicide.

Thus another chance! But you see, such events are in reality no mere chance. I have chosen a striking example to illustrate the kind of connection one must look for in life. If one is to discover links that are less obvious, one must seek the kind of event in which connections are hidden and which involved the inner life of human beings. Once it has been recognized that there is a deeper aspect of our life of soul which is prophetic, then one can no longer consider such events as mere chance. This aspect comes to expression chiefly in our mental life when tinged with feeling, and when it is somewhat dreamy. In such instances it points to the future to a remarkable degree. All dreams are in fact prophetic; when you dream you always dream the future. But because you cannot formulate mental pictures of future events you clothe the dream in pictures of past ones, and draw them like a veil over the inner experience. There is a deep connection between what we dream of the future and the clothes we put on it when we awake. This is because of karma, and because the future is linked to the past. What we become conscious of, we clothe in pictures from the past, i.e., in images with which we are familiar. Though we are aware of only a fraction of our dreams, we dream the whole time between falling asleep and waking. When someone is in a dreamy state during waking life, it is not without effect on his karma.

Anyone who really understands what I have indicated concerning life's hidden connections will recognize in this incidence a definite picture of how karma works. Had Stepniak not been the sensitive and dreamy person he was, then the effect produced by the connection between his conscious life and the hidden current of his karma would have been less effective. It would not have been strong enough to bring about, on the last evening, practically at the last hour, the meeting I have described. The more our ordinary abstract mental pictures are obscured by a state of dreaminess the stronger our power to attract karmic connections. Naturally, it is also possible in ordinary life to take note of things and adjust one's actions accordingly. But here we are concerned with a person of a dreamy disposition who, not in full consciousness, but while in a dreamy state brings about—just before going through the portal of death—the opportunity that enables him to meet the other person once more.

Such fine, more delicate connections must be recognized for what they are—namely, a source of enrichment for man's inner life, an enrichment that provides the striving human being with a perspective on life between death and new birth. One must become more attentive to finer details in the present life and seek out threads between events in which human beings themselves are involved. Certainly these things must not be understood materialistically. What I have said must not be taken to mean that Stepniak brought about the meeting with Bernstein through some kind of inner force of attraction. That would be a materialistic and completely wrong interpretation. These things must not be regarded in such a crude manner as though they could be proved by natural-scientific means. When dealing with such delicate issues one must not expect to be able to pin them down as if they were something material, but be satisfied if one thing or another becomes clearer through the description of such hidden connections. To become accustomed to observe life in accordance with such delicate relationships is to enrich the life of soul. All relationships dealt with in spiritual science are basically of this delicate nature. That is why the study of spiritual science enriches life.

Thus, when we seek out the kind of connections I described earlier, in which human beings are less directly involved, we enrich and strengthen the shadow-like I, which we bear within us as a seed that will evolve only in our next incarnation, whereas connections in which human beings are directly involved, enrich life by awakening sensitivity and awareness for the region we pass through between death and new birth. It is a strange fact that many a person who is well able to seek out such connections fails to notice them because they are interpreted materialistically. Many important passages in Goethe's works can be understood only if it is recognized that Goethe does not want to be pinned down in a materialistic sense. One has to realize that his style when writing such passages was his way of describing events which, as it were, take their course beneath the surface of life.

It is a mistake to believe that the I can be enriched in a way that leads to enhanced self-knowledge by delving into oneself in the crude manner described, for example, by Waldo Trine. The opposite is true; to become strong one must strive to become free from oneself. That is why those who advise people to seek within themselves instead of leading them away from themselves are basically bad guides to self-knowledge. The aim should rather be to seek within the world those hidden connections between events which must be sought with effort, as they are not the kind one is apt to stumble across.

Just as one encounters pitfalls in regard to the I that lives in us as thought picture, so are there pitfalls in regard to the I that lives in the will. In ordinary life we know it no better than the I we depict in our thinking. That such is the case is shown by the fact that people, for example Theodor Ziehen, to whom I referred recently, simply ignore the will.⁹ They cannot discover the will in modern man, and this has a certain justification in the sense I have indicated in public lectures at various places. Franz Brentano ruled out the will altogether and differentiated in the soul the activity of forming mental pictures, the making of judgments, and the feelings fluctuating between love and hate.¹⁰ Consequently he did not deal with the will, not even in his work on psychology. And it is true to say that when one looks at the human being as he is in his present incarnation, one does not find the will as such. According to the modern view the will is what brings man satisfaction or disappointment, pleasure or pain and so on. In other words, all that one finds in place of the will are moods and feelings; the will itself remains hidden.

Let us say you lift your hand; you may be aware of a certain mental picture or a feeling in so doing, but what actually occurs within the body when the hand lifts, of that you are completely unaware. Nowhere can one find the will in man today. But why? Because the will is not in him. The I that lives in the will is not within present-day man. What is effective in him is something that works across from his previous incarnation. What comes from the I of his previous life acts in him now, as will. When I say, I am, I live within the seed of my next incarnation; when I say, I will, I live in what acts across from my previous incarnation.

It is of great importance to become aware of these facts, not least because they explain why it is so easy to be misled in this area. When a person says, I will this or that, and carries out an action, will flows into him from his previous incarnation, whereas his satisfaction or dissatisfaction in life depend upon himself as he is now, and the circumstances of his present incarnation. You will realize what mysterious connections we are dealing with. However, in ordinary life they are felt as if they were jumbled together. People believe the I is a kind of substantial something hidden in their inner being and that they express this something at different times variously as: “I think,” “I was,” “I am,” “I will.” But things are not like that. When I say, “I am,” I rely on a force which I have within me, the way this year's plant has within it the seed that will develop only next year. Thus when I say, “I am,” I am within a force which becomes a human being in a future incarnation. When I say, “I will,” I act out of a force that was in me in a former life on earth.

When this has been grasped one realizes that it is only as far as our life of feeling is concerned that we are—as the philosophers express it—in modus praesens, in the actual present. The only soul force that is fully real in our present life is that of feeling. Our being is interwoven with time in a threefold manner; there exists in us something that works across from the previous incarnation, what we feel now, and something whose effect carries over into the next incarnation. Just as this year's plant grows from the dried seed of the previous year, so does our will, which gradually flows into the world, issue from the I that was the dried seed in the previous incarnation, whereas the seed for the incarnation to come is what we now think of as the I. That is why I could write in the article that appeared in the April 1916 issue of the Bern periodical The Realm: “Our path through the spiritual world can be traversed when we discover what thinking and willing encompass,” because neither thinking nor willing live in us as something belonging exclusively to the present life.¹¹ Rather, they point through their spiritual connection from a former life on earth across to a future one. Feeling, on the other hand, we experience now directly in its spiritual reality, which is why feeling cannot be developed through inner initiative; we can only guide it, whereas thinking and will can be transformed through concentration and meditation.

Many people will ask: How do I attain a closer relationship with the being we speak of as the Christ? One cannot give a simple formula as answer. The whole of spiritual science deals with issues which, through their very nature, lead to the realm in which Christ lives. As you all know, only once, at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, did Christ walk on the earth as a physical human being. Only then was it possible to know Him as one can know a physical person in physical surroundings. If today one wants to draw near to Christ one must seek Him in the form in which He now lives within the earthly sphere. He must be sought in life's finer, more intimate connections like those of which we have spoken today. Schooling oneself to seek out such delicate connections between remote events enables one to raise oneself into that region of consciousness in which the Christ can be truly experienced. What I have just said can of course also be taken in a crude materialistic sense. Someone could say I am implying that one cannot comprehend the Christ with the ordinary thinking that one applies to physical objects. People who speak like that are really expressing the opinion that things only qualify if they can be depicted in one's mind the way one depicts natural objects. This is the attitude of the materialist; no possibility exists to kindle in him awareness of the spiritual.

Let us for a moment imagine a being so constituted that it could be detected only in dreams. No physical sense could perceive it, nor could it be grasped by ordinary thinking. A person who wanted to gain knowledge of such a being would have to develop the art of dreaming, otherwise the being would not exist for him. It would not be the being's fault if he could not perceive it but his own, due to his inability to do so. People make arbitrary demands concerning the qualities something should possess, and if they are lacking, it is dismissed as unreal. It must be realized that in order to be able to be aware of and perceive things which are not of the same nature as external objects, a different thinking must be developed; in fact, an altogether different inner attitude. The important thing is to recognize that we must adapt ourselves to approach such beings, not the other way round.

One could wish that the words could be found which would enable people to overcome their materialistic outlook and discover the subtler aspect of life. Even the most worthwhile people do not find it easy to enter into the kinds of things I have explained today. Such matters are ridiculed and regarded as the product of fantasy, to which we could reply, Very well, regard it as fantasy, but the point is that the beings and things of which we are talking are so constituted that, unless you have the power of fantasy, you cannot become aware of them. They reveal their true reality only to those who possess fantasy. As I said one wishes the words could be found that make clear how necessary it is, especially in our time, to entertain such subtle thoughts in one's mind. Such concepts may be subtle, but they make the soul strong, so strong that it becomes able to comprehend the true essence of things. The soul discovers that it can penetrate far deeper into the real connections of things than is possible with a thinking that is schooled solely on the mental pictures derived from today's materialistic, natural-scientific outlook.

Today one finds that even those with eminent minds have forgotten how to engender the necessary subtlety. In the last lecture I made it clear that I have the highest regard for Franz Brentano, not least because he did, through his study of Aristotle, develop subtlety of thinking up to a point. As I said he could not accept spiritual science. This was due to many things, but principally it was because he still lacked the necessary mobility of thinking to penetrate to the spiritual aspect of things. One must at least strive to attain it. When people read my Theosophy or the second part of Occult Science, one can often discover from what emerges just why their thinking stumbles.¹²¹³ The same can be said in regard to Brentano. I would indeed have found it incomprehensible that a sensitive and astute thinker like Brentano should be unable to find the way, had I not succeeded in discovering an exact instance that reveals just where the difficulty lies. There are others, of course, but let me give you an example.

Brentano said: Whatever the soul consists of, as far as the substance in which it lives is concerned, it must be capable of individualization, for one can divide certain lower creatures, and each part will continue life with the same characteristics the creature had before being divided. You will know that this is possible with certain lower worms; they are unaffected if divided, and live on as two separate worms. From this Brentano concluded that an independent soul must be present in each separate piece. In other words, if a worm is divided in two and both parts continue to live, there must be a soul in each. He further concluded from this that the soul and the body must be one unity. He made a comparison which convinced him that his view was right. He compared the event of the worm with a triangle saying that the triangle divides into two triangles if a line is drawn through it. So he compared two concepts: that of dividing a worm in two and that of dividing a triangle in two, and let one explain the other. He considered the two concepts to be of equal simplicity and able to explain one another. But is it a valid comparison? For Brentano it was an important issue. But does it stand up to scrutiny? It does not. Let us say you have here a triangle; if you draw a line through it in a certain way, it does indeed divide into two triangles. Each half is a triangle just as the worm when divided becomes two worms. However, if you divide the, triangle differently, one of the parts becomes not a triangle but a quadrangle. In other words, only under certain circumstances do you get two triangles.

An intelligent, astute man makes a comparison, but it is invalid; his thinking is not sufficiently mobile, not sufficiently alive to find a valid one; he stumbles, with serious consequence. Had he not been misled into thinking that dividing a worm in two could be compared to dividing a triangle in two, he would have stayed on the right course. Dividing a worm into two parts has nothing whatever to do with two souls. One and the same group is effective in both parts. One could compare it with someone looking at his image in a mirror. If the mirror is broken in two, he has two images; yet he himself remains whole. Not the person but the mirror has become divided. Likewise the worm soul cannot be divided; it endures as does the person who sees two images of himself in the mirrors. Thus one and the same soul is present in the two parts of the worm; that is the true concept corresponding to the reality. That concept Brentano could not reach; his thinking was not mobile enough and had become deluded by a false comparison. Had he made the comparison correctly, he would have noticed as he divided the triangle that the mere act of dividing does not guarantee that the result will be two triangles. In order to get that result something else must be added, namely, the concept triangle, which is to be applicable to both parts after the division. Without the concept the result may require two different concepts; i.e., that of quadrangle as well as that of triangle. The comparison could have been valid if it had occurred to him that he had to use one and the same concept for both parts, and that it was this concept that guaranteed the division would result in two triangles. It did not occur to him, consequently he did not recognize that one and the same worm soul was effective in both pieces of worm, effective in the sense that it looked into the parts from outside, like someone looking into two mirrors.

The need for greater subtlety of thinking is evident in all spheres of life. We shall not progress unless thinking becomes more alive and mobile so that it will cease to cling to crude externalities. There never have been more obstacles to making thinking more alive. For that very reason it is all the more necessary to promote science of one spirit. Only by working with subtler concepts does thinking become active and mobile. Through their very nature, the concepts of spiritual science have the power to strengthen the human I. What is longed for today may be satisfied by other means. But only spiritual science can give the human being real inner strength by awakening in him lucid concepts that are not so readily available, concepts which, just because they do not depict life's external aspects, make us inwardly strong, which means capable of recognizing the reality, the essence of things.

We shall continue next time to look at important issues from a wider perspective.

• 1. Ralph Waldo Trine, 1866–1958. In Harmonie mit dem Unendlichen, 1897.
• 2 . Ernst Mach, 1838–1916, Austrian physicist and epistemologist, belonged to the school of empirical positivism, Beitrage zur Analyse der Empfindungen, Jena, 1886.
• 3 . Johann Fercher von Steinwand (actually Johann Kleinfercher), 1828–1902. Zigeuner. Begegnisse and Betrachtungen, 1859 in Gesamtausgabe seiner Werke, Vienna 1903, third volume, page 365ff.
• 4 . Rudolf Steiner, Vom Menschenrätsel (Verlag der Rudolf Steiner Nachlassverwaltung, Dornach), 1984, GA20.
• 5 . Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1712–1778, French philosopher. The prize-winning work for the Academy in Paris is entitled, Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, 1750.
• 6 . See Lecture III, p.
• 7 . Eduard Bernstein, 1850–1932, Memoirs of a Socialist Part 1: From the Years of my Exile, Berlin, 1918, published in German.
• 8 . Karl Marx, 1818–1883, German socialist, founded dialectical materialism with Friedrich Engels, 1820-1895.
• 9 . Theodor Ziehen, 1863–1950, philosopher and psychologist.
• 10. Franz Brentano, see note 2 to Lecture I.
• 11. In the April edition of 1916, the first volumes of Reich (Realm), a journal founded by Alexander Freiherr von Bernus (Lindau 1880), a quarterly produced in Munich and Heidelberg. 1st vol, 1st edition (April 1916), pp. 106-123; and, vol. 1, 3rd edition (October 1916), pp. 420-432.
• 12. Theosophy, see note 3 to Lecture IV.
• 13. Occult Science, see note 7 to Lecture IV.

Let us now consider the implication of certain concepts we have obtained in our recent studies. Today, in the lecture to follow, I shall speak mainly about the nature of truth and the nature of the good. These issues we have been concerned with recently. But let us first look at something that belongs to those interconnections we spoke about last time and which to modern history must seem very strange. We saw in the previous lecture that it is possible to gain definite concepts as to how a present life on earth is connected with the preceding life on earth as well as with the one that will follow. I described that the I insofar as we are aware of it in the will acts across from our previous life on earth, and that insofar as we form a thought picture of the I this thought, with all it contains, is so delicately woven that it acts across to the next earth life. I compared it with the way in which the seed in this year's plant becomes the life in the plant of next year. We must regard as seed for our next life on earth every web of thought at the center of which is the I. So you see, when we enter our life on earth we do so with conditions determined by our previous life; but also, of course, with what comes as a result of the last life having been worked on between death and new birth. This can be said to be one group of concepts we have gained.

Let us now make a great leap to another group of concepts we also obtained recently, concerned with the course of man's lives on earth. Those considerations culminated in the insight we gained into the secret of mankind's present age. I described how man, after the Atlantean catastrophe, entered upon the ancient Indian epoch, at the beginning of which mankind's age was 56. What this signifies was also described. It means that at that time the individual human being continued to be capable of natural development right up to the age of 56 in a way possible now only in childhood. Up to that age man's soul and spirit went through a development parallel to that of his physical body. This now happens only in childhood when the development of soul and spirit is bound up with the growth and development of the body. This interdependence ceases when we reach the age that was indicated. The soul and spirit then become more independent and man's inner development no longer continues of itself.

The most important aspect of this is that we do not go through the middle of life, when the body begins to decline at the age of 35, still dependent on the body. Consequently we are not conscious of the Rubicon which we cross at that time. We do not experience what was experienced in the first post-Atlantean epoch, namely, the body's decline, its becoming sclerotic and calcified and the spirit becoming free of the body. At that time this took place in the course of natural development, without effort on man's part. As we know, during that epoch the age of mankind receded from 56 to 55, 54 and so on, so that at the end of the epoch his natural development continued only up to the age of 49. In the following, the ancient Persian epoch, mankind's age receded from 49 to 42. During the third, the Egyptian-Chaldean epoch, it receded from the age of 42 to that of 35, in the Graeco-Latin epoch from the .age of 35 to 28. This means that the Greeks and Romans remained capable of natural development up to that period in life which is bounded by the ages 28 and 35. I then placed before you the stupendous mystery that, as mankind's age had receded to 33, Christ Jesus, aged 33, united Himself with mankind. That moment the Mystery of Golgotha took place. This revelation is so wondrous that one is at a loss to find words to express the awe felt by the soul able fully to experience this fact so steeped in mystery.

The age of mankind continues to recede. As you know, since the fifteenth century we have been living in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. When it began, the age of mankind was 28 and by now has dropped to 27. This means that up to that age our soul and spirit are still in some way dependent upon our bodily-physical nature. After that age our natural development ceases; we can make no further progress merely through what our environment provides. If we are to progress, we must have an inner incentive to do so, and today that can only come from spiritual knowledge, as I have often explained. The impulse must arise from our feeling for what is spiritual in the world, from our knowledge of the spiritual aspect of things. In the last resort that can only arise through the Christ impulse. It is simply a fact that modern man, concerned only with what nature and society can provide him with, i.e., what the world can make of him, will remain a 27-year-old even if he lives to be a hundred. If he is to progress in his inner life, he must himself engender the impulse to do so; nothing more arises through the body's participation in his development. Thus through natural development modern man becomes 27 years old, and that is what is so characteristic of today's culture. Our culture, our civilization cannot be understood, especially in relation to earlier ones, unless this fact, verified by spiritual science, is kept firmly in mind.

This is something that is closely connected with the first group of spiritual facts of which we reminded ourselves today. As you will realize from the last lecture, we go through a certain evolution during the time between death and new birth; what is particularly at work then are the will impulses from the previous incarnation. What is accomplished between death and new birth we bring with us; it becomes experience in this life. However, the strange fact is that in the human being of today the reciprocal action between the astral body and the I that is soul and spirit on the one hand and the ether body on the other comes to a halt at the age of 27. We are so conditioned during life between death and new birth that we prepare and organize our new ether body in such a way that when it comes to live in the physical body, the I and astral body can still be active in it. At the beginning of the Graeco-Latin epoch, about 747 B.C., this vivifying effect of astral body on the ether body came to a halt when the person reached the age of 35, at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, at the age of 33. It now stops at the age of 27. This means that today, according to the evolution he has gone through before birth or conception, a person can through what nature itself provides and what he gains from society keep his ether body mobile up to the age of 27, so mobile that the astral body, with which the ether body is in reciprocal activity, can imbue it with fresh concepts and ideas, vivifying it enough to engender new feelings and perceptions. Our mental pictures of the world, our ideals can be enriched up to the age of 27 simply through the experiences that come to us. After that age it does no longer happen of itself; progress will only come about through our own inner impulses.

Many soul conditions, many inner dissatisfactions in life suffered by modern man are due to the comparatively early cessation of the reciprocal effect between astral and ether body, and consequently also the physical body. There is, especially in early life, a lively reciprocal activity in the lower region between the soul, i.e., the astral body, and the ether body. Then it ceases, and unless we quicken our conceptual life in the way described in the previous lecture, we can absorb only shadowy concepts. These concepts must not attain their full reality or they would constantly lame us. They would be like a plant seed that insisted upon growing into a complete plant straight away. Our concepts and mental pictures must remain seeds until the next incarnation. If upbringing and self-discipline did not modify this tendency, we would in fact always want more than life of itself could give us. Many people do suffer from this “wanting more than life can give.” Life can provide us only with concepts that will mature in our next incarnation. They must consequently remain shadowy in this one unless through inner impulses of the kind described in the last lecture, we enrich and stimulate our mental pictures, in fact our whole inner life. If we could recognize that we are nurturing the seed for our next incarnation, i.e., see life in a much wider perspective, we would attain much greater inner contentment. This is directly connected with what Pascal and later Lessing expressed and what has often since been emphasized, the fact that in seeking truth, we are in a certain sense satisfied.¹ A passage which Pascal before him discussed at great length, Lessing expressed in a simpler, paradigmatic form, saying: “If God held truth in one hand and the striving after truth in the other, I would choose striving after truth.”² These words contain a great deal. They imply that while incarnated in a human body we will always have the feeling that we do not attain complete truth. Truth lives in concepts, in mental pictures and these are interwoven with the I; while in a human body, we can have only the truth which is seed for a next incarnation. It must not be fixed but live and move in our striving. Before incarnation our ether body is so constituted that it contains the truth. However, incarnating causes truth as a whole to be reduced to a copy, a picture of truth, and it is this picture which is seed for the following incarnation.

Inner contentment we attain only when we can feel ourselves as a member of humanity as a whole. In practice it is not attained unless we develop the kind of living concepts of which we spoke last time. These concepts are not derived from the surface of life's events; they must be sought in the connections between them. No human being today will achieve inner contentment unless he takes a vivid interest in the world around him, but an interest directed towards the spirit and the spiritual connections in the environment. Those who merely want to brood within themselves will find in life only what makes us into the kind of 27-year-olds that correspond to the evolution we went through between the previous death and the birth of the incarnation we are in.

Man has to discover out of his own initiative his bonds with the environment. This is why in our age man encounters obstacles to freedom. He must kindle in himself interest for those spiritual aspects of life that cannot be discovered merely through sense observations; they must be sought in wider, more hidden connections, in ways I explained in the previous lecture. Much in what has just been said can help explain, not only our stand towards truth in our time, but also towards the good—the ethically and morally good. In the next lecture we shall go into more detail. Today we shall concern ourselves more with something that follows from these facts and can explain much that will help us understand our present time.

The spiritual scientist must deal with the facts he discovers differently from the way the natural scientist deals with his. From our considerations over the years you will realize that the spiritual scientist arrives at his discoveries through the faculties of imagination, inspiration and intuition. This means he is engaged in cognition that goes beyond the confines of the immediate sensory world into that realm of the spiritual world which reaches beyond what is perceived through physical senses. This realm is at the same time the spiritual background from which everything sense perceptible is governed. The science of the spirit gains its observations such as the fact that humanity becomes younger and younger from the spiritual realm accessible to the human faculty of knowledge. The age of the human being is receding the way I explained from that of 56 to the age of 27 in our present time, and 27 is the age where we remain unless we take our own progress in hand. These facts can be discovered only through spiritual science. They cannot be found through ordinary ethnology or anthropology, nor of course, through ordinary historical research into the course of events since the Atlantean catastrophe with the methods of natural science. All these things can be derived only from the spiritual world. You will understand that the spiritual investigator with his spiritual knowledge will have a somewhat different attitude to events than the natural scientist, and not only to external events and processes but to history and social procedures. How does the natural scientist set about his research? He has before him the objects and phenomena to be investigated, and he formulates his concepts and mental pictures accordingly. The concept, the mental picture, is the second; the law that governs what is investigated is what he discovers. Thus he goes from facts to the laws by which they are governed; the sense perception comes between the two. The facts are the first, then the mental pictures are added, then the law discovered and so on.

In regard to the spiritual world itself the spiritual researcher sets about his investigation in a similar way; here the investigation is not really different. It is in regard to the physical aspect that differences arise. The spiritual facts are directly understood as one takes hold of them. If one wants to discover what significance they have for the physical world, then the corresponding physical facts must be sought out afterwards. The spiritual aspect is given first; afterwards one seeks out the physical facts or conditions which it explains. By means of the spirit one explains what in life must be spiritually explained. Many find it extremely difficult to understand that in spiritual research the law comes first, and the law; i.e., the spiritual aspect, then points to the physical phenomenon to which it applies. The physical phenomenon supplies confirmation, as it were, of the law. Spiritual investigators used to express this difference somewhat formally, saying that natural-scientific investigation has to proceed inductively—from fact to concept, whereas spiritual-scientific investigation must proceed deductively—from concept to fact. In this light, let us look at an example which is of significance today.

Spiritual research reveals that man in general develops in our time, through what nature and society provide, up to the age of 27. Therefore, the typical modern person who keeps aloof from spiritual knowledge will progress in his development up to his 27th year. If he is a person of significance, someone with many interests and is full of energy, then his faculties will be well developed by the time he reaches the age of 27. This means he will have brought to maturity everything one can develop simply through the fact of having physically become 27 years old. His powers of thinking will have developed and so too, the impulse to be active in one or another sphere. His will power will have grown in strength simply because his muscles have grown stronger, and similar things apply to the nervous system, and so on. If he is responsive to what he can absorb from the human environment, he will, by the time he is 27 years old, have developed a sum of ideas and ideals; he will be concerned about social reform and so on. All this will live and develop in him up to his 27th year, so that by that time he will, one might say, be crammed full. Then it stops; it ceases to develop further, and from then on what he brings to bear on life is the insight and outlook he has attained by the age of 27. He may live to be a hundred years old, and if he is a significant person he will bring about significant things, but whatever he does will be based on the ideas and impulses of a 27-year-old. Thus he is a true representative of the time in which we live; one could say he is a product of our time. But if he has no interest in the spiritual aspect of life, and does not develop impulses of the kind that enable, not only the body but the soul to mature beyond the 27th year, then he refuses to participate in mankind's further evolution. As he does not kindle spiritual impulses in himself, he cannot bring them to bear on his environment. He is incapable of bringing into our time anything that contains seeds for mankind's further progress. All that he does bring is characteristic of the time. If he is a man of stature—and one can, of course, be such and still remain 27 years old—then he will provide our time with what is in complete agreement with a certain aspect of it, but it will provide no seed for the future.

How are we to picture to ourselves such a typical person of our time? What exactly would he be like? What we must now do is to bring our mental picture of such a person down into physical reality. We must look for a physical counterpart. We must, as it were, visualize where such a person could be encountered in social life. It would have to be in the midst of modern life. So in what circumstances would one find him? First of all, the 27th year of his life would be conspicuous, but conspicuous in the sense that from his 27th year onwards his position in society would enable him to carry out precisely the ideas and impulses of a 27-year-old. At the same time what he lacked, i.e., his inability to progress inwardly beyond that age would not be too noticeable. In other words, he must have the opportunity to remain the age of 27 in a fruitful manner. Had he reached the age of 27 and found no possibility to do anything significant with his impulses and ideas, then he would have grown older with something dead within him. If then at the age of say 31 he found himself in some public position, he would meanwhile have carried what had become lifeless and dissolute within him into that later age; he would be no true representative of our time. However, it is possible in present-day circumstances to visualize that in a democratic country, under so-called normal conditions, such a person would, at the age of 27 be voted into parliament. There he would have the perfect opportunity to influence social affairs; it would also be a certain peak in his career. For if someone of some significance enters parliament at the age of 27 that would mean an occupation for life. He is, as it were, stuck; he cannot change course. However, he is in a position to put into action, from his 27th year onwards, all he has developed within himself. Should he later be called from parliament to become a minister of state, then that would be a change of less significance than the one that brought him into parliament. As minister of state he can put into practice what, as a 27-year-old he brought into parliament. So we can say that a typical person of our age with political and social interests would be someone who at the age of 27 is voted into parliament, giving him the possibility to carry out in practice the ideas and impulses corresponding to his age.

Yet there are still other demands such a person must fulfill to be a true representative of our time. There are things in modern society that work against a human being's natural development. What develops naturally soon goes awry when the person is subjected to modern educational methods; the more so if he goes through some branch of university training that pushes him in a one-sided direction. What we are looking for is someone who represents the age, someone in whom what nature has bestowed develops as far as possible, up to the age of 27, unimpaired by modern training of the young. In other words, he must fulfill the requirement I laid down on the basis of spiritual science—you could say deduced from spiritual science—someone who at the age of 27 stands in the modern world with all that nature provides, fully developed, unimpaired by modern training, and who refuses to absorb any knowledge that provides seeds for the future. If such a person could be found in the modern world, his life would clarify many things. We would see in him demonstrated in practice what it means that mankind is in general 27 years old, that people anywhere who come to a standstill in their development at the age of 27, in a crude way weaken the seed of the future.

Does a human being exist somewhere who had all the required qualities at the right age to make him a typical representative of our age? He does indeed; all the qualifications I deduced from spiritual considerations fit Lloyd George completely.³ Look at the life of Lloyd George, not just from the external aspect but, as it were, from above, from the spiritual aspect, and you will find that everything fits. He was born in 1863, was orphaned early in life—you will be acquainted with these details—he was brought up by his uncle who was a cobbler and also a preacher in Wales. He was of Celtic stock and, especially when young, of a lively and alert disposition. His uncle, the preacher, was always there as an example, and he aspired to become a preacher himself. That was not possible because the sect to which his uncle belonged was not permitted to have salaried priests; everyone had to pursue a trade and preach without remuneration. Therefore, not even these conventions had any inhibiting effect. Already in youth he was an ardent lover of independence. The poverty was such that often there was no money for shoes, so he ran about barefoot, in fact experienced all degrees of destitution. He grew up without attending school regularly, so received no proper education, but simply accepted what life brought him. In the same irregular fashion he embarked on a career as a lawyer, not through official training but by getting employment at sixteen in a lawyer's office, and through keen observation and sound judgment he became a solicitor at the age of 27. Thus his attainments were achieved not through academic training but through what he could gain from life in the present. Life had also kindled in him a strong opposition to the many privileges birth and position bestow. It was with a certain fury that he had removed his cap in greeting to the local squire with whom he was obliged to meet several times a day.

Then what happens? In the year 1890 when Lloyd George, born 1863, is 27 years old, he becomes, through the death of a member of parliament, the candidate opposing the man to whom he hated raising his cap in daily greeting. He had been put forward as a candidate because of the attention caused by a series of urgent speeches he had made, inflaming the hearts and minds of his listeners, exhorting the liberation of Wales from English dominion. Celtic nationality, he said, was to be infused with new life, and in particular the Church should be freed of the organizing influence of the State. He drew so much attention that as a result he won a seat in parliament by a slight majority. This was in 1890. Lloyd George was just 27 years old and a member of parliament! Immediate life experiences had taught him what was needed in his time, and these experiences he brought with him into parliament. For two months this 27-year-old member carefully watched everything that was happening and said not a word. For two months, sitting with a hand behind his ear, with eyes that tended to converge but now and then could flash, he saw and heard everything that went on, whereupon he began the career of a much feared speaker in parliament. People like Churchill and Chamberlain who formerly had looked upon their opponent with a certain indifference, with a certain English impassiveness, became enraged when opposed by Lloyd George.⁴ After all, he was untutored, unacademic, but he also displayed penetrating logic and biting sarcasm when refuting an opponent, no matter how highly revered. He was close to Gladstone, but even he had to endure much from the sarcasm, the cutting remarks, and logical arguments Lloyd George was always ready to conduct.⁵ Here we see the extraordinary versatility of someone taught by life itself. People not taught in this way tend to be one-sided, limited in things they can manage. Lloyd George was well informed about every subject and spoke in a way that enraged even the most distinguished members, rousing them from their habitual impassiveness.

It is indeed interesting to observe this great man as a representative of our time, to observe how he unites the characteristics of the 27-year-old with the strength of Celtic traits and makes the most of this combination. His caustic speeches against the Boer war, this wholly disgraceful affair, as he called it, are among his most outstanding. He constantly harangued parliament in even more vivid terms about what he called this vile, mean action of the war in South Africa. With Celtic fearlessness he continued to speak in public though he was once hit on the head with a cudgel so hard that he fell senseless to the ground. Another time he had to borrow a policeman's uniform and be smuggled through a side door because one dreaded the speech he was going to make. There had been no one like him in British political life, and he remained a severe critic well into the 20th century; naturally under a reactionary government a critic only. However, when the Campbell-Bannerman liberal government came to power early in the 20th century, everyone said how good it was to have a liberal government, but what was to be done about Lloyd George?⁶ Well, in a democratic country what does one do in such a case? One hauls the person in question into the cabinet and gives him a portfolio he is sure to know nothing about. That was exactly what Campbell-Bannerman did with Lloyd George. He, who never had any opportunity to concern himself with trade, was given the Department of Trade, which he took over in 1905. He was a self-made man, molded by life, not by academic training. And what was the outcome? He became the most outstanding Minister of Trade Britain had ever had.

After a comparatively short time, spent studying his new task and which involved travels to Hamburg, Antwerp and Spain in order to study trade relations, he set about introducing a law concerning patents which was a blessing for the country. The bills he introduced and passed for reorganizing the Port of London were met with general approval, an issue over which many former Ministers of Trade had come to grief. The way he managed to settle a particularly critical railway dispute was universally applauded. In short, he proved to be a quite exceptionally efficient minister of trade. When the change of government came from Campbell-Bannerman to that of Asquith and Grey, Lloyd George naturally had to be kept in the cabinet.⁷ By then it was the general opinion that Lloyd George could do anything. He was so truly a representative of his time that he was given the most important office, that of Chancellor of the Exchequer. With all his characteristics of a 27-year-old, with all his emotions stemming from his Celtic origin, Lloyd George became Chancellor of the Exchequer. He had of course retained all the emotions that used to well up in him when as a barefoot boy he had to greet the local squire. He did, however, score over that same squire in his bid for a seat in parliament. He also retained his strong feelings against everything to do with special privileges and the like. He remained as he had been at the age of 27.

Before Lloyd George's time as Chancellor there had been in England a magic cure for financial problems; it was called tariffs. Inland revenue is really a form of tariff, worked out so that the privileged pay as little possible, ensuring that poverty is widespread. As Lloyd George presented his first budget, the abuse hurled at him and his impossible budget must have created a precedent. The British press was, in fact, hurling at him the kind of abuse they at present are reserving for the Germans. Everything in his budget to do with raising taxes in areas that affected the more privileged came in for heavy criticism.

In parliament he faced vehement opposition, but he sat, as always, completely calm and unperturbed, hand behind the ear, eyes that sparkled and lips ready to curl in sarcasm. This was a man in complete accord with the age. Chancellors before him had produced budgets which had been given this or that name, but the budget he presented was so unique to him that in Britain it was known simply as the Lloyd George budget. With no education other than that of life itself, he represented to perfection the time of which he was himself a product. Everything that could be learned about taxation and how it worked in America, France, and Germany he had investigated and endeavored to evaluate. Here again he did not gain his knowledge from books but from practical life, from the way the issue was dealt with at that particular time.

What he achieved is really most interesting and quite remarkable. His complete confidence is again demonstrated when one year, as he came to present his annual balance sheet, it was found that there was a deficit. Deficits had previously always been dealt with by simply absorbing them; i.e., making an entry for the amount. However, Lloyd George said: “Well, there is a deficit, but we shall leave it and not enter it because through the measures I have taken various branches of trade and industry will be so profitable that the extra revenue will cover the deficit in time”—which shows his confidence in life, a confidence that stemmed from his accord with life. Most importantly, unlike others he dod not lose that confidence when things went wrong. And in regard to this matter things did go very wrong. The deficit remained, but the prosperity he had so confidently promised did not materialize. Yet he remained calm, being so completely adjusted to life. And what happened? Three of his greatest adversaries died, all exceedingly wealthy men. They had strongly opposed him because of his tax laws which had earned him the title “robber of the upper classes,” one of the many insults hurled at him. Well, three of his most powerful enemies died—and you may call it a coincidence, but the death duty he had already introduced was so high that the revenue from their estates made up the deficit.

In a remarkable way the tide gradually turned, and Lloyd George began to be praised. He lived according to his inner conscience and the way he was prompted by the environment, and nothing could be in more complete accord than the man who had remained aged 27 and mankind aged 27. However, the time came for his 1909 budget. By then he was of course considerably older, yet had remained aged 27 in the real sense. As he introduced new measures in every sphere in which he had influence, all aiming at fighting poverty and other social ills of the worst kind existing in Britain, it was not surprising that he met with much enmity. But, if one is in such accord with what lives in mankind and has the strength to experience it, the strength will also be found to cope. He sometimes had to listen for ten hours or more to speeches and continually had to intervene and often was opposed by the strongest members of parliament, some glaring at him through monocles while reviling him. Lloyd George remained calm, answering objections for ten hours if he had to, always with wit and ironic remarks that found their target. Thus he managed to introduce laws of immense benefit, such as care of the elderly, laws aiming at improving the population's health, such as effectively combatting drunkenness and the like. One could say that as representative of the time he fought everyone who did not represent his time.

In order to understand fully this whole issue, we must add to it another basic aspect of mankind's evolution. We must bear in mind that in the first, the ancient Indian epoch, man developed the ether body, in the ancient Persian epoch the sentient body. Then in the Egyptian-Chaldean epoch he developed the sentient soul, in the Graeco-Latin epoch the intellectual soul, and in our epoch the consciousness soul. However, in the present epoch no other people anywhere are in the position of the British, for they are especially constituted for the consciousness soul. We know that the Italian and Spanish peoples develop the sentient soul, the French the intellectual soul, the English people the consciousness soul, the Central Europeans the I, while the Russian people are preparing for the Spirit Self. The English people are therefore representative of the materialism of the epoch, because materialism is bound up with the development of the consciousness soul. Thus Lloyd George is also intimately connected with the consciousness soul; he is, as it were, predestined to be in every way the representative of our time. It is of immense significance that he, the typical 27-year-old, should emerge with the 27-year-old English people. That is why in everything he said he represented the English folk. But he also spoke as a representative of man-kind's present evolutionary stage, as one who has no inclination to further that evolution, but rather with bull-like tenacity wants to press on with what this evolution presently has to offer. Thus the English folk soul is coming to expression in a human being representing the age.

Lloyd George has been active in the British social system ever since 1890, when he was 27 years old, and has left his mark on every aspect of it. And it comes as no surprise that in the years leading up to the war he was heard saying that the British people were not to let themselves be confused by warmongers who continually tried to convince them that the Germans meant to invade England. There was to be no war and not a penny would be spent on arms. So again, this eminent representative of the British people expressed exactly what the British people felt. It also expresses the idealism of a 27-year-old. Whatever else was taking place at the time was more reminiscent of the other ideas as they had been in different ages. But Lloyd George expressed the un-warlike sentiment of the present age, particularly characteristic of the British people. He said there were three stages—which must be avoided at all cost—to sure ruin: to budget for war, to arm for war, and the war itself. This man, the eminent representative of our time, during the period of liberalism in Britain had imprinted it on all spheres of life. All that could be done in Britain in this respect he had done. He also dreamed of a world court of arbitration, which is a typical abstract ideal of a 27-year-old.

Everything I have explained so far about Lloyd George is connected with the fact that he possesses in an unspoiled way the qualities of the 27-year-old. This makes him the ideal representative of the English folk, and in fact, of everything from which the British people benefit and through which they in turn can benefit the world. But what Lloyd George cannot do is progress beyond the age of 27; he remains that age throughout his life in the sense I have explained. Consequently when something occurs under the influence of a different human age group with which he has no affinity, he is immediately thrown off balance. Someone who accepts only what nature and life of itself provide can have no understanding of something which issues from quite a different aspect of mankind's evolution. When one is able to look behind the scenes of world history it is an indisputable fact, though one that is little recognized, that what is represented by Lloyd George is what on the surface the British people want. And what they want is no war. This comes to expression perfectly in the sentiment which says that the three stages to certain ruin are to budget for war, arm for war and war itself. Though the war was not prevented, and thus permitted to occur by Britain, the real truth is that it was brought about by occult powers who manipulate those who govern as if they were marionettes.

One could point to the exact moment when these occult powers intervened, the moment they caught in their net those who were rulers or rather appeared to be. The occult powers who caused the war from Britain were behind well-known statesmen, and their impulses are most certainly not those of 27-year-olds. Rather they stem from ancient traditions and from a thorough knowledge of the forces inherent in the peoples of Europe. They have knowledge of where and when various peoples, or individuals, various leaders may be weak or strong. Their knowledge is exact and far-reaching, and has for centuries not only flowed through hidden channels but has been kept so secret that those in possession of it could drag others unawares into their net. Individuals like Asquith and also Grey were in reality mere puppets who themselves believed, right up to early August 1914, that at least for Britain there would be no war. They were sure they would do everything to prevent war, when suddenly they found themselves manipulated by occult powers, powers which originated from personalities quite other than those named. Over against these powers Lloyd George, having remained 27 years old, also became a mere puppet. This was because their influence originated from quite a different human life period than his; they could be so effective because of their ability to place ancient traditions in the service of British egoism. The influence of these powers swept like a wave over Britain engulfing also Lloyd George who, though a great man, is through and through a product of our time. Behind the impulses which from Britain laid the foundations for war existed an exact knowledge of the peoples of Europe and their political intentions. Those who know what took place in Britain also know that the content of what today is expressed in war slogans existed as an idea, as a plan, already in the 1880s and 90s, a plan that had to become reality.

Those with occult insight into Britain's political future and the future of the peoples of Europe were saying that the dominance of the Russian empire will be destroyed to enable the Russian people to exist. The Russian revolution in March 1917 was planned already at the end of the 1880s, and so were the channels through which events were guided and manipulated. This was something known only to that small circle whose secret activities sprang from impulses that were of considerably older origin than those of Lloyd George. The events that took place on the Balkans were all planned by human beings of whom it could be said that they were the “dark figures behind the scenes.” That these things happen, is destiny. When from Britain something intervened in the world situation which could not have arisen from the essentially British character represented by Lloyd George, the powers behind the scenes saw to it that he became Minister of Munitions! As long as he had been himself, Lloyd George's deepest convictions had been that the way to certain ruin was to budget for war, arm for war and war itself. Now that he is a puppet he becomes Minister of Munitions! All he retained of his own was his efficiency. He became a very able Minister of Munitions. The man who from deepest inner conviction had spoken against arms brought about that Britain became as well armed as all the other nations.

Here we see coming together the one who, having remained at age 27, so eminently represents mankind, and the dark powers behind the scenes, powers capable of overturning even the deepest convictions because all that lives in the physical world is governed by the spiritual realm; therefore it can be guided by a spirit which acts in accordance with the egoism of a certain group of people. Seldom perhaps have convictions been so completely reversed by the powers behind the scenes as those of Lloyd George have been. The reason lies in the fact that his convictions were so completely rooted in what had been prepared for this particular time as the essential “age 27 quality.” As long as the “age 27 quality” of this single human individuality was effective within mankind also aged 27, there was complete accord. However, just because that harmony was rooted solely in the present, the discord became all the greater when that other influence, based on ancient knowledge, asserted itself.

This extremely interesting interaction does certainly explain a great deal about present-day events; it can also help us to base our judgments on the facts of human evolution, rather than on sympathy or antipathy. The seriousness of certain things can be understood only when they are seen against the background of mankind's evolution as a whole. This also leads to a recognition of how essential it is to be aware of what goes on behind the surface of world history. As long as mankind's age had not receded below that of 28, up to the fifteenth century, evolution could go on without the individual acquainting himself with the guiding spiritual impulses behind historical events. Today it is necessary that we learn to know the influences at work beneath the surface. Such insight is essential especially in Central Europe. If one is to guard against the adversary, one must know the full extent of his might. The only way we can attain insight into mankind's evolution today is to acquaint ourselves, through spiritual knowledge, with the laws that govern that evolution. We understand our time even in regard to the individual human being only when we do so out of the spirit.

How does such an enigmatic figure as Lloyd George come to be just in the key position at this time? The answer to this question is important if one is to understand what is taking place. However, even when the individual is a representative of mankind, he can only be understood through the science of the spirit. Everything concerning Lloyd George's future will be of interest, just as everything concerning his past is of interest. Every step taken by him since 1890 has been significant. So, too, is the way he was there in the background at the outbreak of war, reflected, as it were, in the surface of events. Interesting is also the way he has become the pivot around which so many things in the world revolve, including what emerges from Woodrow Wilson, another one aged 27.⁸ Not least of interest is the fact that Lloyd George's inner convictions, despite their strength, were obliterated in the face of spiritual influences and powers of a dubious nature. How will Lloyd George be superseded? What is his future?⁹ These questions are also of interest. We must wait and see.

• 1 . Blaise Pascal, 1623–1662. Penseés, in many English editions. From the German edition of Ewald Wasmuth, Heidelberg, 1954, pp. 240-241: “We not only know God and ourselves through Jesus Christ; but life and death we know only through him as well. Without Jesus Christ we would not understand our life, our death, God, or ourselves.”
• 2 . Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, 1729–1781. The verbatim quote is: “If God held in his right hand all truth; and, in his left, the ever active drive for truth, even with the condition that I would eternally and always err, and said: ‘Choose!,’ I would fall humbly on his left and say, ‘Father, give! The pure truth is for you alone!,’ ” Eine Duplik (1778), in G.E. Lessings Sämtliche Schriften, Leipzig, 1897.
• 3 . David Lloyd George, 1863–1945, British statesman. Prime minister, 1916–1922.
• 4 . Sir Winston Churchill, 1874–1965, British statesman, prime minister 1940–1945, 1951–1955. Arthur Neville Chamberlain, 1869–1940, British statesman, prime minister 1937–1940.
• 5 . William Ewart Gladstone, 1809–1898, British statesman, prime minister four times between 1868 and 1894.
• 6 . Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, 1836–1908, British statesman, prime minister, 1905–1908.
• 7 . Sir Edward Grey, 1862–1933, British statesman. British foreign Minister, 1905–1914. Herbert Henry Asquith, 1852–1928, British statesman.
• 8 . Woodrow Wilson, 1856–1924, note 3 to Lecture I.
• 9 . David Lloyd George, see note 3, fell from power as Prime Minister in 1922 in connection with the Irish Question. He was a minister in various cabinets from 1909–1916, and Prime Minister from December 1916–1922. The liberal party which he led lost its influence thereafter. Lloyd George's role as a prominent politician was also at an end.

Alongside the content of these lectures I am concerned to show that truth, in the spiritual sense, is a living reality. It is especially essential in our time that a feeling should develop for the fact that truth is something living. What has life is different from one time to another; at one stage it may be formless, at another it may have a definite structure. A young child is very different from an old person. What is alive is continually changing. The human being who is perhaps to unfold his activity sometime in the future cannot be spoken of now as someone existing, as far as the physical plane is concerned. These things are so obvious as to be trivial. However, they cease to be trivial when one has learned to cherish the feeling that truth is a living entity.

I spoke to you last time about a contemporary statesman, Lloyd George.¹ If someone in England in 1890, when Lloyd George was 27 years old, would have spoken about the whole significance of that age in our epoch, as we did last time, it would, in the spiritual-scientific sense, have been wrong. He could have spoken about it in relation to Lloyd George, though of course without the biographical details which had hardly begun to happen. But to do so would have been wrong.

People have the notion that truth can always be expressed at any time in the same way, but that is not the case, especially when one is dealing with certain higher truths. It is only now that the time is right for speaking about the relation that exists between the individual human being's age and the age of mankind as a whole. This kind of truth is also an active force. To speak about Lloyd George in 1890 when he was aged 27, giving an outline of his life—which could have been done within certain limits—would have been irresponsible. It could be compared with planting something in the wrong season. It is important not only that such truths do not reach the human soul as abstractions, but even more that they come at a time when they can be effective. This holds good not only in regard to historical facts, facts related to world evolution in the widest sense, but to truth in general in its effect upon the human soul. I gave some indication of this last time, but attention must continually be drawn to it because we are at present at a stage of transition in the conception of truth. Science of the spirit should create a certain condition of the comprehension of truth. The relationship which man has to truth must alter, must go through a certain development.

In the last lecture I drew attention to the fact that nowadays the human soul easily feels dissatisfied. Let us look at some of the reasons for this dissatisfaction of modern man. We know that the human soul needs concepts and ideas in life which can throw light on certain basic questions, such as the immortality of the soul, the meaning of world evolution, and so on. The human soul needs ideas with which it can live. If it cannot develop such ideas, or only unsatisfactory ones, then it remains dissatisfied and becomes ill in a certain sense. Many human souls today are in fact in a condition of sickness to a far greater extent than is admitted. The near future will see many more such souls than it is at present possible to imagine, unless people turn to the kind of knowledge that can fill the soul with spiritual content.

Nature itself does in many ways present an image of the loftiest and most secret spiritual reality; it is a question of understanding the image rightly and not interpreting it materialistically. The difficulty arises because people want ready-made formulas, sets of concepts with which they can live and be satisfied once and for all. When such are not discovered they may seek advice. However, it is clear that what is expected is a short description of some kind, a book perhaps, that in a short time can be assimilated and that gives the person something that satisfies him for the rest of his life. If one is able to experience even to some degree truth as a living reality, then such a demand is felt to be the equivalent of demanding a food that will sustain the bodily organism for the rest of life. He wants an advice that he can “eat” so that spiritually he never needs to eat again. That is an impossibility in either realm.

Spiritual science cannot hand people something which, once assimilated, is enough for the rest of life. I have often pointed out that there exists no short summary of a world view which can be kept at hand in one's pocket. In place of ready formulas, science of the spirit provides something with which the human soul must repeatedly unite itself, which must be repeatedly inwardly assimilated and digested. External truths such as those provided by natural science we can, if we have a good memory, take in and then possess them once and for all. That is not possible with spiritual-scientific truths, the reason being that the truths of natural science are lifeless concepts. The laws of nature are dead once they have been formulated into concepts, whereas spiritual-scientific truths are living concepts; if we condemn them to lifelessness because we accept them as if they were external truths, then they provide no nourishment; then they are stones the soul cannot digest.

In view of what the science of the spirit is today and what it really ought to be, it is worth remarking that in the cultural life of the 19th century there were trends struggling towards it. But much has happened in the last decade to cause what was then achieved to be swept away and forgotten. Today I would like, by way of introduction, to point to something that was much misunderstood in the second half of the 19th century. It was usually referred to as “Eduard von Hartmann's kind of pessimism.”² However, the fact is that his pessimism is not meant the way it was usually interpreted. People set out from the fixed notion that pessimism means a view that considers the world to be less than perfect, having many unsatisfactory aspects, being in fact quite bad. That view can never do justice to Hartmann's pessimism, but it was usually assessed in the light of this general view. Today it is still difficult to clarify this issue which deals with something basic and deeply rooted in the human soul.

Today every child is taught at school about the impenetrability of bodies. When the teacher asks, “What is impenetrability?” the children have learned to answer, “Impenetrability is the property by virtue of which two bodies cannot occupy a place at the same time,” which is true of physical bodies, but today no one imagines that it is a sentence which one day will have to be unlearned or rather be interpreted differently. Here I shall only indicate what the issue is about. The day will come when the sentence will no longer run, Impenetrability is the property by virtue of which two bodies cannot occupy the same place at the same time; rather, it will be said, Entities whose property is such that when they occupy a space from which other entities of the same kind are excluded are physical bodies. Thus the basic definition will be different. The day will come when the approach will no longer be dogmatic, but based on reality. Much is said nowadays about old dogmas being superseded. The future will prove that there never was an age more steeped in dogmas than our own. Our sciences are stuffed with dogmatism, even more so are public opinions, not to mention political views.

If we take a positive view of pessimism—for the moment that of Eduard von Hartmann—we shall discover what follows. He says, Many people strive for happiness; they want instant inner contentment which they call happiness. But that can never be the foundation, in a higher sense, for an existence worthy of man. Striving merely for one's personal satisfaction can only lead to isolation; it is bound to lead to a greater or lesser degree of egoism. Man's task cannot consist in striving merely for his own satisfaction; rather, must it be to place his living being into one process of the world, to work with and for the development of the world. However, complete satisfaction with external life or harmony within himself would prevent him from fulfilling that task. Only when we are not satisfied with conditions do we strive to further the upbuilding processes in the world. Thus Eduard von Hartmann's pessimism is in the realm of feeling. It is his view that without this pessimism which makes us dissatisfied, we would lack the incentive to cooperate in the work of furthering evolution. Thus Eduard von Hartmann, expressing himself philosophically, states that he stands for both empirical and teleological evolutionism. It is clear that we are here dealing with a pessimism that is very different from the usual dogmatic view of pessimism. With his concept of pessimism, which I won't pursue further at this time, Eduard von Hartmann is in a certain sense on the path that spiritual science must follow.

This spiritual science, however, shows us much more; it shows us what a fully satisfying mental image would really be for our soul life. It would be for our soul life exactly what external food would be for us if we ate it but then had no way to digest it, and instead carried it around with us undigested. It could not really be called nourishment. It is actually so that someone who takes a book of Trine or Johannes Muller and wanted to be satisfied with it, would be attempting the same as someone who wanted to eat food which could then only be carried around undigested in the body.³

If it were not simply carried, it would be digested, but then it disappears; it loses its essential identity. This never happens with a fully satisfying mental image. A fully satisfying mental image remains with us forever, if I may express it so, lying in the stomach of our soul. And the more we believe we receive at a given moment from such a mental image, the more we hope to voluptuously satisfy our soul with it, the more we will see that once we have lived with it awhile it cannot satisfy us anymore. Instead it develops in us so that it bores us, becomes annoying to us, and the like.

These things have another side which is connected with what some people regard as contradictions in spiritual science; namely, the fact that new viewpoints are continually sought from which to develop our concepts. We could, as it were, speak forever from different points of view. These do not contradict one another; rather, they prove that spiritual truths have a capacity for continuous transformation, which is an indication of their living quality. Science of the spirit cannot be molded in rigid concepts. Single facts can certainly be presented in a straightforward manner, but the content of what is to satisfy us as a world view must be presented in thoughts that are full of life and can be understood from ever new aspects. Whoever takes in the thoughts of some aspect of spiritual science and lets them dwell in his soul will find that they speak to him. If at another time the same thoughts pass through his soul, they will speak to him again but quite differently. When he is happy, they will speak differently from when he is sad and troubled, but insofar as he receives them in their living quality they will always speak to him.

Spiritual-scientific concepts do not just provide an image of something; they establish a living connection between the human soul and the whole endless spiritual aspect of the world. Because the spiritual aspect is endless it can never be exhausted. Science for spirit will in every single case bring about a connection between the soul and the spiritual world, provided we retain an open receptivity for what comes to meet us from the world. We must above all become accustomed to the fact that certain concepts which today seem basic and beyond dispute may in the future have no relevance at all. Take the example of the countless philosophies; a problem that emerges in them all concerns “being” or “existence.” Existence as such is always debated and already the form in which the problem is presented creates great difficulty for the mobile human soul to deal with. Especially through these lectures it is my hope to kindle in you a feeling for the fact that whatever we look upon as “existing,” whatever entity we ascribe the state of “being” to, is directly related to the process of coming into being. The truth is that neither what Parmenides said about immutable existence nor what Heraclitus said about the coming into being is correct.⁴ In the world things exist and things become, but only what is in the process of becoming is alive; what is already in existence is always dead. What is in existence is the corpse of what was becoming. You will find more about this in my Occult Science.⁵ In nature all around us we find “existence,” and spiritual science confirms that this existence has arisen because once it was in a process of becoming. The “becoming” left behind its corpse. What is in the state of existence is dead; what is becoming is alive.

This has special significance for man's inner life. We do not attain a satisfying view of things through concepts that are finished and complete, because they belong to what exists, not to what is becoming. A satisfying view can only be derived from what is in the process of becoming; it must act on the soul so that as we absorb it, it becomes unconscious, but in uniting with the soul stirs in us again questions concerning the becoming. This is also an aspect of the science of the spirit which causes difficulty for many because they prefer what is finished and complete. While the science of the spirit points to what will truly nourish the human soul, the inclination is towards the very opposite.

What people want today is to attain as quickly as possible a complete and finished view of the world. Much of what comes to expression as inner disturbances and dissatisfaction will be alleviated only when, instead of demanding finished truths, our interest awakens for participation in the coming-into-being of truth. Certainly truths must be clearly defined, but what is expressed in finished concepts always refers to something that belongs to the past. However, the truths deposited, as it were, by the past we can absorb; by so doing they live in us, and we can in this way participate in truth.

All this is going through a process of transformation in our time, which shows itself in the extreme polarity between Western and Eastern Europe. We in Central Europe are placed in the middle of this polarity. The Western pole has already reached hypertrophy, over-ripeness. The Eastern pole is only just coming into being; it has hardly reached the embryonic stage. It is very important that we be clear about the fact that what shows itself as strange and chaotic conditions in Eastern Europe is very little understood in Central Europe and not at all in Western Europe. How many discussions are not going on about the nature of the Russian people, about what is happening in Eastern Europe! Recently I read about an opinion, put forward by a gentleman who no doubt thinks himself very clever, that the Russian people are going through a stage resembling the one Central and Western Europe went through in the Middle Ages. At that time there was, he said, in Central and Western Europe more faith, more of a kind of dreamy, mystical attitude, just as there is now in Eastern Europe. Thus Eastern Europe must be passing through its Middle Ages whereas in the rest of Europe reason and intellect, and with it the natural sciences have meanwhile progressed. The Eastern Europeans will have to catch up with all of this development.

None of this has any bearing on reality. The truth is rather that the Russian is by nature mystically inclined, but this mystical inclination is at the same time intellectual. What meets us here is intellectual mysticism, or mystical intellectualism; that is, an intellect that expresses itself mystically. And that is something which never existed in the rest of Europe. It is something quite new, new in the same sense as a child is new when compared to an old man, perhaps his grandfather, whom he will come to resemble. It is so important that modern man wakes up and recognizes these things instead of passing them by in a state of sleep. To understand the polarity of Western and Eastern Europe is in particular for Central Europe a pressing necessity. Unless attempts are made to understand it, the chaos that exists at present will not be overcome.

It is rather difficult to become altogether clear about the contrast between Eastern and Western Europe, basically because what comes to the fore in the West is in a sense too mature, whereas what appears in the East has, as I said, hardly reached the embryonic stage. Yet we must try to understand. We have in Western and also in Central Europe what might be called a specific kind of superstition which does not exist in Eastern Europe, or when it appears there, it is an adoption from the West. This superstition, so prevalent in Western and Central Europe is, to put it bluntly, concerned with the printed word, with everything to be found in books. This may sound somewhat grotesque but it does illustrate what encompasses a whole complex of cultural attitudes. In the West we cling to what can be pinned down and put into print. We place the greatest store on what we can objectify by detaching it from the human being. To do so is regarded so highly that our libraries grow into gigantic monstrosities, immensely appreciated more particularly by those working on some branch of science. However, there is another reason why libraries are so appreciated: they keep in storage thoughts which have become divorced from their human source. A sum of such thoughts we call liberalism; when a group of people profess them it is called a liberal party. A liberal party is what results when, over a number of human beings a liberal theory is spread, like a spider's web, i.e., what can be preserved in books. The same applies to many other things. The superstitious belief in theories leads to the attitude that, for things to be dealt with efficiently they must first be pinned down in this way.

In the West there has emerged in quick succession a whole number of theories such as liberalism, conservatism and others, and also wider, more universal theories, preserved in books, such as Proudhon's and Bellamy's utopias.⁶ These things become more numerous the further West we go. Central Europe has produced comparatively few such utopias, strictly speaking, none. Some may have appeared in Central Europe because these things get transferred, but they are all products of the Anglo-Saxon and Latin races. A feature of Western superstition—adopted to some extent in Central Europe—is that what originates in man, i.e., his thoughts, must first be externalized, must be detached from him, before being of use. This procedure has led to evil practices in certain movements usually of a mystical nature. Such practices are facilitated by the fact that great value is placed on producing something, not directly from contemporary life, but from what can be derived from ancient writings and old traditions, in short, from what has become divorced from man. Many people are not interested when told about the spiritual worlds related to today. But if told that what they are hearing stems from ancient Rosicrucian wisdom they are pleased, and even more pleased if told about ancient temples, or better Oriental mystic temples, and it is emphasized how old everything is, how long it has all been deposited, how truly fixed it has become.

This tendency continues to develop to extremes in the Western world. It is a tendency that is intimately connected with a certain despotic power that is being wielded over human beings by the spirituality that has become detached from them. The spiritual element that has become independent exerts its power, in the last resort, over man's elemental forces. The human being himself is then excluded; in one way or another, what he has separated off takes control. Furthermore what has in this way been thrust into the world seeks materialization; it does not just seek to be understood in a materialistic sense, but actually to materialize. The Western world has already gone a long way in this respect. The phenomena are there, but no attempts are made to understand the inner laws that govern them; however, they exist and the day is not far off when man will regret that he did not seek knowledge of them.

A former commoner known today as Lord Northcliffe is a British newspaper magnate, and he is on his way to becoming one in America.⁷ He started by pondering the question of whether it would be possible to make society—that is, the ideas and views people generally share—independent of human beings as such. In other words, he wondered how one could get what has detached itself from man to gain dominance over him. He began by formulating a theory saying: Every province has its own newspaper; it carries articles written by local individuals; consequently the papers differ from one province to another. How splendid if one could gradually pour into all the provincial presses a uniform model newspaper. One could establish a central office which collected all the best articles on chemistry, written by famous chemists, all the best written on physics by eminent physicists, all the best on biology by famous biologists, and so on. This material could be distributed to the various local papers which would then all carry the same articles. Even where of necessity something had to be different, it could be arranged from the central office. Of course, due to different languages, absolutely everything could not be the same, but everything could be centralized.

You will find that this man has come a long way towards his aim. He is today the unseen power over a great part of the British, French and American press. Certain newspapers in Britain, France and America carry nothing that has not been issued from the same central office. Those newspapers which are still independent have to fight for survival, faced with competition from all that flows through his channels. His real aim is to get rid of everything that is not issued from one and the same source. In view of Western man's blind belief in what has become detached from him and which now comes to meet him in this way, you will realize what possibilities this opens up for exerting tyrannical power over individual human beings.

People in Eastern Europe have a natural inclination to restore to the individual his full human dignity and independence. Their inclination is towards overcoming what has become entombed in the printed word and replacing it by man himself. What is striven for in the East as an ideal is to read less, to be less influenced by what has become inert and fixed and rather to let influence come from what is directly connected with individual human beings. Man is once more to listen to his fellow man and to know that it makes a difference whether speech comes directly from the human being or whether it has become detached from him and made a detour via printers' ink or the like.

Meanwhile in the West a dreadful use is made in many spheres of what has become detached from man, especially in the realm of art where it has led to methods of reproduction that are most efficient in extinguishing the sense for the artistic. The ability to recognize the unique aspect in a work of art has to a great extent been lost. This applies especially to objects in everyday use. When objections are made to this modern malady, they are not met with much understanding. You may have noticed that some of the ladies present are wearing rings or other ornaments, every item different, because value is placed on individual design, and on the fact that a connection exists in the ideal sphere between the object and the person who made it. At a time when everything is mass produced, that is, has become detached from man, has been objectified, there is not much understanding for such things. The intention behind much that is developed in our time really springs from this tendency, although it may be thought that things are done from preference. On the other hand, what is preparing in the East is based on what is individual, on enhancing man's intrinsic value, though as yet this tendency is only in the earliest embryonic beginnings.

Marxism (I could just as well choose a number of other examples) originated in the West. But what is Marxism? It is a theory which presents in conceptual form a social structure within which all human beings are supposed to live together in harmony. To the spiritual outlook gradually preparing in the East it will seem an absurdity that a theory of this kind, supposed to have universal validity, could ever have been spun out. It will be recognized that it is impossible to decide in an arbitrary manner how people are to live. That is something which each individual must determine for himself, just as people's lives within a community must be worked out between the people themselves. What is preparing in the East is creative individualism—I hesitate to use yet another stereotyped phrase, but no other possibility exists than to make use of certain concepts.

It is so very important that these things are understood. They indicate the forces which at present are shaping the world, and we are placed in their midst. Unless these things are taken into account sufficiently, it is not possible to arrive at an adequate view of world events. For example, without such insight it is not possible to recognize what is behind the fact that Lord Northcliffe bought up not only British, American and French newspapers, but a Russian one as well. A newspaper called Nowoje Wremja is completely under his control. This enables him to throw a net across to the East, instigated no doubt by human beings who have a certain insight into what will result from gathering into the same net what constitutes the past and what constitutes the future. Something of far deeper significance than is imagined lies behind this East-West union into which we in Central Europe are wedged. These things are worked at far more thoroughly and systematically than people are aware of. Similar things are taking place in other spheres. The idea of implanting the dying forces of the West into the germinating forces of the East is dreadful. Some are aware of what is taking place, but who today can rightly judge the meaning of the fact that at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries there suddenly appeared in the British press a whole series of fictitious names, names such as Ignotus, Argus, Spectator and so on? Who recognizes from a comprehensive viewpoint that an issue of Nowoje Wremja purchased in Russia is written in London by representatives under various pseudonyms, thus ensuring a complete interchange between what is overripe in the West and what is still embryonic and germinating in the East? These are things that go on behind the scenes of our everyday lives, things that have a direct connection with laws governing the evolution of mankind and the earth.

At the beginning of the 20th century the spirit of Eastern Europe was joined to the spirit of Western Europe. Systematic work was done to create a general public opinion. Work on this started in the editor's office and spread to parliament before entering more subterranean channels. Anyone who believes I am imagining things in maintaining this should read and really take in the content of letters published at the beginning of the 20th century by Mrs. Novikoff, the wife of the Russian envoy in Vienna.⁸ These letters were written by Mrs. Novikoff to Mrs. Campbell-Bannerman, with whom she became acquainted in England. In reading these letters you will find that I am not imagining things and you will find much that explains what seems inexplicable, especially to people in Central Europe.

If we are really to understand the significance of the deep changes occurring in our time, we need concepts that are different from those carried over from the past. We must recognize that we have an inherent inclination and ability to formulate such concepts. We must not sleep through the significant events that are taking place. We could cite hundreds upon hundreds of such events. Take for example what took place at Oxford in the summer of 1911. There was a large gathering at which were present, in their official attire, a splendid procession of all the dignitaries and professors of the University of Oxford. They had gathered because Lord Haldane was to deliver a speech.⁹ You must bear in mind that this is the Secretary of State for War giving a speech. And his subject? He discussed in strictly scientific terms how greatly the German spirit had contributed to the furtherance of mankind's evolution. He stressed that it had demonstrated that civilization is furthered not through brute force but rather through moral and ethical influences. The whole speech was a eulogy in praise of the intrinsic value of German culture.

Once war had broken out, Lord Haldane fully agreed with and even emphasized the view that the German spirit came to expression mainly in militarism that created hell for the rest of the world. Yet that same Lord Haldane had in his youth, while in Göttingen, sat in reverence at the feet of the philosopher Lotze who had written some fine books on Education and the State and one entitled A Path to Truth.¹⁰ That same Lord Haldane had in beautiful words spoken about the difference between Hegel and Goethe. He pointed out that while Hegel said that we would be able to hear nature express the highest secrets if we only had the sense, Goethe made a still loftier saying the foundation for his whole world view, namely, that if nature could actually express everything man needs to hear, then she would have had the ability to speak. A deep meaning is contained in these words. They imply nothing less than that Goethe professed true spiritualism, for if nature contained all there is in the world, then she would reveal it to us; the fact that she does not proves that there is more; there is something beyond nature, namely the spirit. All this Haldane had been able to express because of his experience of German cultural life. Yet like hundreds of other instances, we see him suddenly change.

These phenomena are not of a kind that can be brushed aside with trivial remarks like: Once peace has been signed all these things will even out.—Many people do believe that, but what is needed is a fundamentally different approach. The basis for this approach we do not even have to acquire; in a sense, we possess it already, and if we have the will, we can act accordingly. We in Central Europe have by nature the ability, if we would only exert it, to look with understanding towards both the East and the West. What we must do is overcome the habit of approaching things especially spiritual science theoretically. We must enter into it with all our heart, with all the inner forces at our disposal.

Allow me for a moment to turn to something of a personal nature; after all, we know one another and these things concern us all. As you know, I have written about Nietzsche, and from my book you will have seen that I value and admire him greatly.¹¹ Lately, when lecturing in various places, I have expressed my respect and admiration for the Swabian aesthetician Friedrich Theodor Vischer.¹² I also mentioned the fact that he was among the; first to whom I turned after I had for thirty years been concerned with laying the foundation for what I now call the science of the spirit. He was the first to approach me in saying: Your conception of time is a most fruitful foundation on which to build up a science of the spirit.” As I said, I respect Nietzsche, and I tried to do him justice in my book, Friedrich Nietzsche, Fighter for Freedom. I also respect Vischer. But how do the two regard each other? You will find that Nietzsche wrote an interesting passage on Vischer. He also coined the much used expression “bourgeois philistine” which is what he called David Friedrich Strauss, the author of Life of Jesus and The Old and the New Faith.¹³ Vischer was a great admirer of David Friedrich Strauss, a remark I add merely by way of explanation. Concerning Vischer, Nietzsche had the following to say:

... Lately the assessment of an idiot concerning historical facts has been circulating in German newspapers to the joy of the pale aesthetic Swabian Vischer. This assessment, to which every German will agree, is the so-called “truth,” that “Renaissance and Reformation—aesthetic rebirth and moral rebirth—must be taken together to form a whole.” Such a sentence tests my patience too far. I feel it to be my personal duty, once and for all, to tell the Germans what they all have on their conscience: four centuries of crimes against culture; that is what they have on their conscience.¹⁴

Thus it is possible to have respect for both personalities and their philosophical approaches; but one calls the other an idiot. That does not in the least alter my regard and respect for them both. I do not feel obliged to swear by the one or the other when I acknowledge what they have to say. Nor do I feel obliged to make whatever view each has of the other my own. I accept that that is his view, just as I accept that the gentleman sitting across the room will have a different view of the pile of books in front of me than I have. Judging things from one aspect only is a common tendency, which some develop to a remarkable degree. That is something that has to be reckoned with. There is the example of what Hölderlin puts into the mouth of Hyperion in his “Hyperion in Greece”; it is so interesting because, as those will be aware of who know Hölderlin, he identifies with Hyperion. The views expressed by Hyperion are his own. The Germans he describes as follows:

They always were barbarians right from ancient times, and became more so through diligence, learning, and even religion. Completely devoid of pious feelings, lacking every grace, subject to every excess and shabbiness insulting to a fine soul, dull and without harmony like the fragments of a discarded vase—these, my Bellarmin, were my comforters.—These are hard words and yet I say them because they are true: I cannot think of any people more torn apart than the Germans. You will find artisans, thinkers, priests, masters and servants, young folk and mature ones; all these you will find, but no human beings ...¹⁵

One can imagine authors of the entente wanting to copy such a passage. But there is another important aspect: the same Hölderlin who had these convictions also called Germany “the heart of Europe.” In other words, he was capable of having both views. We must be able ever more to recognize that not only is it possible, but it is also a deeply rooted disposition in man. If one clings to the abstract opinion that it is contradictory to hold different views about the same thing, one is clinging to one-sidedness. The views and outlooks that led to the greatness of Western Europe are no longer capable of understanding what is beginning to evolve in Eastern Europe. The day will come when to the people of Eastern Europe it will seem incomprehensible that one should not be able to have two completely opposite views of something. Many-sidedness is what' is developing in the East, and it will seem obvious that to understand things one must view and describe them from all sides.

All this is connected with what I began with today, the necessity to attain a new relationship to truth. An essential aspect of this is the recognition that our life of thinking, that is, our life in mental pictures and concepts, is already a life in the spirit. In order to recognize that thinking is a spiritual activity it is necessary to overcome the materialistic and quite unscientific attitude which says, When I think, I use my brain, so thinking must issue from the brain.—That is just about as clever as someone saying, Along this road there are footprints; where can they have come from? There must be forces beneath the ground that have caused them. I must study these footprints so that I can build up a theory as to the nature of the forces that push and pull from beneath the ground and form the footprints in the soft soil. That is comparable to seeking in the formations and processes of the brain the forces that create thinking. Just as the footprints, though found in the soil, originated from people walking over it, so are the formations of the brain—just as biology and physiology describe them—the imprint of thinking which is spiritual.

Naturally the brain must be there, just as the ground must be there if people are to walk over it. Like the ground, the brain offers resistance as long as we live between birth and death. What lives in us as spirit must be reflected from something during our existence between birth and death. The reflecting apparatus is the brain. But this reflecting is an active process, as if in a mirror in which light was not thrown back from a smooth surface, but one which contoured itself so that one could recognize from the resulting shape what had been reflected. One must understand that thinking as such is spiritual, that we already stand within the spiritual world when we think. We become fully conscious of this only when thinking frees itself, when thinking, as it were, is able to catch hold of itself. Such a refined thinking can follow a course that enables it to take hold of the more hidden connections between events in life. It is able to seek out the more delicate links beneath the surface. I spoke of these things in the two previous lectures.

What thinking is in its spiritual nature one becomes aware of only when it has freed itself from matter. Only then does one attain to a thinking that is truly creative. The natural world can be grasped by a thinking that passively assimilates what the natural phenomena of themselves reveal. If one is to find ideas that can be effective in society, ideas that are, so to speak, to govern people's affairs, they must arise out of a thinking that has become independent. We lack to a high degree the ability to rise above dependence on external phenomena, to rise to a thinking that formulates thoughts independently, within its own essence. That is why our political life is so sterile, so unfruitful; only thinking that has freed itself from matter can deal effectively with social problems. If one wishes, it could be called the next necessary step to be taken in mysticism. But what is meant is not a vague mystical something so often pursued nowadays. What matters is not the awareness of oneself within a divine essence or some such lovely phrase. The God within is an experience common to all creatures. To be in connection with the unity of the world, with the divine element within, one need only to utter words like mysticism or theosophy. A June bug has that kind of connection too, though in its own special way. What matters is that we begin to experience thinking as something active and alive, expressing itself in concrete concepts. Such concepts are able to take hold of and deal effectively with social problems.

At the beginning of today's considerations I spoke about the importance for man not only to regard his relation to truth in the light of the science of the spirit, but also to recognize that the relation itself must become different. It must become an active union with reality; this will have immense significance, not only for the understanding of world events, of history and social problems now and in the future, but also for the individual. What needs to be done now, is to continue certain important spiritual streams and endeavors which have been forgotten. There were good reasons—we still have to speak of them—that in the second half of the 19th century much was forgotten or abandoned. When a new edition of my book The Riddles of Man is published, I shall indicate many phenomena which belong to these forgotten aspects of spiritual life.¹⁶ Many endeavors, now forgotten, existed in the first half of the 19th century to which spiritual science has a direct link. Had they endured—which is of course purely hypothetical, for things could only develop the way they did—but if they had, man would not have been so helpless in face of the present tragic events.

I have mentioned before the remarkable fact that, for egoistical purposes, the strength of the various nations in Europe was carefully monitored in the West, especially in Britain. It was through this that the storm clouds gathered from whose effects we are still suffering. In past lectures I have explained many things which brought about the present catastrophe. You will realize from much of what I have said lately that it is by no means enough to reckon only with the events usually talked about. It is necessary to dig much deeper and to take account of the much greater significance of what happens beneath the surface of external events. It is this which pours over mankind like some dreadful deluge. Many of these things can as yet not be called by their true name, because human beings are not ready to accept them. But if evolution is to be understood, if light is to be thrown on the hidden secrets directly connected with present events, then they must be touched upon. Understanding of these things is possible only if the science of the spirit is taken ever more seriously.

The aim of the science of the spirit is to unite with all that is best in the forces and impulses of the Occident; above all it wants to further evolution. It can achieve its aims only if it ceases to be confused with all the foolish nonsense that appears nowadays in the guise of some spiritual or mystic impulse. Things have come to such straits that in future the difference must be made abundantly clear between everything spiritual science stands for, everything our anthroposophically-orientated spiritual science aims to be, and all the many movements that wish to identify with it.

In conclusion I ask you to look for a moment at the Orient; certainly it did have in the past a high degree of insight into repeated earth lives. This insight was attained through a special training of man's own being. From a certain point of view it must be said that no description of the individual soul's connection with the cosmos surpasses that of the Bhagavad Gita. But we, in our time have different tasks. In his Education of Mankind, Lessing inaugurated one of these tasks.¹⁷ There the concept of repeated earth lives reappears in the Occident. But how did the idea come to Lessing? He knew of course that it had been a teaching among primitive peoples. But the idea came to him while contemplating the consecutive epochs in mankind's evolution, and noticing how one epoch develops out of the preceding one. He considered that the reason no break in evolution occurred between the epochs could only be because human souls themselves carried the forces and capabilities they had attained over from epoch A to epoch B, to epoch C, etc. Just think, if our souls were present back in darkest antiquity and continued to incarnate again and again, that would mean that we ourselves have carried over from antiquity right up into our time what runs like a thread through the whole of history and evolution. Then human beings themselves would have created the various epochs. History gains sense and meaning when it is recognized that the human souls themselves carry over impulses from one epoch to the next. Through such a comprehensive historical survey the idea of repeated earth lives came to Lessing, not as in the Orient from the individual human soul.

Historical thinking and history, history in its highest sense, that is the task of the Occident. However, this requires that we recognize it in every moment. History confronts us when individual facts unite in the understanding of the different ages of man. We have history when a child stands before an aged person. Here we grasp the historical sense by recognizing that the old person was once a young adult and before that a child. What is consecutive in history can also appear side by side in space. Eastern, Western and Central Europe, though next to one another in space, can be understood only when also seen in a historical sense as following one another. This, of course, must be done in the right way.

These tasks stand before each one of us. When we widen our horizon to encompass such matters we shall in our living relationship with what is around us attain that gratification for which our soul longs.

• 1 . David Lloyd George, see note 3 and note 9 to Lecture VII.
• 2 . Eduard von Hartmann, 1842–1906, German philosopher. Philosophie des Unbewußten, 12th edition, Leipzig, 1923.
• 3 . Ralph Waldo Trine, see note 1 to Lecture VI. Johannes Muller, 1864–1919, Protestant theologian.
• 4 . Parmenides, approx. 450 B.C., Greek philosopher. Heraclitus, 540–470 B.C., Greek philosopher.
• 5 . Occult Science, see note 7 to Lecture IV.
• 6 . Pierre Joseph Proudhon, 1809–1865, French socialist and anarchist. Edward Bellamy, 1850–1898, U.S. author.
• 7 . Viscount Alfred Charles William Northcliffe (actually Harmsworth), 1865–1922, English newspaper publisher.
• 8 . Olga Novikoff: The M.P. for Russia, Reminiscenses and Correspondence of Mme. Olga Novikoff, edited by W.T. Stead, Vol. I 1841–78, Vol. II 1878–1908, London, 1909, Andrew Melrose.
• 9 . Viscount Richard Burdon Haldane, 1856–1928, English statesman, Education and Empire, 1902; The Pathway to Reality, 1903–04.
• 10. Rudolf Hermann Lotze, 1817–1881, physician and philosopher. Metaphysics, Vol. 1, 1841–79, Vol. 2, Leipzig, 1879.
• 11. Rudolf Steiner, Friedrich Nietzsche, Fighter for Freedom (Rudolf Steiner Publications, Blauvelt, NY, 1985).
• 12. Friedrich Theodor Vischer, 1807–1887, German poet and philosopher.
• 13. David Friedrich Straul3, 1808–1874, German theologian.
• 14. Friedrich Nietzsche, 1844–1900, Ecce Homo, “The Case of Wagner: A Musician Problem,” in several editions in English.
• 15. Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin, 1770–1843, Hyperion, oder der Eremit in Griechenland, 2 parts, Stuttgart, 1797–99, in Sämtliche Werke, Insel Verlag, Leipzig o.J., p. 580.
• 16. Rudolf Steiner, Vom Menschenrätsel, see note 4 to Lecture VI.
• 17.

Suppose that a browser, knowing nothing about Rudolf Steiner, comes across this cycle of his lectures. From the place or the way the book is found, there may be no great surprise about references and statements which sound “mystical”—that word our age uses to pigeonhole anything appearing now to be factual. Yet complicating that impression would be Steiner's frequent use of the term “science of the spirit.” Spirit and science together? That sounds like mixing two totally different spheres and then trading on the term science, which our age—at least until recently—has venerated as the supreme human achievement and unassailable touchstone of all decisions. How is the casual reader to know that Steiner himself was trained as a philosopher and had a profound interest in and respect for the triumphs of contemporary science?

Yet by no means all casual readers would raise a question about that. There are some who in their depths feel affronted by the excision—if not denial—of all spiritual factors practiced by the modern natural sciences—a viewpoint sheepishly followed by the humanities and even the arts. Such people really yearn for genuine experiences of the spiritual realms that all mankind prior to our era had as a precious, if not entirely understood, gift. These people, though often without the benefit of technical knowledge, can in varying degrees see through the pretentions and unwarranted assumption of a science that has debased its own ideals and brought the world to the brink of destruction. This situation did not escape Steiner's penetrating observation and he discusses in chapters one and seven of this series how even well-meaning politicians (of his day but nothing has changed in this regard since then) became tragically involved in this process. And again in chapter five he shows how even an honest and decent philosopher could not find a way out of the intellectual trap into which our age has fallen.

So who was this man who already in the teens of this century dared to suggest that the way out of our difficulties—and the only way, demanded by world evolution—is to begin dealing with science spiritually and with the spirit scientifically? To be sure, such a program was more daring and more radical during World War I than it sounds now. At the end of the 20th century there are certainly more people than there were then who can see the possibility, and understand the necessity, for such an attitude. Generally, however, they have no clear idea of how it could be brought about. And the great majority of our contemporaries are undoubtedly still shut off from efforts in this direction by the very circumstances of the industrial age, with its all-pervading secularity. At least one segment of the American public has rebelled against this so-called secular humanism by demanding that science be bridled—a quite different solution from that proposed by Steiner. The basic situation is this: the public that Steiner had in mind in these lectures during World War I not only did not take hold of his solution but it has been succeeded by descendants who on the whole keep slipping farther and faster in the wrong direction: a passive, almost bemused attitude toward the excesses of a one-sided scientific mind-set that now, in combination with equally one-sided politics and one-sided economics threatens to bring disaster one way or another to the whole of mankind. Steiner already put this very succinctly in chapter seven by saying that “healthy human common sense ... is simply not there. This is the great secret of our time.” Indeed, through its lack we see humanity plunge from one unnecessary crisis to another almost day by day.

Who was this man? The idea that any one person could be wise enough to know what to do about all this often raises hackles, especially among sophisticated academics. Do they take time to realize that Steiner expressly declines to offer pre-packaged concepts for instant satisfaction (chapter seven)? He can offer something only to those willing to put aside routine contemporary ideas and make an unprejudiced effort to reach his multi-dimensional level. This is not easy, even though his remarks are sometimes quite entertaining on the ordinary level, as in this cycle when he discusses dowsing. And the wide range of his interests and contacts can be grasped simply by using as a roster the footnotes prepared for this publication. Nevertheless, reading one of his lectures is, on the whole, rather like being inside a piece of sculpture and from there attempting to locate oneself in space: one would have to become aware of many different factors at once and combine them in a creative way. Whereas standing outside the same piece we could depend on our automatic internal spatial orientation, of which we hardly take any notice, to accomplish the same thing. In other words, we are led by him, or can be, to view not a new world, but the same world from totally new angles we did not know existed. But it takes some effort to try these out ourselves.

In this sense we can perhaps approach the basic thesis of this series, that the chronological age of mankind (as a whole) corresponds to the scale of years in an individual human being, but to establish it we have to work backwards and down from old age to youth. So humanity as such is actually becoming younger, that is, over the millennia it reacts to the world collectively the way individuals do first at 56, then at 55, then 54 and so on. It may be an instinctive reaction to dismiss this as idle speculation but to do so is, in the long run, to stay put in the intellectual trap mentioned above. So far from being speculative fancy, this concept is a necessary facet of the complex philosophy and cosmology worked out in Steiner's literary books (as opposed to lecture cycles like this one which he never intended to be published). And it can acquire enormous significance in explaining, for example, how we got into our intellectual trap. For the basic reason why the world is moving faster and faster in the wrong direction is that too few people ever mature spiritually, that is, move beyond the attitude of the average person of age 27 (presently; next it will be 26, etc.), which they would have to do, if at all, by their own aroused, inner efforts to grasp the science of the spirit (in whatever form). In practical American terms this might mean looking beyond the prevailing extreme alternatives of agnostic secular humanism and fulminating fundamentalism in search of a true balance that retains what is valid in each and with that moving on to new tasks already being undertaken by the spiritually sane of our times—by definition those who exercise healthy common sense. To insist on the reality of both the spiritual realm and the scientific realm and their interweaving is actually the most practical idea of our troubled times.

J. LEONARD BENSON

South Egremont, Massachusetts

It is a matter of deep satisfaction to me, as I think you know, to be with you again for a while, for this is the place where we are able to create a visible sign of our intentions and of the will to come closer and closer to a true knowledge of the spirit in our studies and in our work in spiritual science.

The quest for knowledge is intimately bound up with the most inward aspect of the human being, and every now and then we must therefore enquire into the essential nature of our will and intent. In the light of the present situation, woeful as it is, it seems the answer to this question must be a negative one. For more than three years we have seen something spread across the world that I need not discuss in detail, at least to begin with, for we are all aware of it and feel it deeply. The events now taking place are the opposite of our own intentions, which have come to expression in this very building.¹

Again and again we must try to see clearly which stream of spiritual development we wish to see taken up by humanity, and today we have to say it is the opposite of the stream which has led to the terrible tragedy of these last years. This is something we may call to mind again and again when we give deep and full consideration to the events now raging all over the world. We may say to ourselves that it appears as if time were drawn out and had become elastic, as if the things we remember from before this madness took hold of the world happened not just years but centuries ago.

There will, of course, be many today—as there always have been—who may be said to sleep through the events of the day, people who are not fully awake to what is going on today. But when those who are awake look back on what went through their minds four or five years ago and left an impression, they will feel more or the less the way one does when one lets the mind dwell on an old book or a work of art that was created hundreds of years ago. Events which meant something to us before this madness came on the world now seem to have happened an infinitely long time ago.

Anyone who was awake—through the science of the spirit—was, of course, able to appreciate what was coming even before these events developed. Many of our friends will remember the almost routine answer I gave to questions asked over and over again after my public lectures from the beginning of this century. The question, you may remember, was: “According to the statistics, the world population is increasing; how does this relate to the idea of repeated earth lives? The increase in population is rapid. How can one reconcile this with the spiritual scientific finding that these are always the same souls?” My answer always had to be: It does look as if the statisticians are right and the world population is increasing; but we have to take a longer view and consider much longer time-spans if we are to do justice to the question. And I would always go on to say that a time may well come, sooner than we may expect, when people discover to their horror that the population can also decrease.

I t is not always possible to give plain and simple answers in anthroposophy. People have not yet reached the point where they are able to take truths in the right way and some things can only be hinted at. Read through the lectures given in Vienna not long before this catastrophe came on our world and you will find the passage where I spoke of the social cancer that is gnawing away at the evolution of humanity.² This and other things were said in order to indicate what was going to happen in human evolution and to challenge people to reflect. For we need to reflect on these things if we are really and truly to wake up. We need to be awake and alive for the sake of humanity. If anthroposophy is to fulfil its purpose, its prime task must be to rouse people and make them really wake up. Merely knowing what is going on in the physical world, and knowing the laws that human minds are able to perceive as operative in this world, is no more than being asleep in a higher sense. Humanity is only fully awake when people are able to develop notions and ideas of the world of the spirit. This is all around us, just as air and water, the stars, the sun and the moon are all around us. When we are physically asleep we are wholly given up to the internal processes that go on in the body during the night and have no idea of anything in the physical world around us. We are asleep in exactly the same way when we are wholly given up to the physical environment, and to the world and the laws of the intellect, and have no idea of the world of the spirit that is all around us.

Humanity has made great play of its intellectual progress and scientific achievements in the last few centuries and has been particularly insistent on this at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century. Yet, strangely enough, the unconscious and instinctive life was never more to the fore than it is at this time. Up to the present time this instinctive and unconscious element has increasingly taken hold of the human race. Failure to see the spiritual reality and take account of the element of the spirit is ultimately the cause of this terrible world war. Nor can it be said that through these years—years which have turned into centuries for anyone who is awake in them, as I have said—humanity has learned an adequate lesson from the terrible events around us. Sadly, it has to be said that the opposite is the case.

What is the characteristic element to be found day by day, hour by hour, when we take note of what people think, or rather pretend to think and pretend to want? It is that, fundamentally speaking, no one in the world knows what they want, and no one realizes that people's perfectly justifiable aims, whichever form they may take in the minds of individual nations, would be achieved so much better if they did away with these terrible wars in which so much blood is shed. People do not realize that these terrible events with their bloodshed are really not necessary as a means of helping them to achieve their aims.

These events have a mysterious background, but if you consider some of the things said in our anthroposophical lectures over the years, even if they have only been touched on lightly, you will find perfectly clear statements, also with reference to the most significant of recent events. Consider also what has been said in these very rooms, especially in the last few years, on the character of the Russian people and the difference between the Russians and the peoples of Western and Central Europe.³ You will find that you need the things which have been said here to gain understanding of an event that appears to have come in with such vehemence. It has burst forth as though it were a karmic vengeance, the inner meaning of which is quite clear, though the word ‘vengeance’ must be taken as a technical term and not at all in a moral sense.

Not only the Russian people, but those of Europe and the whole world, will have to reflect for a long time to come on the events in Eastern Europe, events much more mysterious than we are inclined to think. Something has come to the surface which has been preparing for centuries. The new element wanting to take shape is something completely different from what is actually taking shape. Later generations will be able to use the events which will be taking shape in Eastern Europe over the next decades to demonstrate the difference between maya and reality. For you see, the generations of today are taking what is happening now for the real thing, when this is in fact still waiting in the wings, and they are wrong in taking it for real, for something quite different wants to make its appearance.

The people in the West are ill-equipped to understand what wants to come to the surface. Why are they so ill-equipped? Strange as it may seem to people today—not to you but to the ordinary, average individual; being anthroposophists, you are not ordinary, average people of today—the present age is more than any other age demanding the one thing people least want to have: understanding based on the science of the spirit. Strange as it may sound to the ordinary, average people of today—order will not be created from the chaos of the present time until a sufficiently large number of people are prepared to recognize the truths of that science. Such will be the karma of world history.

If people insist that this war is just like the wars of the past and that we'll be making peace just as peace has been made before—let them talk. They are the people who love maya and do not distinguish between truth and deception. Let them make what may seem like ‘peace’—order will only arise from the chaos that fills the world today when insight based on the science of the spirit dawns in human minds. You may feel in your hearts that it will be a long time before such order comes; you may think it will be a long time before people are prepared to let the dawn of such a science arise, and you will be right. You have to accept that it will be a long time before order arises from the chaos. For it will not come until human hearts understand the realm of the spirit. Order can only come when it is understood how this chaos has arisen.

Chaos has arisen because the reality is considered in an unspiritual way and the world of the spirit cannot be ignored with impunity. You may think it is enough to live with thoughts and ideas that are wholly derived from the physical world. It is what people generally think today, though this does not make it true. The most completely and utterly wrong idea humanity has ever had is—to put it simply—that the spirits will put up with being ignored. You may consider it egotistical and selfish on their part, but the terminology is different in their world. Egotism or not, the spirits take their revenge if they are ignored here on earth. This is a law, an iron necessity. One way to characterize the present time is to say that the present human chaos is the revenge of the spirits who have been ignored for too long.

I have often said, both here and elsewhere: A mysterious connection exists between human consciousness and the destructive powers of decline and fall in the universe. Each can, or indeed must, take the place of the other in the following way.

Let us assume there was a time, say during the last twenty or thirty years of the nineteenth century, when people put the same effort into their quest for the things of the spirit as they have put into achieving material knowledge and material actions during those twenty or thirty years. What would have happened if they had endeavoured to recognize the world of the spirit and used this to give a character, a foundation, to the physical world, rather than follow mere instinct and chase after more and more knowledge of a kind that has seen its ultimate triumph in the creation of instruments of murder and found its be-all and end-all in people enriching themselves with nothing but material goods? What would have happened if people had sought to gain spiritual knowledge and spiritual impulses for their activities in the social sphere? It would have meant that the powers of destruction were paid off! If people had been more awake and not asleep in the last decades of the nineteenth century there would have been greater awareness and therefore no need for destruction in the first decades of the twentieth century. Spiritual awareness simply has to be greater than purely sensual and material awareness. If this had been the case during the last decades of the nineteenth century, the powers of destruction would not have had to intervene in the early decades of the twentieth century.

This is brought to realization most insistently, and perhaps most cruelly, to the perceptive mind when you meet many of the dead who have entered the world of the spirit either during the last decades of the nineteenth or the first decades of the twentieth century. Many of them have been caught up in the hustle and bustle and search for material values here on earth and never had the opportunity to let spiritual impulses arouse awareness. Many have gone through the gate of death without even a notion of the thoughts and ideas that point to spiritual impulses. If they had had the opportunity to take in spiritual thoughts and ideas before they went through the gate of death they could have taken these with them. It would have been something they needed after death, but they were not in a position to have it.

Anyone who knows the history of ideas of the last decades of the nineteenth and the first decades of the twentieth century also knows that people actually no longer knew how to use the term ‘spirit’. It has been used to describe all kinds of things, but not the true spirit. Those souls therefore had no opportunity of knowing the spirit whilst here on earth and they have to take the consequences. Having gone through the gate of death and entered the world of the spirit, they are thirsting for—well, what are they thirsting for, these souls who lived in materialism here? They are thirsting for destructive powers in the physical world! Those are the dues and they must be paid.

There is no easy way of dealing with these things. If we want to know the realities in this sphere, we must acquire a feeling for what the ancient Egyptians called ‘iron necessity’. Terrible as it may be, it was necessary that destruction should spread, for those who had gone through the gate of death were longing for the destructive powers in which they are able to live, seeing they did not receive what was due to them and had been deprived of spiritual impulses while on earth.

Order cannot arise from the chaos until people are ready to give room to such grave truths in their souls and also let these truths enter into the ideas that apply in the world of politics today. And if these truths sound pessimistic to you and make you think that humanity is still a long way from achieving all that is demanded, as I have indicated, you are indeed right. But let this justifiable pessimism become a challenge to be awake and to try, whatever your place in life may be, to awaken souls so that the science of the spirit can send out its impulses. It cannot yet be done to any great extent, but we must have the real, honest desire to make people consciously aware in such a way that they are able to understand this concrete fact: Longings have arisen in the dead in recent times, and those longings are being met with events which are truly horrifying for those of us who are alive here on the physical plane.

Just think how easy it is for some people to present their friends with an image of the region into which human beings enter when they have gone through the gate of death. Consider the unctuous sermons preached in the churches—with politicians now actually following the example of these sermonizers—and the facile notions people have of the world of the spirit, and you simply cannot help realizing how far removed from reality is the facile vanity of many of today's leading figures. Compare the speeches of such leading figures—their lives show that they do anything but lead and that they are guided by all kinds of forces of which they are completely unconscious and which are not the right forces—compare this with what is really needed at the present time, and you will realize the immense gravity of the present situation.

Right next to our physical world lies another, non-physical or spiritual world, and this has never before influenced our world as intensely as it is doing at the present time. People are not aware of this, however; they do not even notice when things get heart-stoppingly fearsome and terrible. Intensely illuminating words are heard in the world today; they should set vast numbers of people thinking. But people never notice, or at least they do not show it if they do.

Some of you will remember that on a number of occasions in the last three years⁴ I have said that when the history of this ‘world war’ will be written in the future—unfortunately present-day critics have not done so, though it could be done fairly easily—it will be impossible to use the method which has produced the legend, the fairy-tale, or call it what you will, which currently goes by the name of ‘history’. This was produced by ‘scholars’—as the world calls them—sitting in libraries for months, years and decades and studying diplomatic records in order to write their histories. Inevitably a time will come when most of these histories will have to be pulped. In fact, no one will be able to write the history of these last years by such a method unless they are literally off their heads.

The causes of the chaos will not be apparent to the people who have been writing histories until now, but only to people who have a real feeling for what it means when a miserable individual of our time has to face a court and is forced to sum up the condition he was in at the time by flinging down before the world the lamentable statement: ‘First one thing happened, then another, and that was the moment when I went out of my mind!’ It was Suchomlinov who spoke these pitiful words.⁵

Many people had gone out of their minds at that time, not only Suchomlinov. What kind of moments are these in world events when the only way of describing them is by confessing that one has gone out of one's mind? They are moments when Ahriman and his cohorts gain access to the human race and to human thoughts. For as long as people watch over their conscious minds and their consciousness is not in any way clouded or inactive, neither Ahriman nor Lucifer have access to it. But when it is not fully active and one needs to use the phrase ‘I have gone out of my mind’, that is the moment when Ahriman and his cohorts enter the stage. The things that happen then will not appear in diplomatic records—little of what it says in those records in recent decades makes real sense, by the way. Leaving this aside, the things that have happened in our time and have led to chaos are not merely human actions, but above all the actions of ahrimanic spirits seeking to gain access by reducing human awareness. Some of you know very well that soon after the present catastrophe broke on the world I pointed out that when we speak of the origins of this catastrophe in time to come, we must not do so on the basis of written records; instead we shall have to point to real facts through which ahrimanic spirits gained access to the stage of human events.

These things must be taken in all seriousness; they have to be seen as concrete realities and not merely as abstract formulations. People who do not know anything about it may well laugh when one says that Ahriman gained access to human evolution. They may well laugh at people who say this, but the day will come when world history laughs them to scorn for having laughed at others today.

We certainly cannot say that the judgments, ideas and notions to be found on the surface in recent years show any degree of maturity. People even failed to understand when eighteen months ago it was pointed out somewhere that something might soon happen of which due note should be taken; it should not be taken lightly. Concrete examples given as an indication of what was likely to happen were never taken in the right way; people were not sufficiently awake in their minds to do so. Now the event has come. And people fail to realize that something is taking root deeply in a certain soil. People are taking it as something which—well, because a certain number of statements take up so many lines, people accept they have a number of statements made in that particular number of lines. They are not at all interested in looking for the roots of such statements, but simply take things at their face value.

I think you know what I mean. You know I am referring to the Papal Note¹ as something I had seen coming for eighteen months. I have looked around a great deal to see if I might not find someone who has expressed their views on this Note, or asked the kind of question that should have come to mind.

Let us remember that the idea of the state as we know it today has been dawning since the sixteenth century. In some parts of the world peculiar people known as ‘historians’ are speaking of states as something which have existed for I do not know how long. But they know little about real history. The present-day idea of a state is no more than four or five hundred years old and something entirely different existed in earlier times. It is important to know this and be really clear about it. The priestly element, which is to be found in Rome, is indeed older than our modern states. It had its justification in its own day, when it brought about many things in the world. I have tried to find out if people are asking themselves the question: What does it really mean that the modern structures which have developed over four or five centuries cannot find a way of achieving order out of their own resources, and look back to the old priestly element as something to be discussed in the way people generally discuss things today?

It would interest me to know if anyone faced with the question as to whether it is a good idea to skate on ice when it is only one millimetre thick would actually answer in the affirmative. Relative to what we are really dealing with, the concepts on which people base their opinions when a priestly element brings impulses into modern life today are like a one- millimetre layer of ice covering the water. The things people write and say today are like someone skating on ice that is not more than one millimetre in thickness. No one is trying to understand what is happening, no one is prepared to see that what matters is not to take a document and look at the statements it contains, but to know that a statement can mean something totally different, depending on the source from which it comes.

Everywhere today we are faced with the need to warn people in all seriousness to look to the origins, to see how things are related, to look for realities and not to the way things look on the surface. Surely it cannot be that difficult for anyone to admit: I see the way things are, but I do not yet understand them and therefore I will not say anything to interfere. Considering the incredibly superficial level of education, it is not at all surprising when people are able to understand and have an opinion on everything. People find it really difficult to admit that they cannot judge an issue and need to get a basis for their judgement before they give an opinion. In fact, it hardly ever comes to their minds that one has to have a basis on which to form an opinion.

Infinitely much depends on real insight into the driving forces, especially for the immediate future. It has to be realized that the chaos will certainly not be reduced if—speaking hypothetically—the churches were to succeed in establishing even the initial stages of apparent order. The worst error we can fall into would be to say: It does not matter where peace comes from, even if it is from the Pope. The point is, it may actually cause no harm at all to have peace initiated by the Pope; the question is how those who are involved see the issue.

Again and again we need to be really clear in our minds that the present time is literally challenging us every hour, indeed every minute, to wake up. Anthroposophy as a science of the spirit can only be understood by those who are able to grasp that humanity is being asked to make a clear decision. Either the spirit is understood or the chaos continues. A papered-over chaos would be no better than the carnage we have today. If we are unable to come up with anything better than materialism and again materialism, even a heightened materialism, in the next few years, and if it were to happen that the events of the last three years, to which humanity has failed to wake up and take notice, were to lead to a new rush for material goods—many people are longing for this as something that comes with peace—then souls would once again go through the gate of death and thirst for destruction here on earth. There would be no end to the destruction.

All it needs is to get an idea, a feeling, an inner impulse for the need to turn to the things of the spirit! Then we shall progress, depending on the extent to which this is achieved. Anyone who wants to gain a little understanding of the present position, and looks at our time in the light of the serious truths we have been considering, must develop a reasonable degree of feeling for all the terrible, hopelessly commonplace and superficial things that are now being written and said in this world.

Imagine a band of children smashing up all the pots and plates, glasses and everything in the house. The adults who see this happening are considering how to stop it, for the children keep running to the larder and all over the house to find more things to smash. Finally the adults have an idea as to how they can stop it. A number of people who are watching, people who actually consider themselves to be the teachers of these children, find a solution: They take care that everything breakable is collected and smashed to pieces—and that, they think, should put an end to it all! I do not know how many people would not consider those teachers to be fools. This is the kind of situation where people would see the truth. Yet there are people who consider themselves to be wise and who say to the whole world: Carnage must continue until peace comes; everything has to be broken, so there will be nothing left to smash in the world. This is considered wisdom. Go on murdering people for as long as you can and you will stop the murder. This is wisdom!

For anyone who has even a spark of logic it is no longer wisdom when the teacher says to a band of children: To make sure nothing else gets smashed up, I will quickly get people to collect all other breakable objects and smash them; I reckon nothing else will get smashed after that. Why do people call this foolishness and the other thing political foresight? Because people's thinking stops at the very point where it should be most intense, which is where their thoughts relate to great questions of destiny.

We shall continue with this tomorrow, and consider some serious spiritual truths.

• 1. The ‘visible sign’ was the First Goetheanum, built from 1913 onwards and destroyed by fire on New Year's Eve 1922/23. See H. Biesantz, A. Klingborg, et al., The Goetheanum: Rudolf Steiner's Architectural Impulse. Rudolf Steiner Press, London 1979.
• 2. Rudolf Steiner, The Inner Nature of Man and Life Between Death and a New Birth. Trans. by A. Meuss. Rudolf Steiner Press, Bristol 1993 (GA 153). The passage referred to is in the lecture given on 14 April 1914.
• 3. Lectures given by Rudolf Steiner on 7, 14 and 15 October 1916, also on 24 September 1916, published in Inner Impulses of Human Evolution (GA 171), trans. revised by G. Church, F. Kozlik and S.C. Easton, Antroposophic Press, Hudson, NY, 1984.
• 4. For example, in The Karma of Materialism. Trans. by R. Everett. Anthroposophie Press, Hudson, NY, and Rudolf Steiner Press, London 1985.
• 5. Vladimir Alexandrovitch Suchomlinov, 1848–1926, Minister for War at the time when the First World War broke out. Together with Janushkievitch, Chief of General Staff, and Sasonov, Foreign Minister, Suchomlinov played a key role in the fateful mobilization of the Russian army on 29 July 1914, ignoring a direct order from the Tsar to countermand the mobilization at the last minute. After the deposition of the Tsar, Suchomlinov was questioned in court. According to the paper Novoie Vremia, the words he said in court were: ‘On that day I almost went out of my mind.’ Quoted from Suchomlinov, die russische Mobilmachung im Lichte amtlicher Urkunden und der Entlillungen des Prozesses, Berne 1917.
• 1. On 1 August 1917 Pope Benedict XV issued a Peace Note to the governments of the belligerent nations.

Today's lecture will add further details to an image which I finally hope to present in its entirety tomorrow.

We are living at a time—yesterday's lecture will have given you an idea of this—of which we can say that much will have to change in the way people think, feel and use their will. Our inner aims will have to change. It is especially with regard to our innermost being that old, inherited and acquired habits will have to go and a new way of thinking and feeling develop. This is what our time demands. I think it can have a profound and truly significant effect on people to ponder the truth I presented yesterday which is, to put it simply, that there can only be one of two things: destructive processes here on the physical plane, or the spiritual development of humanity. Just think what it means—that, knowing this truth, we shall be compelled to feel socially at one with the dead, the departed. Our inner response to present events on this physical plane is one of deep pain, and it is right this should be so; on the other hand, we should not forget that the number of people who have taken up spiritual life in recent decades is small, and the souls of those who have not done so are thirsting for destructive processes here on the physical plane because these will give them the powers they need for the life of soul and spirit which comes after death. In practice this means we are challenged to do everything we can to encourage spiritual life as the only way of freeing future humanity from those destructive forces. It has to be clearly understood, of course, that this was different in the past, when the fact that an age of materialism must inevitably summon up an age of wars and devastation did not hold true to the same degree. It will, however, hold true in future.

Humanity is labouring under numerous illusions that have their origin in the past. The consequences of these have not been as serious in the past as they will be in the future evolution of humanity. I think it is fair to say that, generally speaking, human souls are still very much asleep at the present time, and fail to notice many of the tremendous changes now taking place. Sometimes, however, some of this comes through at an instinctive level, and individuals are then aware of the great riddles of the age. However, many are not fully active inwardly and therefore not yet able to experience these riddles in their full depth.

Taking note of the turbulent and destructive events of today, some individuals are becoming aware of one such riddle. Yet they are in many respects quite unable to find the answers. The riddle I am speaking of is the discrepancy between intellectual and moral development in human evolution. Strangely enough, recent developments in materialistic thinking have lead none other than the Darwinists to this conclusion. Haeckel, too, has commented to this effect in his Welträtsel.¹ Now, in these times of war, it can be seen again and again that this imbalance between intellectual and moral life in human evolution is beginning to puzzle people. They say to themselves, quite rightly, that the life of the intellect, the rational mind, has made tremendous advances. This is what many people call the realm of science today; it provides the basis for the modern materialistic view. Consider the tremendous advances made as the laws of nature have been penetrated, studied and finally used to build all kinds of instruments—most recently especially the instruments for murder! People will also begin to consider other things in the light of this science of theirs. They will analyse foods for their constituents and manufacture chemical foods, never realizing that chemical foods are not the same as those provided by nature, even if they do have the same constituents.

Intellectual, or we may also say scientific, development has shown an upward trend. Moral development has not progressed to the same extent. Surely the present world catastrophe could not have arisen, or taken the course it has taken, if moral development had kept pace with intellectual development. It would be right to say that because moral development has not progressed, intellectual development has assumed something of an amoral character and has in many respects become downright destructive. Many people are beginning to notice that the moral development has not been keeping pace with the intellectual development of humanity today. However, no one asks at the present time that issues like these should be gone into sufficiently deeply so that they may serve a truly human evolution. No one asks that they should be tackled at the point where it is fully evident that modern people simply cannot penetrate to the deeper sources of human thinking and human actions, because elements which are separate and distinct in man and relate to quite different regions of the universe are all mixed up in people's minds.

Modern scientists are faced with a human being consisting of physical body, etheric body—the body of generative powers—astral body and ego; but everything is mixed up. People do not make the distinction in modern science. How can we arrive at a science that will enable us to grasp these things if everything is mixed up together? The truth is that these different aspects of human nature belong to entirely different regions and spheres of the universe. Our physical body and our generative powers relate to the physical world; with the astral body and the ego we enter a totally different world every night, and initially this has extraordinarily little to do with the world in which we are awake during the day. The two worlds really only work together in so far as they are brought together in the human realm.

Consider also that the human ego and astral body are much younger than the physical and etheric bodies. The first beginnings of the physical body go back to the time of ancient Saturn. That early body progressed through four stages—Saturn, Sun, Moon and Earth—to reach its present level of evolution on earth. The etheric body has gone through three stages, the astral body through two stages. The ego has only come in during Earth evolution; it is young and belongs to an entirely different cosmic age. The apparatus or instrument of our human intellect is intimately bound up with the physical body. It has reached a great level of perfection because the physical body has gone through such a comprehensive process of development in the Saturn, Sun, Moon and Earth periods. We can see this from the level to which the nerves, the brain and the blood have developed. This, then, is the highly developed instrument we use for our intellectual activity.

On a previous occasion here in Dornach I suggested that the human being is much more complex than we are inclined to think. When we say ‘physical body’ we are speaking of something that is far from simple. It is based on principles that go back to ancient Saturn. Then the etheric body was added. This created its own element in the physical body; the astral body also created its own element in the physical body, and so did the ego. The physical body thus really has four elements to it. One of these relates to the physical body as such, one to the etheric body, one to the astral body and one to the ego. The etheric body has three elements—one related to itself, one to the astral body, one to the ego.

Let us stay with the physical body for the moment. We find that during the night, when we are asleep, the element of the physical body relating to the physical body continues in the usual way. The element relating to the etheric body can also continue, for the etheric body stays with the physical body. But what happens to the element relating to the astral body, which is organized to meet the needs of an astral body that wants to go outside, and with the element relating to an ego which has also gone outside? During the night, these two elements—let us call them the astral physical body and the ego's physical body—are forsaken by the principles on which their whole organization is based. The ego and the astral body are then outside the parts of the physical body to which they belong. For as long as we live between birth and death we are really leaving something behind in bed every night which is not taken care of by the principle to which it relates. It clearly has to function differently during the night than it does during the day; I think you can see this. During the day the astral body and the ego are active and aglow in it; during the night they are not. People do not enquire into these things today because everything has merged into one and become mixed up in their minds, as I have said. They do not distinguish between the different aspects of their body, though these can be quite clearly distinguished.

During the night when we are asleep the ‘astral physical’ element in the physical body exercises powers very similar to the powers of Mercury, the mercurial powers that make mercury liquid, and so on. The part of the physical body relating to the ego acts like salt during sleep. Human beings thus have Salt and Mercury flowing through them during sleep.

Up to the fourteenth century, those alchemists who must be taken seriously still knew of these things. After this, sectarianism came into alchemy and the books were written which are generally read today. The old knowledge was still to be found with Jacob Boehme,² however, who used the terms Salt, Mercury and Sulphur.

These are some of the secrets of human nature. We say, then, that when we are asleep we look down on a body that has become mercurial and salty. The fact that the body becomes mercurial has highly significant consequences and we may be able to say more about this in the course of these weeks. The fact that it becomes salty—well, I think it is not at all difficult for people to discover this for themselves when they get up in the mornings.

What is the significance, however? It is more or less like this: On waking, the ego and astral body, having been outside in the world of the spirit during sleep, enter into the salty, or mineral, principle in the human body and into the mercurial principle, which flows within the human being as a vitalizing principle. Principles which have been separated during the night now come together. As they interact, opportunity is given for the things acquired in the world of the spirit to be brought in. Mercury and Salt have been resting; now the ego and astral body enter and fill them with what they have gained in the world of the spirit. As a result, the physical body, the instrument which has evolved from ancient Saturn, is enriched still further. On the one hand the physical body is the instrument we use for intellectual activity and it is truly venerable and highly developed because it has evolved over such a long time. Yet, on the other hand, the process I have just described can bring the influence of the spiritual world to bear in the present time. As a result, human beings are now able to influence the instrument of the intellect from the world of the spirit and intellectual thinking can play such a significant role in the present age.

The world in which we are between going to sleep and waking up again does, however, have one peculiarity—there is nothing in it by way of moral laws. Strange as it may seem, between going to sleep and waking up again you are in a world devoid of moral laws. We might also say it is a world that is not yet moral. When we wake up, the impulses we bring from this world may take hold of the physical body and the etheric body with regard to the intellect, but cannot in any way take hold of them in any moral sense. This is quite impossible, for the world in which we are between going to sleep and waking up again does not have moral laws. People who think it would have been better for the gods to arrange things in such a way that humans did not have to live on the physical plane at all are very much mistaken; for in that case people could never become moral. Human beings acquire morality by living here on the physical plane. In short, we bring wisdom to the physical body from the world of the spirit, but not morality.

This is tremendously important and significant, for it explains why humanity must inevitably lag behind when it comes to moral principles, whereas the gods have made excellent provision for their intellectual development, not only providing them with an instrument which has evolved through the Saturn, Sun, Moon and Earth periods, but also giving them the wherewithal by which to maintain the intellect by filling them with wisdom in the world which they enter during sleep. It will not be until later periods, in the second half of Venus evolution, that we make connection with a moral world during sleep. Clearly, it is therefore tremendously important for us to see to it that our social life becomes truly moral.

These are the things modern humanity does not want to consider. Some are aware of the riddles, as I have said, but people do not want to consider the deeper reasons, for that would be too much of an effort. They want to take human nature as it presents itself and refuse to consider that in many respects it extends into the worlds of the cosmos, beyond space and beyond time, and that human nature cannot be explained if we merely look at it the way in which it normally comes to expression and do not take account of these other aspects. It is a magnificent and awesome truth that sleep helps our intellectual thinking, even our genius—for geniuses, too, bring back elements from sleep that enter into their mercurial and salt principles—in fact, it is this which makes someone a genius; but morality can only be provided for if human beings gradually let the moral element enter into them here on the physical plane.

For humanity here on earth, the Christ impulse is the heart of the moral life. It is therefore most important—I have stressed this before, from other points of view—that human beings encounter the Christ impulse here on the physical plane. We have to look at this from many different points of view. So it seems we can now understand why people who have all kinds of impulses based on wisdom at an instinctive level—for these impulses are given in sleep—and are able to invent tremendously complex machines, playing a role in the advance of science and technology, need not connect this in any way with morality, for morality belongs to a totally different sphere.

People do not like to hear or know such things today. Yet they will have to be known if we are to escape from the chaos that has arisen in the world. And this is a very serious matter. Human evolution will not progress unless these truths become part of our life on earth. The gods did not intend human beings to become automatons which they could influence like automatic machines. They wanted them to be free individuals who realize what will take them forward. It is wrong to ask why the gods do not intervene. Attempts have to be made; and if one such undertaking should go awry, we should not draw the wrong conclusions. Instead, those who come later must let this give them an even greater impetus to work in a way that helps to encourage such an attempt at further development in the spirit. I have recently been much concerned with a significant attempt made in the past which did not entirely come off. I discussed this in the first part of my essay on The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz: Anno 1459—it is to be continued in Das Reich.³ The work was written in the early seventeenth century. People were given it to read as early as 1603, and it was published in 1616. The author, Johann Valentin Andreae, also wrote Fama Fraternitatis and Confessio Rosicruci, unusual works which attracted all kinds of comment, some sensible but most of them absurd. All I want to say about them today is that although they may at first sight appear to be satirical, they nevertheless represent one great impulse—to deepen insight into nature in its spiritual aspect to a point where deeper knowledge of the laws of nature also discovers the laws that govern human social life.

This is an area where people find it particularly difficult to distinguish between maya—illusion—and reality. The motives we ourselves or others tend to ascribe to our actions are not the true ones. It is painful to have to realize this, but—I have spoken of this on several occasions—they are not our true motives. Nor are the outward positions people hold in social life their true positions. People are usually completely different inside from the way they present themselves in the social sphere and also from the way they see themselves. People believe so strongly that their actions are based on a particular motive. Some think their motives are entirely selfless, when in reality they are nothing but the most brutal egotism. People are not aware of this because they have such illusions concerning themselves and their social connections. This is another area where we can only discover the truth if we look more deeply into the whole scheme of things.

Johann Valentin Andreae was someone who wanted to look more deeply. What mattered to him, among other things, was to see beyond maya into reality. He was not the kind of superficial person who thinks he can do this with all those harangues profound educationists and others today think will reform the world; he realized that one must look more deeply into the whole scheme which lies behind the world of nature if one is to find the spirit in nature. Then one will also find the threads which truly connect human beings with the spirit. And only then shall we really know the social laws that are needed. You cannot reflect on social relationships today if you think the way people do in modern science, for this will only give you the surface of nature and the surface of social life. Johann Valentin Andreae looked deep down to find nature and the social life, for only there do they come together. It really is like this: Think of the borderline between maya and reality—there you have a peep-hole on nature on the one side and a peep-hole on social life on the other. And you have to look deeper before you realize that they actually only meet a long way back.

People will never reach this point, however. They will continue to look at some of the laws of nature at a surface level and will then speak about social life out of their feeling, out of superficiality. This will not help us to see the scheffle of things, however, that Johann Valentin Andreae sought to find. At most we shall get to be—excuse me calling a spade a spade—a Woodrow Wilson. Andreae wanted to discover the scheme of things, and his desire to do so fills such works as his Fama Fraternitatis and Confessio Rosicruci. He was addressing the leaders, the statesmen of his time; it was an attempt to establish a social order based on truth and not illusion. The Fama appeared in 1614, the Confessio in 1615, and The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz in 1616, though it had already been written in 1603. The year 1618 marked the beginning of the Thirty Years War,⁴ which brought conditions in which the truly great things aimed at in the Fama and the Confessio were swept away.

We are now living in an age when one year of war is equal to more than ten years of war in the seventeenth century, because war has become so much more destructive. By the standards of those times we have more than a Thirty Years War behind us already.

Try and see this as something that can guide you towards the will and endeavour that arose in the seventeenth century but was brought to a halt by the Thirty Years War. As I have said, if there have been such attempts and a beginning has been made, we must not let ourselves be put off by this but rather let it spur us on to even greater activity; then a later attempt may not end in failure. The first condition is, however, that we really come to know life.

I now want to relate this to matters I discussed with you last year and at the beginning of this year. I drew your attention to the strange course that the whole of human life and human evolution is taking. Individuals will gain in years, being 1, 2, 3, 4, years old, and later 30, 35, 40, and so on, years old; but the opposite is true for humanity as a whole. Humanity was old to begin with and is getting younger and younger. If we go back in time—for our present purposes we need only go back as far as the watershed between Atlantean and post-Atlantean life when the catastrophe happened on Atlantis—we come first of all to ancient Indian times. Conditions were very different then; humanity as a whole remained capable of further development beyond the 50s. Today we are only capable of developing in such a way in childhood and up to a certain time of our youth, for only then is our physical development directly connected with the development of soul and spirit, and the two run parallel. This soon comes to an end, however. In ancient Indian times, development in soul and spirit continued to be dependent on physical development until well into the 50s. People went on developing the way a child develops, and this only came to an end when they were old men and women. This is the reason why people looked up with such humility to their old people.

During the time of ancient Persia, people were no longer able to develop to such a high level but only into their 40s and early 50s; and in Egyptian and Chaldean times only into their 40s. In Graeco-Latin times, this kind of development went only as far as the thirty-fifth year. Then came a time—you will remember, the Graeco-Latin age began in the eighth century before the Mystery of Golgotha—when human beings were only capable of development up to their thirty-third year. That was the time when the Mystery of Golgotha took place. The age of humanity then matched the age at which Christ went through the Mystery of Golgotha.

After this, the human race got younger and younger. By the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantean age, in the fifteenth century, humanity was only able to develop up to the age of 28, with no further development after this, and today we have reached a point where people only reach the age of 27, if this is left to nature. In the past, human beings naturally remained capable of development into a ripe old age. Today people must conclude such development as comes of its own accord and is tied to the physical body by the age of 27, unless they take up a spiritual impulse in their inner life and push on from within. People who do not take up anything spiritual remain 27 years old even if they live to be 100. It means they have the characteristics of 27-year-olds. And with people refusing to look for inner spiritual impulses we now have a culture and a social life that is 27 years of age. We do not grow beyond the age of 27 in our outer social life. This age now rules humanity. If we go on like this, humanity will go down to 26, 25 and 24 years, then in the sixth post-Atlantean age to the twenty-first and later to the fourteenth year.

These things must be looked into, and they should not be taken pessimistically; instead they should give us the inner impulse to go towards the life of the Spirit and set out on an inner quest to look for the elements nature is unable to provide.

This is another point of view from which it is apparent that spiritual impulses are needed in civilization. The most characteristic people of our age, those who take the lead today, are people who do not get beyond their twenty-seventh year. The question is, what would really make someone a present-day leader? Well, let us say we have someone who is born and is very much alive, who does not take in much by way of tradition but only what comes by nature, without undue influence from outside; this individual would be very much determined by what comes of its own accord. Education usually gives colour and nuance to this in most people. But let us take a really typical individual who essentially shows only the characteristics of the present age, someone born into poverty perhaps and not given an education that puts much emphasis on tradition, but who would only be influenced by whatever arises from circumstance. Such a person would grow up, would be very active initially, for it is Part of the present age that one is active up to the seventh, fourteenth and twenty-first year, and perhaps be a forceful personality up to his twenty-first year. But unless he is able to develop spiritually, then, being very much a representative of the age, he will come to a halt at the age of 27. Now if he were to be truly representative of the age, something like the following would have to happen: At the age of 27 he would come to a key point in his life, to such effect that the circumstances he creates for himself at the age of 27, committing himself for life, would not allow him to progress beyond this. In modern life this could take the form, for instance, that such a person, a self-made man with tremendous energies and all kinds of impulses arising from the time itself, gets himself elected to parliament at the age of 27. To get oneself elected to parliament means one has committed oneself and there are some things that now have to be maintained. And so the individual remains as he is—which is entirely due to this development in the present age—and he is highly representative of the present age. Parliament being the great ideal in the present day and age, this would be a key point in the life of an individual who would then refuse to accept anything capable of growth for the future and who would have become completely adapted to external circumstances or, in a word, remained 27 years of age. And so at the age of 27 this would be a strong, powerful individual imbued with the impulses of the age who now entered parliament. After some time he would even be a minister and advance to become one of the leading figures. But he would merely be a man of our time, a typical 27-year-old.

There is such an individual, someone born into such circumstances who only took in what came, nothing by way of tradition. He grew strong and powerful under these circumstances—someone who would go through thick and thin for anything that came to him in the first twenty-seven years of his life and who did, in fact, become a Member of Parliament at the age of 27. He was a thorn in the flesh at first, being in opposition, but soon rose further and has become a kind of axis of rotation at the present time—and this is Lloyd George.⁵ No one is more characteristic of the present age than Lloyd George. ‘His own man’, he committed himself for life within a week of his twenty-seventh year by getting himself elected to the House of Commons. This and the rest of his life story show him to be a typical representative of life in the present age, a life we should not follow, for spiritual impulses should have taken over in the twenty-seventh year.

If one is able to penetrate the inner aspects of life one sees the most important events of the present time to be events to which other people are asleep. To anyone who can take a wider view it is immensely significant that such a self-made man is elected to the British Parliament exactly at the age of 27 and thus commits himself.

These are the realities which people must gradually learn to observe and consider, for they reveal the deeper connections in life. People like to skip over them today because they are not easy. Reluctance is felt because people prefer to give free rein to their passions, the emotions they create for themselves in the outer world and to their instincts, rather than seek to gain insight. They want to live the life of the world, basing themselves on these emotions and not on their true selves.

• 1. Ernst Heinrich Haeckel (1834–1919), German naturalist. His Welträtsel first appeared in 1899. Rudolf Steiner was probably referring to the following statement from the first chapter:
  
  Today we feel justifiably proud as we see the tremendous advances made in the pure and applied science of nature in the nineteenth century. Unfortunately the picture is entirely different and far from pleasing when we consider other aspects of modern civilization that are no less important. Much to our regret, we have to agree with Alfred Wallace who wrote that compared to our remarkable progress in the physical sciences and their practical application, our system of government, the justiciary, national education and the whole of our social and moral organization was still in a state of barbarism.
• 2. Jacob Boehme (1575–1624), shoemaker in Goerlitz, Germany,. was a mystic whose influence went beyond Germany to Holland and England. He was studied by Henry More, Newton and William Law among others. His main works were Aurora (1612), Vom irdischen und himmlischen Mysterium (title translates as ‘The mystery of earth and heaven’—not available in English) and Der Weg zu Christo in acht Buchern (title translates as ‘The road to Christ in eight books’—not available in English).
• 3. Das Reich was a quarterly published in Munich and Heidelberg by Alexander Freiherr von Bernus. Rudolf Steiner contributed three consecutive essays on the subject in Nos. 3 and 4 of the second and No. 1 of the third volume (October 1917 and January and April 1918). These have been Philosophie und Anthroposophie (GA 35) 1965. Johann Valentin Andreae's (1586–1654) work was translated into modern German and published by Walter Weber in Dornach in 1942; 2nd improved edition, Stuttgart 1957. Available in English as The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz: Anno 1459, as translated by Edward Foxcroft in 1690. Minerva Books, London (no date).
• 4. The Thirty Years War, 1618–1648, devastated Central Europe. It held great terrors for the civilian population, which have lived on in people's memories, in tales, legends and in the literature and were still very real to people in Germany up to the Second World War. (Trans.)
• 5. David Lloyd George, later Lloyd George of Dwyfor (1863–1945), elected as an Advanced Liberal for Carnarvon Boroughs in 1890, Prime Minister of Great Britain from 1916 to 1922.

My intention is to give a series of lectures which will enable you to understand the present time and the immediate future in some aspects at least. It should be a coherent whole, but it may sometimes be necessary to go a long way back. There will be a continuous thread through it all, but I would ask you to see the parts always in the context of the whole. I will sometimes go far and wide to collect the material we need to understand the present time, and some of it may seem remote.

When I say ‘the present time’ I mean quite a long period of time, going back several decades and also looking decades ahead. It is important to realize that it will be necessary to present truths based on the science of the Spirit that in many respects go utterly against current and generally accepted beliefs. The world holds opinions that not only differ but often are the direct opposite of the truths that have to be spoken out of anthroposophy. It is only to be expected, therefore, that people will consider these truths to be incredible, warped and downright foolish.

When truths which differed from generally accepted views had to be said in the past, in order to open up a road to the future, the difference between those truths and common opinion was probably never as marked as it inevitably is today. This may not be absolutely the case, but, relatively speaking, it is so, for people are tremendously intolerant in their hearts today and less able to accept views which differ from their own.

In the immediate future, people will feel more strongly than ever before that the new and different views presented to them are fanciful and absurd. Nevertheless, truths that until now were closely guarded by small groups of people, with strict silence demanded of anyone to whom they were made known, must increasingly be made public. It does not matter how public opinion and those who hold it react to these truths; nor do the prejudices and counter-currents matter that are provoked by them.

The reason for this will be discussed later on in these lectures. To begin with, I must speak of some of the ways in which people will react to truths today and in the immediate future. People believe they have long since outgrown the illusions and superstitions of the past, yet in some respects they are entirely given up to illusion. There is a growing tendency to live in illusion concerning some important and essential aspects of the great scheme of things, and this to such an extent that these illusions become powers that rule the world, nations and, indeed, the whole earth. It is important to realize this, for illusory ideas are a major element in the chaos in which we find ourselves today; in fact, they make it a chaos.

Let me tell you of one common illusion which exists today and is closely bound up with the materialistic trends of the age. It is the growing tendency to form utterly wrong opinions about what in the science of the spirit is called the physical plane. And the New Testament words that are fundamental in this respect: ‘My kingdom is not of this world’,¹ are increasingly less understood today. They are misunderstood in so far as the leading personalities of the outer world are caught up in the illusion that their kingdom should be very much of this physical world.

What do I mean to say? Anyone who is able to see the reality, and to see through it, knows that this world on the physical plane can never reach perfection. Yet people who think materialistically have the illusion that perfection can be achieved on the physical plane. This is the source of many other illusions, and particularly and characteristically the socialist illusion of the present age.

People's illusions come in all shades of meaning; they are coloured by party politics and so on. People who take a liberal view of the world and of life have constructed their own ideal of the physical world and believe that if they realize this we shall have paradise on earth. All that the socialists are able to think of is how to arrange things on this physical plane so that everybody can live what they consider to be the good life, the same for everybody, and so on. Their vision of the future on this physical plane is of a wonderful paradise. Do examine the programmes put forward by people who see themselves as belonging to the many different socialist parties and you will see for yourselves.

They are not the only people, of course, who have such views and opinions. Teachers also do, for instance. Today, every educational agitator and writer is absolutely convinced that it is up to him to establish the best possible educational system, the best principles of education one can think of. And in an absolute sense they really are the best, one cannot imagine anything better.

To go against such endeavours must seem sheer madness to people. The way things are today, people simply must consider anyone who does not want things to be the best possible in the world to be evil-minded. One can understand people feeling this way. Yet it is not evil-mindedness that stops us from thinking their way but a clear vision of the truth. It tells us that it is illusory to think such levels of perfection can be achieved in the physical world. And if it is a law that there never can be perfection in the physical world, just as it is a law that the three angles in a triangle add up to 180°, then people will simply have to face such a truth boldly and not shrink from it.

So there you have the kind of illusion which arises from entirely materialistic premises. Many say they believe in the world of the spirit, but with many of them this is mere words, nothing but hot air. In their innermost hearts, in their feelings and unconscious impulses, lives something different—the inclination to think materialistically. However much people may pretend to themselves that they believe in something else, in reality they believe only in the physical world. And since they do not believe in anything more than just the physical world around them, the only ideal they can possibly have is to arrange things in the physical world in such a way that it becomes a paradise; otherwise the whole world would make no sense to them. Until materialists are prepared to say that the world makes no sense at all, they can only live in the illusion that, however imperfect this physical world may be, it will be possible to create conditions that will put an end to imperfection and let perfection take its place.

Everything coming to the fore today in this respect—in general terms, with all kinds of political, social and other agitators making great words about it, or in specific instances, such as in education—is based on illusion because people are unable to see the connections between the physical world and the other spheres of the world. In no way can they gain an idea of what Jesus Christ meant when he said: ‘My kingdom is not of this world’, and why Jesus Christ did not want to bring a kingdom of perfection to realization here in the physical world. There is nothing in the gospels to show that Christ intended to reform this outer kingdom of the physical world and make it into one of perfection. He certainly did not cherish that illusion. But he made up for this lack of desire to establish paradise in the physical world by giving people something which is not of this world: to let impulses enter into their souls which are always alive in the world but are not of this physical world.

Illusions of this kind dominate the human race today in the widest possible sense, and this creates an unhealthy climate. People are free individuals and therefore free to live in illusion. In more down-to-earth contexts their illusions would immediately be seen to be illusions. When we are dealing with physical objects, fools who invent things which merely work in theory are instantly seen to be under an illusion. It is not immediately obvious, however, in the vast field of social and political life.

The following story is one I have told before. When I was a young fellow of 22 or 23, one of my fellow students came to me one day, his head aglow, absolutely fired with enthusiasm, and told me he had just made an important, epoch-making invention. Oh, I said, that is nice; what are you going to do with it? Well, he said, I'll have to go and see Ratinger—our professor of mechanical engineering at the university—and tell him about it. No sooner said than done, and off he went. Ratinger was not free at the moment and so the student came back; he had been given an appointment for later on. So I said to him: Why don't you tell me about it in the meantime? We have some time to spare. Tell me about your invention. It was a very clever thing. He had invented a steam engine that needed just a very small amount of coal to heat it up; after that no more coal would be needed, for a special mechanism kept it going of its own accord. One merely had to start it up. This was certainly epoch-making! You will be wondering why we do not have it today. I got him to explain it all to me and then told him: You know, that is really clever; but if one looks at the whole thing it is no different from wanting to get a railway truck going by getting into it and pushing as hard as you can from inside. Someone standing outside can, of course, get it to move, but anyone inside will not get it to move a millimetre, even if they apply the same amount of energy. This is what it all came down to.

Things can be extremely logical and clever, developed by applying all kinds of technical principles, and they may still be nonsense, having been thought up without taking account of reality. What matters is not to be merely clever, or logical, but to relate to reality. In the end the student never went to see the professor.

When one is dealing with physical matter and mechanics, such a thing will soon be obvious. But in social and political affairs, and with reference to what in its widest sense may be defined as making everyone happy, it will not be immediately obvious. You can easily put forward ideas of exactly this kind; people will be impressed and believe you. Yet it is all a matter of being inside the truck and pushing from there. A time will come when a certain basic characteristic of the present time may actually be labelled with a particular name, a name that will typify a way of thinking which at heart is utterly illusory and unreal. I am very sure that in future people will speak of early twentieth century ‘Wilsonianism’. For Wilson's ideas are typical of those of someone who wants to push a railway truck from inside.

All the basic ideas of ‘Wilsonianism’ which make such an impression today are utterly unreal, though they also have a major influence on people for other reasons. They are powerful for the very reason that they cannot be realized. Any attempt to implement them it would soon show them to be meaningless. But people are able to imagine they could be implemented. If we were able to implement Wilsonian ideas, world philistinism would be realized throughout the world. Woodrow Wilson² really deserves to be made the universal saviour of general philistinism. Of course, philistines would not actually do all that well in a world organized by Wilson, which anyway cannot be realized, but at least they imagine that if Wilson's ideas were to conquer the world we would be able to live according to our ideals.

A time will come when people say: At the beginning of the twentieth century a peculiar ideal arose, which was to make the world into a perfect image of philistine, or bourgeois, ideals. Wilson's ideas will be analysed one day and presented as typical of the early twentieth century.

You see, we have not only small but also big examples of illusory ideas in our time. These illusions and unreal ideas are held not by otherworldly sects, but by groups whose beliefs spread far and wide.

Important and vital genuine truths must now be proclaimed to the world. For the reasons and because of the kind of conditions we have been discussing, they will show little relationship to the general opinions of today. Different conditions have to be created to enable people to grasp the truth. The truths which must inevitably come up are repulsive to many people today; they are thoroughly uncomfortable. The truths people like and ask for are convenient truths, for that is the way people are today.

Some of these uncomfortable truths will have to be presented in the course of these lectures. They need to be made known out of a feeling of responsibility, and above all they must relate not only to the physical plane. They must cut across the illusions people have of the physical plane and offer reality rather than fantasy. The most unrealistic and fantasy-ridden people today are those who consider themselves to be more or less entirely realistic. One makes the strangest discoveries in this respect.

I was recently sent a kind of lexicon listing the names of writers.³ It purports to list the names of all writers who have a connection with Judaism and anything which seeks to bring Judaism to realization in this world. I am one of the writers listed in the book, the reason being that, according to the author of the lexicon, I have many similarities with Ignatius de Loyola who is stated to have founded the Jesuits precisely because of his Judaism. Furthermore, I come from a border region between Germans and Slavs—which is where I happen to have been born, though my family certainly do not come from there—and apparently the fact that I come from there indicates that I am Jewish in origin—I have no idea why. This does not really surprise me, for I think you will agree that even odder things are published today. But the lexicon also includes Hermann Bahr as someone who is promoting Judaism—I was merely leafing through the book. Yet he is an out-and-out Upper Austrian. It is really and truly impossible to think of any way in which he can be connected with Jewish blood or the like. Nevertheless, this literary lexicon quotes a well-known literary historian as saying that Hermann Bahr definitely had Jewish traits.

Well, when I was said to be Jewish on one occasion—these things are not new—I had a photograph of my certificate of baptism made. Hermann Bahr also had to jump through those hoops, because a literary historian had said he was Jewish.⁴ Bahr wanted to establish the truth. The literary historian then said: Well, his grandfather may have been a Jew. But it simply is not possible to find anything in Bahr's family which is not absolutely Upper Austrian German. This was of course an embarrassment for the literary historian, but he would stick to is opinion. He went so far as to say that if Hermann Bahr were actually to present the certificates of baptism for the last twelve generations to show that he did not have a drop of Jewish blood rom anywhere, then he, the historian, would believe in reincarnation if forced to do so. So you see, the reason for believing in reincarnation is a highly peculiar one in the case of this renowned and widely-read literary historian.

There are times today when it is really difficult to take what is said by famous people at all seriously. It is a pity, of course, that it is so difficult to convince the wider public of this. People are rather in the habit of believing in authority, despite the fact that modern people do not believe in authority at all, of course! Such, at least, is their opinion. Yesterday we were able to learn something about the opinions people have of themselves.

Today, when people's basic instincts sometimes take them so far from the truth, it is extremly difficult to accept the truths relating to the region which borders immediately on the physical world. To characterize anything relating to this region one has to appeal to healthy, incorrupt minds, and this presents the greatest difficulties one can imagine. For when it comes to the truths which must now be made known, the whole constitution of the human soul will be affected even if people merely get to know them, let alone gain direct perception of them.

External knowledge about the physical world has a certain effect—let us say on the human head. But truths which go deep, even if only to the depth where they relate to the world immediately next to the physical world, touch the whole human being and not only the head. To proclaim such truths one must be able to depend on a sound, incorrupt mind.

In many spheres of life today a sound, incorrupt mind is almost a rarity, whilst unsound, corrupt minds are far from uncommon. And the way individuals accept truths today strongly reveals the particular nature of their life of instincts and drives, the whole constitution of their souls, and their state of mind. People with corrupt instincts who are unwilling to apply some degree of discipline to their life-styles quickly tend to take an attitude which is completely determined by the base mind, particularly when the truths to be accepted relate to the world bordering on the physical world. This happens only too easily. If people do not take a healthy objective interest in what goes on in the world, if they are essentially only interested in anything that relates to themselves, this will often corrupt their mind and attitudes to such an extent that they do not have the right instincts for occult truths and particularly for truths relating to the world bordering on the physical world.

With respect to the physical world and anything relating to it, and to all the great advances humanity has made, I think I can say that physical nature makes sure this corruption does not go too far in human minds. People are confined within the Limits imposed by physical nature; they cannot get very far with their instincts and have to obey the laws of nature. When we move from the physical world into the one bordering on it, we are no longer on those leading reins; guidance has to take another form and a different, inner certainty is needed. This is only possible, however, if the mind is incorrupt as we go beyond the physical level; otherwise we lose all control in that other region where we are no longer controlled by physical nature, nor by social and traditional prejudices. We are suddenly quite free and cannot bear such freedom. For instance, the physical world has many ways of preventing people from lying: If someone were to say at 6 o'clock in the evening that the sun had just come up, nature would soon demonstrate this to be wrong. It is like this with many things relating to the physical world. If people insist on talking nonsense about things relating to the higher worlds, even if it is only the one immediately next to our own, the physical world will not immediately show them to be wrong. This, then, is the reason why people may lose all control if they rush to escape the discipline which is imposed in the physical world.

Here we have one of the great problems which may arise when truths relating to the non-physical world are presented. Yet the answer always has to be that it is simply necessary to present these truths today. We must not forget that truths relating to the non-physical world cannot be received in the same frame of mind as truths relating to the physical world. To take them in we must slightly loosen the etheric and astral bodies; otherwise we shall only hear words. The state of mind has to be such—and with reference to the phenomena of the subjective inner life it merely is a state of mind—that for any real understanding of the things of the spirit one has to loosen the etheric and astral bodies a little. This loosening should only be a means of gaining understanding of the world of the spirit. It must not become an end in itself; this would be a very serious matter.

Imagine—to take an extreme case—someone comes to an anthroposophical lecture, not in order to gain insight into the realms of the spirit, which would be the right thing, but because he thinks this is truly mystical. As he listened he would let the words flow through him, as it were, because this would slightly loosen the ether body and the astral body. People certainly do come to lectures of this kind, sometimes also to those on pseudospiritual science, and listen in a kind of sleepy ecstasy; they are not really interested in the content, but more in the feeling of voluptuous pleasure which comes when the ether body and the astral body go partly outside the physical body. There may be other situations in life when to be thus ‘given up’, or ‘warm’, is a good thing; it is no good at all when it comes to revealing the truths relating to things of the spirit.

This must be properly understood. If spiritual truths are rightly understood, and if people are in all seriousness following the lines of thought used to develop concepts which may make the world of the spirit accessible to our understanding, their humanity will be enhanced and they will learn the things which have to be known at the present time for the salvation and further development of humanity. People who take these truths into themselves in the right way will also find their drives and instincts ennobled and raised to a higher level. By merely listening to spiritual truths they go through a development that is for the good.

Anyone who is not willing to accept anthroposophical truths in this sense but is perhaps doing so from some kind of purely personal interest—let us say he wants to belong to a society and has not found another one which suits him as well as the Anthroposophical Society does—anyone who comes to this Society with personal interests may indeed find that spiritual truths will first of all activate low instincts, and perhaps even the lowest of the low. It therefore does not come as a surprise that people who really should not be members but nevertheless do come and hear such things, find their lowest instincts brought to life. It is something that cannot be avoided at this time, for these things have to be made public and it is difficult to draw the line. The right way will only be found if those who have the inner justification to be part of such a movement use their wide-awake judgement and take themselves to task. People who in any way bring personal interests to bear, before or after leaving the Society, merely show that they never should have been members. And I think it is not really difficult to distinguish between personal interests and interest in objective understanding.

But it is not surprising that in the situation which has arisen because it is now necessary to make things generally known, it happens again and again that some of the instincts of the lower human nature come to the fore. The potential dangers must be consciously and clearly considered and ways must be found to correct them. If we take the right attitude to these dangers we shall certainly be able to meet them. This is very much a time—it is part of the chaotic situation we are in—when aberrations of this kind are far from uncommon. The tragic situation of today makes tremendous demands on the powers of many people. It is true to say that people who were not in the habit of working hard in the general rather than merely personal interest really have learned to work hard in the last three years. Many people have learned to work and to acquire general interests.

People who rightly belong to our movement will have come to it out of more than personal interest. Nevertheless, the present age does offer enormous opportunities for a kind of lazy outsider attitude. The specific constellation created by the war means that some people have really nothing to occupy them. If they are part of our movement they will also be aware of it. Before the war we had many lecture tours; a whole raft of people would get together and travel from one lecture to the next. Outer interest may have been lacking, but excitement could be found, and if this did not come from outside, people created their own excitements. This has now become difficult. It cannot be done. However, some people have not found a way of occupying themselves usefully. And that is why a lazy outsider attitude is to be found in our ranks exactly at this time, with people whiling away the time by creating all kinds of opposition. Being unable to get the excitement of travelling from lecture cycle to lecture cycle they find other ways of entertaining themselves. This merely shows the true nature of the interest that formerly made them travel from lecture cycle to lecture cycle.

When there is an inner obligation to represent anthroposophical truths before the world, in all seriousness and with dignity, you also know that more than fifty out of an audience of a hundred may well become opponents. That is a law; it is the way it is. If these fifty per cent of such people do not actually become opponents, there will be a reason for this, but it will not be because they are consistent. For reasons which have already been given and others that will be given, this is how matters are. Someone who represents anthroposophical truths is therefore not in the least surprised if there is opposition. We might take up the points that these opponents keep coming up with all the time, things they generally know better than anyone else to be untrue—for they do of course know that they are not true—but it would be much more useful to consider the sources from which such Opposition has Sprung.

All kinds of peculiar things will happen when we do so, and we shall then no longer feel inclined to take up the points that our opponents want us to take up. Instead, we are going to discover their true reasons. This can sometimes be more of an effort than to take up the points the opposition is making. Think of all the years in which lectures have been given here and how it has been necessary over and over again to say the same things I am also saying today, though this is always pointed out. But it is necessary to consider them with profound seriousness and dignity, and to consider them in a way which is fitting for an anthroposophical movement.

Believe me, I have more important things to do, if I am to lead this movement and be fully responsible for it, than to take account of the fact that three or four people, or even more if you will, get together and invent all kinds of gossip. I have more important things to do and never feel the inclination to go into such matters. But unfortunately this is so little understood! Even within this Society, there is more interest in excitement and sensation than genuine scientific interest. From the scientific point of view it is, for instance, interesting to study not only useful but also poisonous plants, but one has to find the right point of view. Very few of those who profess to follow anthroposophical spiritual science have even the least notion of the immense seriousness and importance of what it really should be. Forgive me for saying this. If there were the right seriousness and if the importance of this were really understood, people's attitudes would in many respects be very different from what they are. Of course I am not saying that people should turn their attention elsewhere. Rather the opposite: We should not turn our attention away from the phenomena which go hand in hand with the will to destroy this anthroposophical movement. But we have to find the right approach.

People may, for instance, write volumes in the way in which I have contradicted myself in my written works and with reference to all kinds of other things. One way of countering this would be to say that Luther was shown to have contradicted himself in hundreds of ways, not just a few dozen. His answer was: These asses are talking of contradictions in my works. I wish they would make the effort to try and understand just one of the things that appears to be in contradiction to other things!⁵ So one way would be to point out something like this. But there is no need for this. For when people speak in opposition today it is not because they are interested in finding and revealing contradictions but for quite a different reason.

Someone⁶ offered a manuscript to Philosophisch-Anthroposophischer Verlag,⁷ for instance. The publishing house was unable to use it and therefore returned it to the author. From this moment the author, who until then had been running after me wherever I went, became an opponent. The real reason was not that he had found contradictions. If that were the real reason we might use Luther's words. But we cannot do that, for the individual concerned can only be seen in his true colours if we know he is giving vent to his spleen because the publishing house was not able to publish his book. This was the real reason. So if we simply listen to the things people say, we shall have little opportunity for getting at the truth—just as little, perhaps, as the literary historian who would convert to reincarnation if this allowed him to continue in the belief that Hermann Bahr had Jewish connections. Conversion would be necessary if he were to be shown certificates of Christian baptism for Hermann Bahr's ancestors down to the twelfth generation.

Much is said about the courage which people are showing today. To assert the truths humanity needs today, in the sense I have spoken of, will need quite a different kind of courage—inner courage. But the place where this courage should be in the soul is occupied by cowardice, reluctance to take action, and this is tremendously widespread. In many respects it is due to this cowardice that anthroposophical spiritual science finds it so difficult to make its way today. It will make its way. But one should not sit back and accept; one should not think that things will go the right way without human involvement. One thing you will have to get used to—and it will be different from what you have been used to so far—is that I myself will have to be a lot less lenient in some respects than I have been until now. Do not think this is because I have changed my will and intention; you must look for the reasons in the existing situation.

You will have to understand that I cannot let the movement which I have to represent before the world go to the dogs in any old way. Forgive the expression. Higher duties are involved than people may dream of. I cannot be involved in whatever excitements or sensations some group or set may be desiring. Consideration must be given to many general and more important interests and impulses than to the purely personal ambitions which rule one set of people or another. To find the right way of presenting anthroposophy we simply must be able to set aside the purely personal element which for many is about the only thing that interests them today.

And so I must conclude here today with something which I have also been saying in all the other places where I have been speaking these days. There are many members of our anthroposophical science of the spirit who are truly dedicated and who have a clear idea of the seriousness of our work. But again and again there are others who do not belong and who behave in a way that simply would not happen if membership of the Society were limited to those who rightfully belong to it. Things keep coming up among members which are far removed from what is really intended; some of these can only be said to relate to what is really intended if one takes a totally distorted view.

Things are said by groups of people who have to be ignored—for our real interests go far beyond giving one's attention to the ambitions which are alive in those groups—things are said there, and people are beginning to believe them, which have no more to do with our true intentions than a dung beetle has to do with a pendulum clock. It is quite impossible to see how they go together. Yet fantastic stories created out of base instincts that are left to run riot are set in circulation. And this despite the fact that the people who generate them know full well that not a word is true. Such things can be explained in natural science, but we must also draw the logical conclusion and take the necessary actions. In the first place I am going to impose two rules an myself. Anyone who is going to speak of the one rule without the other, will be saying something which is not true. I have made these two rules known in all the places where I have been giving lectures in recent months.

In principle, I shall no longer continue to give private interviews to members of the Anthroposophical Society. For all those private interviews have led to reports which are full of lies. I have better things to do than refute the tales told by people who let their imaginations run riot, and so there is no other way but to discontinue these private interviews. Some individuals have a true esoteric impulse, and I will find other ways of making sure they are able to progress; it will just take while. The measure should not prevent anyone from progressing in esoteric development. But, generally speaking, all private interviews must now stop. This, then, is the first rule. Do not come to me, as people have done in some local groups, and say it is a harsh rule. No, do not come to me, go to those who are responsible.

The second thing is that I release everyone who has ever had a private interview with me from the promise not to talk about it, if they wish to do so. Anyone can tell anything they like about what has happened or been said in those private interviews—that is, in so far as they wish to do so. I am not going to prevent anyone from telling the whole truth about anything ever discussed with me in a private interview.

These two rules go together. The one does not apply without the other. And, as I said, if you think they are harsh, go to those who are responsible. Unless I am less lenient in these matters than I have been until now, the problems I am speaking of will not stop. As I said, I shall find other ways to make sure this does not harm anyone's esoteric development. Ways and means will be found. But, people being as they are today, it is not possible to establish such a science without things going badly astray on occasion, with people always jumping to the wrong conclusions. This is why there will have to be these rules.

People who take a serious and dignified approach to our spiritual-scientific development may find it difficult to understand how such things could come about, but they will accept the two rules as inevitable. From now on, everything will be entirely in the open. For there is nothing there which needs to shun the light! This is what is so shameful about it all: The truth and the whole truth could be told by everybody without leaving the least stain on our movement. But people have grown attached to something which has survived in our work as a continuation of earlier practices: to have individual interviews. 1f talking to individuals had not resulted in lies, the rule would not have been necessary. But everything ever said to any member can be truthfully told. Our movement can only gain from the truth—go and tell as much as you like. The truth will not be affected by the lies which are told; but it must not even appear to be affected, for it is important for humanity that anything presented out of a background of spiritual science is presented in a serious and dignified way.

So let me repeat once more: Without causing any loss to those who are seriously seeking esoteric development, I will generally no longer give private interviews for members. Everyone is free to tell everything they want about the interviews which have been given, but it must be the truth. I release everyone from whatever vow of silence there may be. But it should only be because individuals want to tell others for their own sake; they do not have to do it for my sake. And I have no objection to people spreading it about far and wide that these rules exist and are characteristic of our movement. Then the world will realize the infamous nature of the things that are so often said, especially about our Society.

• 1. John 18:36. The German for ‘kingdom’ in this sense is Reich (Trans.).
• 2. Thomas Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924), President of the United States 1913–1921. (Wilson propagated ‘open’ diplomacy but refused to permit publication of his discussions at the 1919 Peace Conference in Paris. His Fourteen Points were to be the basis for the armistice in November 1918. Trans.)
• 3. Semi-Kuerschner oder Literarisches Lexikon der Schriftsteller, Dichter, Bankiers, Geldleute, Schauspieler, Kunstler, Musiker, Offiziere, Rechtsanwlte, Revolutionre, Frauenrechtlerinnen, Sozialdemokraten usw. jdischer Rasse und Versippung, die von 1813–1913 in Deutschland ttig oder bekannt waren (Semi-Kuerschner or literary lexicon of authors, poets, bankers, financiers, physicians, actors, artists, musicians, officers, lawyers, revolutionaries, women's rights activists, social democrats, etc., who were Jewish by birth or marriage and were active or known in Germany from 1813–1913), published by Philipp Stayff, Berlin 1913. The passage about Hermann Bahr reads as follows: ‘It is said, and people have assured me over and over again, that Hermann Bahr is not a Jew, but I believe in the adage: ‘Tell me who your friends are’ (Bahr's first wife was Jewish), and would maintain that Bahr is of Jewish origin even if he were to show me the certificates of baptism of his forebears for the last ten generations, and indeed if really pushed into a corner I would rather subscribe to belief in the transmigration of souls.’
• 4. Adolf Barthels in his Kritiker und Kritikaster, Leipzig 1903.
• 5. Martin Luther (1483–1546) religious reformer who led the German Reformation. He translated the Bible into the vernacular to make it accessible to everyone and wrote many works, their vigour still much appreciated today. The actual quote is: ‘How can these asses form an opinion on contradictory elements in our doctrine if they don't understand any aspect of those contradictory elements?’ From Ricarda Huch, Luthers Glaube, 10. Brief (translates as ‘10th letter’).
• 6. Max Seiling (1852–1928), Austrian poet and writer.
• 7. Philosophisch-Anthroposophischer Verlag is the publishing house established by Marie von Sivers in 1913 in Berlin for the publication of Rudolf Steiner's works. It moved to Dornach in November 1923.

As I said in my earlier lectures, the time has come for humanity to know certain truths concerning the spiritual background to the physical world. If people are not going to be prepared to accept these truths out of their own good will, they will be forced to learn them from the terrible events that will happen as time goes on.

The question may arise as to why now is the time for humanity to learn these truths, some of which are liable to shock people. They have of course existed for a long time, but humanity in general was protected and did not have to accept them. Many of these truths were carefully guarded in the ancient Mysteries, as you know, so that people in the surrounding areas were not exposed to the disturbing effect of these truths. Now, we have often said that it is fear of the great truths that prevents people from accepting them. Those who have this fear today—and there are indeed many of them—could of course say: Why cannot humanity go on in a kind of sleep state where these truths are concerned? As it is, people have grown tense and fearful in recent times, and why should they be exposed to those great and fearsome truths?

Let us go into this question, first of all considering why from now on humanity has to be treated differently, as it were, by the world of the spirit than has been the case so far in this post-Atlantean age.

In my earlier lectures I spoke of the non-physical world which borders directly on our physical world. This is the world humanity will need to know about in the time which lies just ahead. You know, as soon as you enter into a non-physical world, everything is different from the way it is here. You get to know certain entities, and above all things of a special nature which are hidden from the sight of weak humanity—‘sight’ here includes anything conveyed in insights and ideas.

Why has the human eye been deflected from this other world in the post-Atlantean age, right up to the present moment? It is because there are entities in this next-door world—other, higher worlds lie beyond it—which could only be made known to human beings under certain conditions. They have a specific function in the whole universe and especially also in human evolution. There are many different kinds of these entities in the other region.

Today I want to talk to you about one class of such entities, the class whose function in the great scheme of things is connected with human birth and death. You should never believe that human birth and death are actually as they present themselves to the senses. Spiritual entities are involved when a human being enters this physical world from the non-physical, and then leaves it again for the non-physical world. To give them a name, let us call them the 'elemental spirits of birth and death' for the moment. It is true that the individuals who until now were initiated in the Mysteries considered it to be their strict duty not to speak to people in general of these elemental spirits of birth and death. If one were to speak of them, and of the whole way in which these elemental spirits live, one would be speaking of something that would seem like red-hot coals to people, for this is how humanity has developed in the post-Atlantean age. We might also use another analogy. If people get to know more about the essential nature of these elemental spirits of birth and death and do so in full consciousness, they come to know powers which are inimical to life in the physical world.

Anyone with more or less normal feelings, even today, will be shaken to learn the truth that in order to bring about birth and death in the physical world, the divine spirits who guide world destinies have to use elemental spirits who actually are the enemies of everything human beings seek and desire for their welfare and well-being here in the physical world. If everything was done just to suit the wishes of human beings—to be comfortable in this physical world, be fit and well as we go to sleep and wake up again and go about our work—if all spirits were of a kind to see to it that we have such a comfortable life, birth and death could not be. To bring about birth and death the gods need entities whose minds and whole way of looking at the world give them the urge to destroy and lay waste to everything which provides for the welfare of human beings here in the physical world.

We have to get used to the idea that the world is not made as people would really like it to be and that there exists the element which in the Egyptian Mysteries was known as ‘iron necessity’. As part of this iron necessity, entities hostile to the physical world are used by the gods to bring about birth and death for human beings.

So we are looking at a world that is immediately next to our own, a world that day by day, hour by hour, has to do with our own world, for the processes of birth and death happen every day and every hour here on earth. The moment human beings cross the threshold to the other world they enter into a sphere where entities live and are active whose whole conduct, views and desires are destructive for ordinary physical human life. If this had been made known to people outside the Mysteries before now, if people had been given an idea of these entities, the following would inevitably have happened. If people who are quite unable to deal with their instincts and drives, with their passions, had known that destructive entities were present around them all the time, they would have used the powers of those destructive entities. They would not have used them the way the gods do in birth and death, however, but within the realm of physical life. If people had felt the desire to be destructive in some sphere or other, they would have had ample opportunity to make these entities serve them, for it is easy to make them serve us. This truth was kept hidden to protect ordinary life from the destructive elemental spirits of birth and death.

The question is, should we not continue to keep them hidden? This is not possible, and for quite specific reasons, one of which is connected with a great, important cosmic law. I could give you a general formula, but it will be better to use the actual form it is taking now and in the immediate future to demonstrate this law to you. As you know, not long ago growing numbers of impulses came into human evolution which did not exist before and which are quite characteristic of our present civilization. Try and go back in your mind to times not very long ago. You will find times when there were no steam locomotives, when people did not yet use electricity as we do now; times perhaps when only thinkers like Leonardo da Vinci¹ were able to have the idea, theoretically and on the basis of experiments, that humans could create apparatus which would enable them to fly. All this has come to realization in a relatively short time. Just consider how much depends on the use of steam, of electricity, of the changes in atmospheric density which has made airships possible, or the knowledge of statics which has led to the aeroplane. Consider everything which has come into human evolution in recent times. Think of the destructive powers of dynamite, etc., and you can easily imagine, seeing how swiftly this has gone, that new and different fabulous things of this kind will be the goal of future human endeavour. I think you can easily see that the ideal for the near future will be to have not more and more Goethes, but more and more Edisons. This really is the ideal of modern humanity.

Modern people do, of course, believe that all this—the telegraph, telephones, the use of steam Power, etc.—happens without the participation of spiritual entities. This is not the case, however. The development of human civilization involves the participation of elemental spirits, even if people do not know about it. Modern materialists imagine that the telephone and telegraph, and the steam engines driven long distances and also used by farmers, have been constructed merely on the basis of what people produce by the sweat of their brow. Everything people do in this respect is under the influence of elemental spirits. They are always involved and helping us in this. People are not taking the initiative on their own in this field—they are guided. In laboratories, workshops, really everywhere where the spirit of invention is active, elemental spirits are providing the inspiration.

The elemental spirits who have given impulses to our civilization from the eighteenth century onwards are of the same kind as those used by the gods to bring about birth and death. This is one of the mysteries which human beings have to discover today. And the law of world history of which I have spoken is that as evolution proceeds, the gods always rule for a time within a particular sphere of elemental spirits and then human beings enter into this same sphere and use the elemental spirits. In earlier times, the elemental spirits of birth and death essentially served the divine spirits who guided the world; since our day—and this has been going on for some time now—the elemental spirits of birth and death are serving technology, industry and human commerce. It is important to let this disturbing truth enter into our souls with all its power and intensity.

Something is happening in this fifth post-Atlantean period of civilization which is similar to something that happened in Atlantean times, during the fourth Atlantean period. I have spoken of this before. Up to the fourth Atlantean period the divine spirits who guide human evolution used certain elemental spirits. They had to use them because not only birth and death had to be brought about at that time, but also something else, which may be said to be closer to the earth. You will remember some of the descriptions I have given of the Atlantean age, when human beings were still flexible in their physical nature and their souls could make their bodies grow large or remain dwarf-like, with their outer appearance depending on their inner nature. Please call this to mind again.² Today the service certain elemental spirits give to the divine spirits on occasions of birth and death is clearly apparent in physical terms. In those times, when outer appearance was in accord with inner nature, certain elemental spirits were serving the gods for the whole of human life. When the Atlantean age had reached its fourth period, people again began to rule the elemental spirits, which had previously been used by the gods, to govern the growth and general physiognomy of human beings. Human beings gained control of certain divine powers and made use of them.

The consequence was that from about the middle of the Atlantean age it was possible for individuals who desired to harm their fellow human beings to use all kinds of creative powers on them—keeping them dwarf-sized in growth or making them into giants, or letting the physical organism develop in such a way that the individual concerned would be an intelligent person or a cretin. A terrible power was in human hands in the middle of the Atlantean age. You know, for I have drawn attention to this, that this was not kept secret, though not from any kind of evil intent. According to one of the laws of world history, something which initially was the work of the gods had to become the work of human beings. This led to serious mischief in the Atlantean age, so that over the last four or three periods of civilization the whole of Atlantean civilization had to be guided towards its own destruction. Our own civilization was saved and brought across from Atlantis, as I have described elsewhere, and you will recall my descriptions of what happened in the Atlantean age.

In the last three, or two, periods of post-Atlantean civilization in the fifth stage of earth evolution, work now done by the gods will again become work to be done by humanity. We are only in the early stages of the technological, industrial and commercial activities which proceed under the influence of the elemental spirits of birth and death. This influence and its effects will be increasingly more radical. Until now, the elemental spirits of birth and death have been guided by the gods and their influence has been limited to the coming into being and passing away of humans at the physical level. But the civilization of our own and future ages has to be such that these spirits can be active in technology, industry, commerce, and so on.

There is also another, quite specific, aspect to this. As I have said, these elemental spirits are the enemies of human welfare and want to destroy it. We have to see things straight and not have any illusions concerning the radical nature of this. Civilization must progress in the fields of technology, industry and commerce. But by its very nature such a civilization cannot serve the well-being of humanity in the physical world; it can only prove destructive to the human weal.

This will be an unpalatable truth for people who never tire of making great speeches on the tremendous advances made in modern civilization, for they see things in abstract terms and know nothing of the rise and fall which is part of human evolution. I have made brief reference to the causes of destruction in Atlantis. The commercial, industrial and technological civilization which is now in its beginnings harbours elements which will lead to the decline and fall of the fifth earth period. And we only see things straight and face reality if we admit that we are here beginning to work on something which must lead to catastrophe.

This is what it means to enter into iron necessity. Looking for an easy way out people might say: Alright, I won't take the tram. It might even go so far—though even members of the Anthroposophical Society are unlikely to take things this far—that people will not go on trains, and so on. This would be complete nonsense, of course. It is not a matter of avoiding things but of getting a clear picture, real insight into the iron necessities of human evolution. Civilization cannot continue in an unbroken upward trend; it has to go through a succession of rising and falling waves.

There is, however, something else which can happen, something people generally do not want to know about today but which is exactly what modern humanity will have to discover. Insight—a clear picture of the necessity which exists—is what will have to come to all human minds. It will necessarily mean that much will have to change in the frame of mind in which we consider the world. Human beings will need to live with inner impulses which they still prefer to ignore today, for these go against the good life they want. There are many such impulses. Let me give you just one example.

People today, especially if they want to be good people, wanting nothing for themselves but only to be selfless and desire the good of others, will of course seek to develop certain virtues. These, too, are iron necessities. Now, of course, there is nothing to be said against a desire for virtue, but the problem is that people are not merely desiring to be virtuous. It is quite a good thing to want to be virtuous, but these people want more. If one looks to the unconscious depths of the human soul one finds that in the present time people are not really much concerned to develop the actual virtues. It is much more important to them to be able to feel themselves to be virtuous, to give themselves up entirely to a state of mind where they can say: ‘I am truly selfless, look at all the things I do to improve myself! I am perfect, I am kind, I am someone who does not believe in authority.’ They will then, of course, eagerly follow all kinds of authorities. To feel really good in the consciousness of having one particular virtue or another is endlessly more important to people today than actually having that virtue. They want to feel they have the virtue rather than practise it.

As a result, certain secrets connected with the virtues remain hidden to them. They are secrets which people instinctively feel they do not want to know, especially if they are modern idealists who like to feel good in the way I have described. All kinds of ideals are represented by societies today. Programmes are made, and a society states its principles, which are to achieve one thing or another. The things people want to achieve in this way may indeed be very nice, but to find something nice in an abstract way is not enough. People must learn to think in terms of reality. Let us look at the aspect of reality when it comes to people having virtues. Perfection, benevolence, beautiful virtues, rights—it is nice to have them all in the outer social sphere. However, when people say: ‘It is our programme to achieve perfection in some particular way, benevolence in some particular direction, we aim to establish a specific right', they usually consider this to be something absolute which can be brought to realization as such. ‘Surely’, people will say, ‘it must be a good thing to be more and more perfect?’ And ‘What better ideal can there be but to have a programme that will make us more and more perfect?’ But this is not in accord with the law of reality. It is right, and good, to be more and more perfect, or at least aim to be so, but when people are actually seeking to be perfect in a particular direction, this search for perfection will after a time change into what in reality is imperfection. A change occurs through which the desire for perfection becomes a weakness. Benevolence will after a time become prejudicial behaviour. And however good the right may be that you want to bring to realization—it will turn into a wrong in the course of time. The reality is that there are no absolutes in this world. You work towards something that is good, and the way of the world will turn it into something bad. We therefore must seek ever new ways, look for new forms over and over again. This is what really matters.

The swing of the pendulum governs all such human efforts. Nothing is more harmful than belief in absolute ideals, for they are at odds with the true course of world evolution.

A good way of demonstrating things—not to prove, but merely to illustrate—is to use certain ideas. And to some extent, ideas from the physical sciences can be used as symbols to illustrate non-physical ideas. Imagine we have a pendulum suspended here (drawing on the board). Now you see, if you take the pendulum to this point, to one extreme, and then let go, it will go to this point to find its equilibrium. It follows this path. Why does it do so? Because it is subject to gravity, people say. It goes down, but once it has reached the lowest point does not stop there. The downward movement has given it a certain inertia, which it uses to move to the other side. It then goes down again. It means that when the pendulum travels this distance, the downward movement gives it sufficient energy to swing to the other side. This provides an analogy that may be used to give a strong visual image of one thing or another. Thus we may say: A virtue—perfection, benevolence—goes in this direction, but then goes in the opposite direction. Perfection becomes weakness, benevolence uncritical adoration, and right turns into wrong in the course of evolution.

People prefer not to consider such ideas today. Just imagine trying to explain to a solid middle-class citizen who is establishing a society which is to serve certain ideals: You are now setting up an ideal, but in making it part of the process of evolution you will create the opposite effect, and you will do so in a relatively short time. Well, he would think you are not only no idealist, but a real devil. Why should the effort to be perfect not go towards increasing perfection, and why should right not continue to be right for ever and ever? It is extremely difficult for people today to have ideas based on reality instead of ideas that are one-sided abstractions. Yet they will have to learn to have such ideas, for they will not progress without them. They will also have to become used to the idea that progress in civilization will gradually make it necessary for us to use the elemental spirits of birth and death. And in doing so, humanity will have to live with the fact that a destructive element becomes part of human evolution.

Every now and then, people who refuse to familiarize themselves with anthroposophy—which is the only means of finding the right attitude to such things—find the right ideas by themselves, from instinct. What is the significance of all this? The elemental spirits of birth and death are, of course, messengers of Ahriman. The iron necessity of world evolution forces the gods to use Ahriman's messengers to control birth and death. When they ask the elemental spirits to act on their behalf they do not allow the powers of these messengers to enter the physical world. But as civilization goes into its decline, from the fifth post-Atlantean period onwards, this element has to come in again, so that catastrophe may be brought about. Human beings must use these powers themselves. Ahriman's messengers are therefore an iron necessity; they have to bring about the destruction that will lead to the next step forward in civilization. This is a terrible truth, but it is so. And nothing will avail where this truth is concerned but to get to know it and to see it clearly. We shall be discussing this further and you will see how many things there are which call for the right attitude to these truths.

Instinct, I have said, makes some people realize that something is necessary. One such individual is Ricarda Huch,³ who has written a number of excellent books at the present time—though none that somehow comes even close to anthroposophy. Her latest work, on Luther's faith, is remarkable—not so much because of insight, but because of the instinct to be found in this book. If you read the first three chapters of the book you find there a strange cry—I think we may call it such—a cry for humanity to find again what has really been lost since Luther came on the scene. Before his day atavistic clairvoyance still existed. Ricarda Huch says that what humanity needs most of all today is to get to know the devil. She does not consider it so necessary for people to come to know God; it is much more important, she says, to get to know the devil.

Ricarda Huch does not know, of course, why this is necessary, but she has an instinctive feeling that it is so. Hence her remarkable cry for knowledge of the devil in the first chapters of the book. This is highly symptomatic and significant for our time. Her thinking is: People will come to know God again once they know that the devil is all around them. Individuals like this, who still do not want to take up anthroposophy, will always look for a way to apologize for their statements. Ricarda Huch does feel that people must get to know the devil as someone who is very real; but she immediately says, as a kind of apology, that one should not, of course, imagine the devil to be walking around in the street with horns and a tail. Oh, but he does walk around! ‘They never know the devil is about, Not even when he has them by the collar.’⁴ Modern abstract thinking immediately needs an apology, even if someone knows instinctively what is most urgently needed. But there is a good and real instinct for the present time behind this cry for the devil. People should not simply grow blindly, as if asleep, into what iron necessity demands of them in the immediate future, which is to use the messengers of the devil in our work in laboratories, workshops, banks and everywhere else. They have to use them so that civilization may progress; but they must know the devil, they must know that the keys which are used, say, to unlock the vaults have the devil's power in them. Ricarda Huch knows this instinctively, and people need to know it, for only knowledge will take us into the future in the right way. It is of immense importance that there are people who, out of instinct, point to the need which exists to know the devil and not walk past him fast asleep, for he is getting more and more powerful.

Perhaps there is something else that is characteristic—I mention it only in passing: In Paradise, too, it was a woman who instinctively allowed the functions of the devil to enter into Paradise. I think it is not much to the credit of men in our civilization that they are still calling this kind of thing superstition and refuse to have anything to do with it, once again leaving it to a woman. It may indeed be characteristic that a woman, Ricarda Huch, is calling for the devil, just as once in Paradise it was Eve who let in the devil. This merely as a passing comment.

It is the devil who will and must be the bearer of our future civilization. This is a harsh truth, but it is important. It is intimately bound up with the fact that destructive powers will have to enter into the future progress of civilization. Above all—and I will speak of this tomorrow—destructive powers will have to enter into the whole field of education, and especially the education of children, unless the matter is taken in hand with wisdom. Because of the general trend of civilization, and the customary practices and emotions of people, destructive powers will also enter more and more into the whole social sphere. They will above all bring more and more destruction into the actual relationships between people.

Humanity should seek to bring Christ's words to realization: ‘Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.’⁵ Technological and commercial progress will not bring this to realization, but rather: Where two or more want to fight and assault each other in my name, there am I in the midst of them. This will happen more and more in the social life and because of this there is a general difficulty today in presenting truths which will bring people together.

Let us conclude by being clear in our minds, at least for the moment—we shall continue with the subject tomorrow and the day after—about the frame of mind in which people generally receive truths. People do not like to be told truths today because they simply do not believe truth to be something which comes to human beings directly from the world of the Spirit. Modern people believe truth must always be something grown in their own garden. People in their twenties have their own point of view, they do not need to be convinced of a truth, they do not need to have the truth revealed to them, they have their own point of view. And someone who has eagerly fought for the truth, a young fellow of twenty-four, just finished at university where he may have attended lectures on philosophy—he has his point of view and enters into discussion with another who has just as eagerly fought for his own truth. Each of them believes that the absolute certain truth grows in his own garden, even if the soil has not been prepared. People are not inclined to receive truths; they announce themselves the possessors of truth. This is the characteristic element in the present time.

Ricarda Huch has put it rather nicely. She points out that in the period of Enlightenment in Europe, our present state of mind, or call it what you will, which is absolutely awash with chauvinism, was preceded by Nietzscheanism, which was far more sublime than anything connected with native pride and chauvinism. Many, many people became followers of Nietzsche and it was he who set up the ideal of the ‘tawny beast’. People actually had little idea of what this meant. Ricarda Huch says: People who did not even have what it takes to be a decent pet rabbit fancied themselves as ‘tawny beasts’ of the kind Nietzsche presented.⁶ There you have the modern bourgeois point of view. One does not have what it takes to be a decent rabbit, but if someone establishes a high ideal—that is how they like to see themselves! One considers oneself to be this, without doing anything to achieve it. People do not feel they need to develop, for they cannot bear the idea of being something in the future; they want to be something now. This splits them apart into human atoms, each with his own point of view, with no one able to understand anyone else.

There, in this mood where no one can understand anyone else, you see the destructive powers at work in human society. This is driving people apart. It was, of course, the devil who presented people with the temptation to be ‘tawny beasts’. They did not actually become such beasts, but even so, the nineteenth-century impulses which destroy social life in the twentieth century have certainly taken root. We will continue with this tomorrow.

• 1. Leonardo da Vinci, 1452–1519.
• 2. Examples are the chapter on the evolution of the world and the human being in Occult Science. An Outline (trans. by G. and M. Adams; Rudolf Steiner Press, London 1969) and the chapter on our Atlantean forebears in Cosmic Memory (translated by K. E. Zimmer; Steinerbooks, New York 1976).
• 3. Ricarda Huch (1864–1947), German writer: Luthers Glaube, Briefe an einen Freund (Luther's faith, letters to a friend), Leipzig: Insel-Verlag 1916. A new edition of the work appeared in 1964.
• 4. Quote from Goethe's Faust, Part 1, scene in Auerbach's Tavern. Trans. by Philip Wayne; Penguin.
• 5. Matthew 18:20.
• 6. The German term for ‘tawny beast’ is ‘blonde Bestie’. Nietzsche experts are in two minds about the interpretation of the term. It comes from Nietzsche's Zur Genealogie der Moral (1887, I, 11): ‘das Raubtier, die prachtvolle nach Beute lstern schweifende blonde Bestie’ (the predator, that magnificent blonde/tawny beast roaming far and wide lusting for prey). One interpretation is that this refers to the Janissary, a ‘killing order’ of warriors who in their boyhood had been taken from Christian families by the Turks and, thus removed from the humanizing influence of a family, trained to be utterly ruthless and inhuman. Other experts, and clearly also Ricarda Huch, think the term refers to a lion. (Translator.)

The spiritual constitution is such today that we are getting to know grave and significant truths and insights, as you have seen. I have had to emphasize that the insights which humanity currently finds acceptable will not be adequate for the future. But we must know the reasons why such insights are not adequate, if we are to connect ourselves in all seriousness and dignity with the impulses which really have to be given for the further evolution of humanity. What I want to say today is perhaps best understood if I start by going back to the fourth post-Atlantean period. As you know, this began in the eighth century before the Mystery of Golgotha and ended in the fifteenth century after the Mystery of Golgotha when human beings essentially related to the environment, the outside world, in a very different way from the way in which we inevitably must do today. I have often stressed that human evolution has to be taken seriously. Souls change much more than we believe, and it is part of the sheer modern laziness of mind to think that the inner life was just the same in ancient Greece, say, as it is today. Today I will merely consider one aspect of this: the relationship to the world around us.

Lazy thinkers will say: The Greeks and the Romans perceived the world around them and we, too, perceive the world around us; there is no appreciable difference. Oh, but there is an appreciable difference. It is actually true to say that today, at the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantean period, people perceive the world around them, in so far as it is perceptible to the senses, in quite a different way from the ancient Greeks, for example. The Greeks also saw colours and heard sounds; but they still saw spiritual entities through the colours. They did not merely think spiritual entities, for there made themselves known to them through the colours.

In my book Riddles of the Soul¹ I attempted to make this peculiarity of the Greeks into a thread running through the whole book. Modern people think thoughts. The Greeks did not think thoughts in the same degree; they saw the thoughts which came to them out of the world they perceived around them. Instead of merely being blue or red, the blue and the red in the world around them told them the thoughts which they would then think. This created an intimate relationship to the world. It also created an intense feeling of being connected with an environment which had spiritual qualities. The nature of the human constitution was totally different in the fourth postAtlantean period, and perceptions were therefore different.

In the evolution of the present earth, distinction must be made between major epochs, a general description of which is given in Occult Science—first and second age, Lemurian age, Atlantean age, our own post-Atlantean age and two which are to follow. We may say that during the Atlantean age both the earth and humanity had reached their midpoint. Up to then everything was growth and development. In some respect this has not been the case since the Atlantean age. It certainly is no longer the case where the earth is concerned. When we walk on the soil today—I have mentioned this on a number of occasions—we are walking on something which is crumbling away; it is no longer something that is growing, as it was in early times. Before and until the middle of the Atlantean age the earth was much more of a growing, sprouting organism. It then started to develop cracks and fissures, we might say; and it was only then that the rocks of today, with their cracks and fissures, developed. This is something known not only in anthroposophy today. You find an excellent description of the breaking up, shattering, of our present-day earth in Eduard Suess's outstanding scientific work The Face of the Earth.² Using broad brush-strokes he presents the outer conformation of the earth today—its face, as it were—by outlining the properties of minerals, rocks and the different formations to be found both on and in the earth, as well as the properties of organic life forms in the realm of the earth. Basing himself entirely on scientific facts, Suess comes to the conclusion that the earth is decaying and crumbling away.

This, however, is also true for all physical creatures which inhabit the earth. They are on the downward curve of evolution and have been so, essentially, from the middle of the Atlantean age. Evolution does, however, go in waves and it is possible to say that the fourth post-Atlantean period, the Greek and Roman civilization, was a kind of recapitulation of what existed in the Atlantean age. Up until the time of ancient Greece, therefore, it was not so clearly evident that humanity was on the downward curve of evolution. It was a feature of ancient Greece that the inner life was still in complete harmony with physical development—I have spoken of this before. That harmony was, of course, greatest in the middle of the Atlantean age, but it was recapitulated in ancient Greece. The total human constitution of the ancient Greeks has been discussed on a number of occasions, especially in our characterization of Greek art, which we know to have come from quite different impulses than the art of later periods.³ The Greeks still had an inner feeling for the etheric in the human form; they did not need the models we need today, because they felt the form inside themselves. We are thus able to say that until the time of ancient Greece, the living human body was determined and maintained by the immediate environment. Human beings were intimately bound up with the space immediately around them.

This changed with the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantean age. Strange as it may seem to you, it is nevertheless true to say: We really are no longer in this world to take care of our own organization. We do still incarnate, but no longer in order to take care of our own organization. This organization evolved until the middle of the Atlantean age, or until ancient Greek times. Then, human bodies were as perfect as they can be during time spent on earth. It will not be until the Jupiter epoch that humanity achieves a higher level of physical perfection. Now, we are really here to be part of a downward curve of evolution, to incarnate in order to learn and experience all manner of things by the very fact that we are in bodies which are dying, increasingly crumbling and withering away. I am using fairly radical terms. The fact is, however, that anything we inwardly develop and inwardly are, will no longer become part of the outer physical body to the same extent as it did in the past. The consequence of this will be all kinds of changes in development.

In March this year, a very important person died in Zurich—Franz Brentano.⁴ You will find a memoir in my book Riddles of the Soul,⁵ which is due to appear shortly. The book will have three parts and an appendix. In the first part I am discussing the relationship between anthropology and anthroposophy; in the second part I am showing the attitude of modern ‘scholars’ to anthroposophy, giving Dessoir⁶ as an example; and in the third part I intend to show how Franz Brentano, a man with a fine mind, was held in thrall by modern science, but nevertheless came as close as anyone can get to anthroposophy with his psychology. The appendix will give brief outlines of aspects which in the present situation can only be touched on, though they might well provide the subject matter for several volumes. I have made it into a number of short chapters in the new book because the times are getting more and more difficult today and the situation does not permit a more extensive treatment. With some of the things which are written in this manner for the present time, one does have the feeling that one is in a way writing something of a testament. Those who are inwardly conscious of the whole weight of present events will no doubt know what I mean.

One of the many things Franz Brentano's sensitive mind has produced is a treatise on genius.⁷ Oddly enough, Brentano is actually showing that there is no such thing as genius, demonstrating over and over again that a genius has the same inner qualities and impulses as anyone else, that memory and the ability to make connections are merely more flexible and comprehensive in the case of a genius, etc. Franz Brentano creates an idea of genius which differs a great deal from the usual idea. We have to admit that our usual idea of genius tends to be pretty vague, like all the stereotyped ideas people have today. In general terms we may say that Brentano's characterization of genius does not agree with the idea of a genius as it has existed until now; it does, however, agree with what genius will be in the future, for it will not be the same in the future.

In the past, people were geniuses because their souls still had the power, through heredity or education, to send impulses into the physical body which caused the Intuitions, Inspirations and Imaginations of a genius to arise unconsciously. The power of genius was therefore available when the body was still in the ascendant. In future, bodies will be in the descendant and the power will no longer be available. Anything resembling genius in the future will arise because the individuals concerned, whom we may also call geniuses, see more deeply into the spiritual world which is all around them. Thus the impulses will not come from their unconscious physical aspect but out of deeper insight into the world of the spirit. The changing nature of genius provides an excellent demonstration of the break which has occurred between evolution as it was in the past and evolution as it will be in the future. We might say that in the past genius arose from the body, but in the future this will be replaced by something which comes from insight into the realm of the spirit. A mind sensitive to present developments like that of Brentano would be aware of this, just as Suess, looking at the earth, realized that it is now in the process of dying.

What lies behind it all? The fact that human beings now relate to their environment in a different way. The space around us no longer speaks to us in the way it did when human bodies were ‘fresh’, as it were. The world around us is one of space, but it no longer yields up the spiritual element. Colours no longer speak to us as elements filled with spirit, sounds no longer reveal the spirit that is in them; they have become substantial. And human nature has become more inward. It is strange to say, is it not, that the superficial human beings of the present time really and truly have become more inward. On the other hand human beings of today may be said to be superficial because in their present incarnation their inner constitution is such that they simply cannot reach their own inner being. They do not become aware of their inner nature; they do not gain the power to know themselves; they do not discover what they really are.

Someone who sees the world with the eye of the spirit sees many people today who simply are not themselves. Bodies are walking around, and the soul is not entirely inside them. Why? Because it is no longer the soul's task to enter fully into the body, which is beginning to crumble away; instead the soul's task is to prepare for what will happen on Jupiter. Our souls are even now making preparations for the future.

This is the situation we must penetrate with a perceptive mind. We are entirely constituted to hear the words of a cosmic spirit: ‘My kingdom is not of this world.’ But it will be a long time before human beings are prepared to grasp this truth. Yet in spite of our outward superficiality we are truly less and less of this world. This, however, should not be confused with something else. People might well believe they could now walk around like Nietzsche's followers who called themselves ‘tawny beasts’, saying: We are in the world of the spirit; we do not belong to the physical world. The answer to this must be: The part of yourself of which you have knowledge does belong to the physical world; the rest is occult; it is hidden.

Nevertheless, we have the task of using all our powers of insight and all our inner strength to become aware of the essential element in us which can no longer give itself completely to the body, nor penetrate the whole body. We must see ourselves as candidates for the Jupiter age. This will only happen gradually, however. For the time being, human beings still continue in what they receive from their environment. It means that they continue in something which is below them. With every incarnation we withdraw more and more from the body, so that to some extent we are hovering above it.

If this were not the case, and people had to depend entirely on being like the ancient Greeks, the prospects for the further development of humanity would be dire indeed. Strange as it may seem, conscientious occult research aiming to penetrate the laws of human evolution reveals a truth which may well cause dismay at first sight. It shows that in a time not all that far ahead, possibly as early as the seventh millennium, all women will be infertile on earth. The withering and crumbling of human bodies will go so far that this will happen. Just think—if the relationships that can only come into their own between the inner life and the physical body were to continue unchanged, people would no longer find anything to do on earth. The fact is that women will no longer be able to have children, even before the earth has gone through all its stages. Human beings therefore have to find a different way of relating to earthly existence. The final stages of earth evolution will make it necessary for them to do without physical bodies and yet be present on earth. Existence holds more mysteries than people would like to think when they base themselves on the primitive ideas of modern science.

There was an instinctive feeling for this in the twilight of the fourth, and the dawn of the fifth, post-Atlantean age. Things were said then which relate to developments in our own age. They could not be understood, however, and people often did not even properly understand human nature. Think of the seemingly brutal teaching of St Augustine, for example, and also of Calvin, that some people were destined to be blessed, others to be condemned, some to be good, therefore, and others evil. Such was the doctrine. It seems brutal. And yet, seen in the right light, such doctrines do not seem entirely wrong. Many things which seem wrong are also to some extent relatively right. Knowledge of human nature at the time of St Augustine and in the centuries which followed did not actually relate to the human mind and spirit—as you know, the human spirit was decreed to be non-existent at the Council of Constantinople—but to the human being who walks the earth. Let one try and put as clearly as I can what this is really about.

You may meet one person and then another, and in St Augustine's terms we might say: this one is destined for good, and that one for evil. But only the outer physical body, not the individual personality. The latter was not even discussed in Augustine's day. If you have a number of people you may say—but it only has come to have meaning in more recent times and it would have been meaningless at the time of the ancient Greeks—These are human souls; they do, of course, fashion their own destinies. No impulses come to them from predestination. But they dwell in bodies destined for good or evil.

As earth evolution progresses, human beings will be less and less able to develop their souls parallel to their bodies. Why, then, should it not be possible for an individual to incarnate in a body, the whole constitution of which destines it for evil? The individual can still be good inside such a body, for the connection with the physical has become less close. This, then, is another awkward truth, but a truth which we must make our own.

In short, human beings are becoming more and more inward and we must seriously come to realize that during the final epochs of earth evolution they will withdraw from the outer physical body. It will however, need the brutal reality of the facts to get human beings to accept these things, and this can only be gradually, as I have said on a number of occasions. The facts will force them to know these things.

Looking at the way people appear on the outside today we get one image. Looking at the way they do not immediately appear on the outside we get another image. Today the two images are no longer in complete agreement, and they will agree less and less as time goes on. It is really necessary for people today not to rely entirely on outer appearances if they want to form an idea; they have to base their ideas on the things which influence human beings out of the spirit.

In the future, ideas like these will be particularly vital in everything connected with politics, the social sciences, and so on, and especially also the sphere of education. Ideas coming from the natural and not from the spiritual world can no longer adequately meet human needs. Hence the inadequate political and social theories we have today. People want to base their judgement only on their physical environment; they do not want to be inspired by anything of a spiritual nature. This is the reason why their theories and political programmes are so inadequate. We are living in an age when programmes like the one which Woodrow Wilson is presenting are no longer appropriate;⁸ the age demands world programmes created out of other depths. It will need the assistance of the spirit to make world programmes today.

People have not yet reached the point, however, where they can really be conscious of the truth of everything I have just told you. They are lumbering behind. They have been people of the fifth post-Atlantean age for a long time, but they still want to think like people of the fourth post-Atlantean age. That was right, it was great and truly in harmony in ancient Greek times. It is utterly wrong, however, to think like a Greek today.

The Greeks were given everything they needed from their environment, an environment which no longer exists today. In many respects one first of all notes a form of hatred or dislike arising—hatred being merely another aspect of fear—when it comes to taking an inward look at the human being. People want to limit themselves to the outer aspect. And so we get echoes of the past that are nothing but echoes of a time when human beings were not fully in control of their lives.

A very interesting phenomenon, one I would ask you to take a really good look at, is the following. Imagine we have a number of people putting their heads together, in a meeting, let us say—illuminated minds are meeting all the time nowadays. Well, the actual spiritual element has already separated to some extent; it really is no longer entirely present in those heads, for it has become inward. If there are thinkers present at the meeting, even superficial thinkers, the real heads are hidden from view—the people who are sitting there are not aware of them. And so it may be that you get meetings, or individuals, with old ideas running on like clockwork in those visible physical heads. These people have no idea of the demands of our time, but their automatic minds may bring up all kinds of echoes from the past. It is interesting that such things happen every now and again.

In 1912 a science called eugenetics was established in London.⁹ People tend to use high-falutin' names for anything which is particularly stupid. The ideas you find in eugenetics really came from people's brains and not from their souls. What are the aims of this science? To ensure that only healthy individuals are born in future and not inferior ones; economics and anthropology are to join forces to discover the laws according to which men and women are to be brought together in such a way that a strong race is produced.

People are really beginning to think in this way. The ideal of the London congress, which was chaired by Darwin's son,¹⁰ was to examine people of different classes to see how large the skulls of the rich were compared to those of the poor, who have less opportunity for learning; how far sensibility went in rich and poor; how far the rich could resist getting tired and how far the poor would do so, and so on. They want to gain information on the human body in this way which may at some future date enable them to establish exactly the following: This is how the man should look, this is how the woman should look, if they are to produce the true human being of the future; he should have such a capacity for getting tired and she such a capacity; this size skull for him, and a matching size for her, and so on.

Those are the rumblings, natural rumblings, in brains which are emptied of soul; ideas rumbling about which had reality in the Atlantean age. Then there really were laws which enabled people to determine size, growth, and all kinds of things by cross-breeding and the like. It was a science that was widespread in Atlantean times and—as I mentioned yesterday—sorely misused. Atlantean science worked on the basis of physical relationships and it was known that if such a man was brought together with such a woman—differences between men and women were much greater at the time—the result would be such and such a creature, and then a different variety could be produced—just as plant breeders do today. The Mysteries brought order into this cross-breeding, where related and different elements were brought together. They established groups and withdrew anything which had to be withdrawn from humanity . The blackest of black magic was practised in Atlantean times, and order was created by establishing classes and taking these matters out of human control. This was one of the factors which led to the nations and races of today. The issue of the nation as an entity is coming up again in our present time; it is an echo of the soulless brain from Atlantean times. There is so much talk about national issues today. But it is only the body speaking. The spirit has withdrawn and already belongs to a totally different world today. There you have the discrepancy between the reality and the speechifying about the ‘principle of nationality’ which goes on today. This will never lead to anything good; if politics are based on issues relating to nations, which are no longer issues of the day because the soul belongs to entirely different orders and realms than those which come to expression in our physical nature, this will inevitably take us into chaos over and over again. All this must be known, and it can only be known through anthroposophy. Those rumblings in brains emptied of soul are the reason why ideas that human beings should be produced on the basis of certain laws are now coming up again.

Something else also reveals the rumblings of outdated ideas, ideas which can still be active in dried-up brains but which no longer come from the soul. The soul needs to be made strong, so that anthroposophy can enter into it. Then people will speak out of their individual reality again.

You have no doubt heard of all the nonsense we get now, with all kinds of different people shown to be what they are in the light of psychopathology. All it needs is for someone to write a decent poem; the doctor will immediately tell you what illness he has. So we get all kinds of treatises—on Viktor Scheffel from the psychiatrist's point of view, on Nietzsche from the psychiatrist's point of view, and on Conrad Ferdinand Meyer from the psychiatrist's point of view.¹¹ Reading between the lines we feel the authors of these books are saying: Pity he did not get treatment in time. If he had had treatment at the right time, someone like Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, for example, would not have written the kinds of things he has written, for they are entirely written out of a diseased state.

It is very much in the spirit of our time that no attention is paid to the growing inwardness of individual human beings. Sometimes this must inevitably have the effect, especially in someone like Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, of the outward, physical body showing signs of disease, so that the inner life can achieve the highest spiritual level in a work of art, quite independent of the physical body.¹²

I am not bringing these things up in order to criticize them. From the purely medical point of view they are, of course, correct; there is nothing to be said against them. It is equally possible to do something else from a purely medical point of view. You can take the gospels and show, from a number of things, that Jesus Christ—that strange individual—existed because some quite specific pathological elements had come together. Such a book has in fact been written, and anyone can read it.¹³ Another book shows that everything which came from the individual called Jesus could only have come from this individual because he was suffering from a particular disease.

We must penetrate all these things with our understanding if we are to enter into present developments. I especially want to discuss the education issue in this context, to show you that today growing children cannot be considered in a way which focuses only on things which come to outward expression. If we were to do so, our efforts at education would sometimes simply fail to reach the element which is now becoming more and more inward. Such things are not properly taken into account today, and this is why there is so little understanding and so much philistinism. In some respects, philistinism is the opposite of a true understanding of human nature, for philistines always like to stick to the norm. Anything which does not fit in with this is considered abnormal. But this will not help us to understand the world around us and, above all, other human beings. One of the things we should encourage in our Anthroposophical Society is to learn to understand human beings so that we may give due regard to the individual nature of others. Individuals differ much more from each other than one thinks, for the human soul no longer relates entirely to the body and this makes human beings very complex today.

This, of course, has other consequences, though the matter is dealt with rather clumsily today; we must hope that anthroposophy will help people become less clumsy about it. Just consider, in ancient Greece the whole body was filled with the whole soul, and they were in agreement. Today this is not the case, for the bodies are partly empty. I am not saying anything derogatory about empty heads; they will stay empty as part of evolution. In reality, however, nothing stays empty in this world. The heads are merely empty of something which was destined to fill them at another time. Nothing is ever completely empty.

With the human soul withdrawing more and more from the body, the body is increasingly in danger of being filled with something else. And if human beings are not prepared to take up impulses which can only come from spiritual knowledge, the body will be filled with demonic powers. Humanity is facing a destiny where the body may be filled with ahrimanic demonic powers. So we have to add to what I said yesterday about future development: there will be people in future who are Tom, Dick and Harry in ordinary life, which is something determined by social circumstances, but their bodies will be empty to such an extent that a powerful ahrimanic spirit can live in them. One will be meeting ahrimanic demons. Human beings will not be what they appear to be. The individual person will be deep down inside, and outwardly one will get a totally different picture.

This shows the complexity of life to come. It is reasonable to say that there will be situations in future when it will be difficult to know who one is dealing with. Ricarda Huch's longing for the devil really arises from what will be coming in the future. The institutions and ideas, especially the social ideas people have today, are abstract and crude; they are clumsy in the face of the complexities that are lying ahead. And because people are not able to have ideas or concepts about the true nature of things, they are sliding more and more deeply into chaos—the events of the war make this quite clear. Chaos is arising because reality has changed; reality is becoming fuller and richer than anything people are able to think of or create in their heads. And we shall have to be clear in our minds that we are faced with a choice: To go on beating each other to a pulp, shooting at one another, in the way we do now, because we do not know how to bring order into the world or, start to develop concepts and ideas to match the complexity of the situation.

A spiritual movement must exist where people seek to develop concepts which meet the real situation. There will be vast numbers of people in future who want to stick to the rumblings of the past—today they are still in the minority. Their concepts, ideas and actions will be based on the outside world around them and on the fact that their bodies are being filled with the ahrimanic spirit which wants them to form such ideas. We should not fool ourselves, for we are faced with a quite specific movement. At the Council of Constantinople it was decreed that the spirit did not exist; it was dogmatically stated that the human being consisted only of body and soul, and it was heresy to speak of a human spirit. In the same way attempts will be made to decree the soul, the inner life, as nonexistent.

The time will come—and it may not be far off—when quite different tendencies will come up at a congress like the one held in 1912 and people will say: It is pathological for people to even think in terms of spirit and soul. ‘Sound’ people will speak of nothing but the body. It will be considered a sign of illness for anyone to arrive at the idea of any such thing as a spirit or a soul. People who think like that will be considered to be sick and—you can be quite sure of it—a medicine will be found for this. At Constantinople the spirit was made non-existent. The soul will be made non-existent with the aid of a drug. Taking a ‘sound point of view’, people will invent a vaccine to influence the organism as early as possible, preferably as soon as it is born, so that this human body never even gets the idea that there is a soul and a spirit.

The two philosophies of life will be in complete opposition. One movement will need to reflect how concepts and ideas may be developed to meet the reality of soul and spirit. The others, the heirs of modern materialism, will look for the vaccine to make the body ‘healthy’, that is, makes its constitution such that this body no longer talks of such rubbish as soul and spirit, but takes a ‘sound’ view of the forces which live in engines and in chemistry and let planets and suns arise from nebulae in the cosmos. Materialistic physicians will be asked to drive the souls out of humanity.

People who think that playful ideas will help them to look ahead to the future are very much mistaken. We need serious, profound ideas to look ahead to the future. Anthroposophy is not a game, nor just a theory; it is a task that must be faced for the sake of human evolution.

• 1. Steiner, Rudolf, Riddles of the Soul. Translated by Eva Frommer. Rudolf Steiner Press, Bristol 1994.
• 2. Eduard von Suess (1831–1914), Austrian geologist born in London, Professor of Geology in Vienna from 1875 to 1901. He was the founder of the ‘new geology’ and a member of the Lower House in Austria. His most important work, Das Antlitz der Erde, was translated into English in 1904–1910.
• 3. The major lecture given by Rudolf Steiner on this subject was in Dornach on 24 January 1917. This lecture, entitled ‘Griechische und Roemische Plastik—Renaissance-Plastik’ (Greek and Roman sculpture—Renaissance sculpture), has been published in Kunstgeschichte als Abbild innerer geistiger Impulse, GA 292. It has not yet been translated into English.
• 4. Franz Brentano (1838–1917), Catholic priest who abandoned the priesthood in 1873. Professor of Philosophy at Wurzburg 1872–1880, senior lecturer at the University of Vienna 1880–1895.
• 5. Steiner, Rudolf, Riddles of the Soul (see Note 1 above). The parts are: Anthropology and anthroposophy; Max Dessoir on anthroposophy; Franz Brentano, a memoir; outline extensions.
• 6. Max Dessoir (1867–1947), Professor of Philosophy in Berlin.
• 7. Das Genie, lecture given in the hall of the Engineers' and Architects' Society in Vienna, published in Leipzig in 1892.
• 8. Woodrow Wilson, see Note 2 of lecture I.
• 9. ‘Eugenetics’ or, more commonly, ‘eugenics’, a term coined by Francis Galton (1822–1911) in a series of articles on ‘Hereditary talent and genius’ published in 1865. The term is now generally only used in the applied sense, whilst the scientific discipline is now called genetics.
• 10. Leonard Darwin (1850–1943) was Chairman of the Eugenics Education Society from 1911 to 1928; his book The Need for Eugenic Reform was published in 1926.
• 11. Paul Moebius (1853–1907): Goethe, 2 voll, Leipzig 1903; Nietzsche, Leipzig 1904; Schopenhauer, Leipzig 1904; Ueber Scheffels Krankheit, Halle 1907.
• 12. The 1941 German edition has the following additional sentences at this point: It is easy to see why people have no mind for such things today, materialism being so prevalent. They have to be said, however, for they are realities. The future will show that all efforts which do not arise from the Spirit will not be for the good, but will increasingly lead to chaos. These are facts which have to be reckoned with.
  
  The shorthand record does not include these sentences and it is assumed they got into the earlier edition by accident.
• 13. De Loosten (Dr Georg Lomer), Jesus Christus vom Standpunkte des Psychiaters, Bamberg 1905. Also, Emil Rasmussen, Jesus. Eine vergleichende psychopathologische Studie, Leipzig 1905.

If we are to continue in the right way today, we must consider something of the nature of the human being and how human beings are part of historical evolution. First of all we consider the fact that human beings have the power, or the gift, of the intellect. What does this mean? It means that we are able to form ideas. For the moment we need not reflect on where these ideas come from. The life of thought is with us wherever we are in waking consciousness. And we also feel, for instance, that when we walk, stand or do anything else, we are guided by our thoughts, by something which exists first of all in the mind. Later on we shall discuss if this really is the case. For the moment I merely want to establish what fills the conscious mind in everyday life. It is our thoughts. But when it comes to the world of thought as such, the matter is really quite different. And we shall not understand how human beings really relate to their thoughts unless we first consider the true nature of the world of thought.

In reality we are always, wherever we are—whether sitting, standing or lying down—not only in the world of air and light and so on, but also in a world of surging thoughts. You will find it easiest to get an idea of this if you look at it like this: When you walk on earth as an ordinary physical human being you are also a breathing human being, walking in a space filled with air. And in more or less the same way you move in a space filled with thoughts. Thought-substance fills the space around you. It is not a vague ocean of thoughts, nor the kind of nebulous ether people sometimes like to imagine. No, this thought-substance is actually what we call the elemental world. When we speak of entities which are part of the elemental world in the widest sense of the word, they consist of thought-substance, actual thought-substance. There is, however, a difference between the thoughts flitting around out there, which really are living entities, and the thoughts we have in our minds. I have spoken of this difference on a number of occasions. In my book due to be published shortly, and which I mentioned yesterday,¹ you will find further references to this difference.

You may well ask yourself: If there is such an elemental principle out there in thought-space and if I, too, have thoughts in my head—what is the relationship between the two? To get the right idea of how your own thoughts relate to the thought-entities out there you have to visualize the difference between a human corpse which has been left behind when someone has died and a living person who is walking about. The kind of thoughts you have to consider in this respect are the kind you gain from the world you perceive with the senses when in waking consciousness. Our own thoughts are actually thought-corpses. This is the essential point. The thoughts coming from the world we perceive with the senses and drag around with us when in waking consciousness are thought-corpses—thoughts that have been killed. Outside us they are alive, which is the difference.

We are part of the elemental world of thought in so far as we kill its living thoughts when we develop ideas on the basis of what our senses have perceived in the world around us. Our thinking consists in having those corpses of thoughts inside us, and this makes our thoughts abstract. We have abstract thoughts because we kill living thoughts. It is really true that in our state of consciousness we walk around bearing thought corpses which we call our thoughts and ideas. This is the reality.

The living thoughts in the outside world are certainly not unrelated to us; there is a living relationship. I can demonstrate this to you, but do not be frightened by the grotesque nature of this unaccustomed idea. Imagine you are lying in bed and it is morning. You can get up in two different ways. Ordinarily, you are not aware of the difference between them because you are not in the habit of making the distinction, and anyway you do not pay attention to this particular moment of getting up. Nevertheless, you can get up out of habit, without thinking about it, or you can actually produce the thought: I am now going to get up. There are people, however, who get themselves up out of sheer habit, and yet there is just a touch of the idea: I am going to get up now. To repeat, many people do not make the distinction, but it can be made in the abstract, and the difference is enormous. If you get up without giving it a thought, out of sheer habit and training, you are following impulses given by the Spirits of Form, the Elohim, when they created human beings as dwellers on earth at the beginning of earth evolution. So you see, if you switch off your own thinking and always get up like a machine, you are not getting up without thought having gone into it, but it is not your own thought. The form of movement involved in getting up involves thoughts—objective, not subjective, inner thoughts; these are not your thoughts but those of the Spirits of Form.

If you were a terribly lazy person who really did not want to get up at all, if it really was not in your nature to get up and you would only get up on reflection, against your nature, out of purely subjective thought, you'd be following ahrimanic tendencies; you would be following only your head, and therefore Ahriman. As I said, the distinction is not made in ordinary life. And everything else we do is really done in the same way as our getting up. Human beings truly are made up of two entities which can be outwardly distinguished as the head and the rest of the body. The human head is an extraordinarily significant instrument and much older than the rest of the body. The construction of the human head is such—I spoke about this last year²—that the basic shape arose during Moon evolution, though the head has, in fact, come down through Saturn, Sun and Moon evolution. Humans would look quite different if they still had the shape they had during Moon evolution.

In very general terms we might say people would look like spectres, with only the form of the head emerging somewhat more clearly, which was the original intent. The rest of the body was not meant to be as visible as it is now. These things have to be considered, otherwise we cannot really understand human evolution on earth. The rest of the body was meant to be purely elemental by nature. In the head, everything would come into effect which has come down as Moon existence transformed by earth; let us call it ‘a’. But this inherited Moon existence transformed by earth is the actual human being, for the human being is really a head with only a very insignificant attachment.

The rest of the human being—let us call it ‘b’ and to begin with let us simply consider it to be this elemental, airy principle—is a manifestation of the higher hierarchies, from the Spirits of Form downwards. The right and only way of seeing the human being is to realize that everything shown here as ‘b’ has been created by the cosmic hierarchies. The human being which has evolved from the time of Saturn emerged against the background of the cosmic hierarchies. If you visualize the essential nature of the parts of the human being which are not head—you must think of it as all spirit, or at least all air—then you have the body of cosmic hierarchies (drawing on the board).

However, luciferic seduction entered into the whole process of evolution. The outcome was that this whole, more elemental, body condensed to become the rest of the human body, which of course also had an effect on the head. This will give you an idea of the true nature of the human being. Apart from the head, which is their own, having come from earlier evolution, human beings would be an outward manifestation of the Elohim if their bodies had not become sensuous flesh. It is entirely due to the temptations of Lucifer that this outward manifestation of the Elohim has condensed to become flesh.

Something very strange has arisen as a result, an important secret to which I have referred a number of times. What has happened is that the human being has become the image of the gods in the very organs which are normally called the organs of his lower nature. This image of the gods has been debased in human beings as they are on earth. The highest principle in human beings, the spiritual principle coming from the cosmos, has become their lower nature. Please, do not forget that this is an important secret of human nature. Our lower nature, which is due to Lucifer's influence, was actually destined to be our higher nature. This is the contradictory element in human nature. Rightly understood, it will solve countless riddles in the world and in life.

We are thus able to say: In the course of human evolution man has, thanks to the luciferic element, made the part of him that should be constantly emerging from the cosmos into his lower nature. Many historical phenomena will find their explanation if you consider that this was known to the leaders of the ancient Mysteries, people who were not as facetious, cynical and narrow-minded as people are today. Certain symbols taken from the lower nature and used in the past, symbols that today are merely seen as sexual symbols, are explained by the fact that the priests who used them in the ancient Mysteries did so in order to give expression to the higher reality of the lower nature of man.

You can see how sensitive we have to be in dealing with these things if we are not to be facetious. Modern people slip easily into facetiousness, because they cannot even imagine that there is more to human beings than mere sensuality—which, in fact, is the luciferic element in our higher nature. Thus historical symbols are easily given entirely the wrong interpretation. It takes some nobility of spirit not to interpret the old symbols in a lower sense, even though they often can be interpreted in that way.

With this, you will also begin to realize that if thoughts from the elemental world come to us—they are living thoughts, not abstract, dead ones that come from the head—they must be coming out of the whole human being. Mere reflection will not achieve this. Today the idea is that we only arrive at our thoughts by reflection. Today the idea is: If human beings will just reflect, they can think about anything, providing the things they want to think about are accessible. This is nonsense, however. The truth is that the human race is in a process of evolution, and the thoughts developed by Copernicus, for example, or Galileo, at a particular time could not be reached by mere reflection before that time. You see, people fabricate the thoughts they have in their heads. But when a thought which marks a real change arises in world history, this thought is given by the gods and through the whole human being. It flows through the human being, overcoming the luciferic element, and only reaches the head out of the whole human being. I think this is something you can understand. In certain ages, particular thoughts just have to be waited for and expected; then human beings are not merely reflecting, nor is something conveyed through their eyes or ears, but inspiration comes from the world of the hierarchies and it comes through the whole essential human being, which is the image of the hierarchies.

If you consider this, some of the things I said yesterday can also tell you great deal. In the present age, from the fifth post-Atlantean age, we are living much more inwardly than before—in ancient Greek times, for example, when the outer environment provided much more that was spiritual. This inwardness of life relates to the process in which thoughts come up through the whole human being. In earlier times, in the fourth post-Atlantean age, the relationship between human beings and the gods was much more of an exterior thing; today it has become much more intimate. Human beings are always associating with the gods; their heads do not normally know anything about this, however, because they only hold human thoughts, or rather the corpses of thoughts.

Human beings always associate with the gods as whole human beings, and this association is more intimate today than it was in the past. Even the nature of clairvoyance is such that the relationship to the gods and to disembodied spirits is altogether different from what it was before. When a human soul associates with spirits or with the dead, the association is a very subtle one. It is more or less similar to the way in which our own thoughts associate with our own will in the soul. It is very intimate, and this intimacy belongs to the present age. It corresponds to the essential nature of human beings here on earth and also to that of the dead, of those who are going through the gate of death to enter the world of the spirit at this time. This intimate association has become possible because in some ways the relationship between man and cosmos has changed. If the relationship which some human beings have to the world of the spirit comes to conscious awareness, it shows itself to be a much more intimate one, even today, than it was before.

Certain abilities had to be lost, so that this intimate association with the gods could develop. During the times of ancient Greece and Rome and after, right into the Middle Ages, people still had direct perception of spiritual elements in the world around them; as I said, they did not merely see physical colours in the way we do today, or hear physical sounds, but perceived spiritual elements in colours and sounds. They were also able to use the element which for us has turned into chaotic dreams as a means of entering into the world of the spirit and they did so in a way that was much less subtle than is possible today. It was relatively easy to approach the Spirits and the dead in the past. Today our ordinary dreams no longer have the same quality, though this did continue well into the Middle Ages. Some people still had it for a long time afterwards. Those earlier people also perceived as in a dream all that happened around them in the elemental thought-world of which I have spoken. They were not yet cut off from that surrounding world, and their own essential nature still extended into it. People were aware of this and acted and behaved accordingly.

Today these things are, of course, considered to be an old superstition. Yet when something significant occurs in connection with this ‘old superstition’, modern science does not know what to do with it. Let me give you just one example: Cimon, a well-known historical figure, had a friend called Astyphilos who knew how to interpret dreams. Astyphilos was able to interpret dreams intellectually. When Cimon had dreamed of a vicious, yapping dog before the Egyptian campaign, Astyphilos forecast his death, saying: ‘You have dreamt of a vicious, yapping dog; you will die in this campaign.’ The story was told by Horace.³

A modern sage who has written about dreams, though in materialistic terms, does of course believe that Cimon had an ordinary dream and Astyphilos was a mountebank who interpreted dreams. Yet he also makes a strange comment: ‘Chance willed it, however, that his prophesy came true.’ I could show you books which give irrefutable evidence of prophesies which have come true,⁴ but people will say: ‘Chance willed it.’ This is one of many examples. People imagine that the inner life has always been the same as it is today and that there has been no development in the inner life of man.

Thus the outer senses perceived more of the spiritual, and at the same time the relationship with the surrounding elemental thought-world was, in a way, based more on images. Dreams still had the quality of images which pointed to the future. Just as memory relates to the past, so the images pointed to the future, though not in the same way, of course. The constitution of the human soul was therefore entirely different in the past. Blurred dream images came into everyday sensory perception, images which nevertheless related to real happenings in the elemental world. We might put it like this: The physical world of sensory perception had not yet condensed and become solid and mineral in quality. Everywhere colour and sound still sparkled with spiritual qualities. At the same time people still had the ability to live in waking dreams, and these were reality in the elemental, objective world of thought. Then humanity was deprived of this relationship with the outside world in order to establish and strengthen human freedom; the inner life became more intimate in the way I have described.

There is something we must consider which is most important. We can use the powers of the normal intellect to reflect on the phenomena belonging to the world of nature, but we cannot use this intellect to reflect on social phenomena. People believe that the way of thinking which enables them to reflect on the events of the physical world can also be used to establish social laws and political impulses. They are actually doing so now, but the laws and impulses are of correspondingly poor quality. The kind of thing you find in Roman history, and you would also find it in later history if it had not all been turned into romance—for instance, that Numa Pompilius took his inspiration from a nymph called Egeria in certain matters of state⁵—indicates that in those days people appealed to the gods when matters of state had to be dealt with. They would not have thought it possible to create political structures merely by thinking about them. Today the idea is that individuals are not able to do this, but if you multiply the individual by so and so many times, then it can be done. So if you have a modern democracy and an enlightened parliament, three hundred heads are able to achieve by reflection what a single head cannot do, of course. This goes against one of Rosegger's statements which I have quoted a number of times: ‘One's a human being; if there are several, you've people; if you have lots of them, they're beasts!’⁶—but surely it is not what you would do in practice! And just imagine what the whole enlightened modern world would say if news were to get around—not in the old form but in a new one—that Woodrow Wilson had taken his inspiration for some decree or other from a nymph.

These things have changed, even if they are not exactly more intelligent. It will, of course, be difficult to grasp, but it is something we have to realize, that real and appropriate ideas concerning social structures will only come when people appeal again to the spirit. They are not forced to do so, and the form will be different, but this appeal to the spirit must be made again. Otherwise, everything people produce by way of political principles, social structures and ideas will be mere nothingness. There has to be living awareness of the fact that we live in the world of elemental thought and have to take our inspiration from it.

People are still able to laugh about such things today. But humanity will have to struggle through pain and suffering to gain awareness of inspiration in the creative sphere of the social order. Here we have an even more subtle indication of something that will become more and more necessary for humanity.

People will have to realize that they must now prepare themselves to make a connection again with the world of the spirit, so that they may bring into the kingdom of this world a kingdom which is not of this world but is present everywhere in the kingdom of this world. Only then will salvation come for a social sphere where chaos now reigns.

It will, however, be necessary for people to overcome the unease and reluctance they feel about concerning themselves with the intimate relationship between man and world. In the more important fields of human activity, people will have to go more deeply into the nature of this relationship as it was in the fourth post-Atlantean age. This will give them the necessary orientation so that they can really see how human beings related differently to the world around them than they do now. It is possible to study this, but we must overcome this mythology—mythology in the bad sense—we call the study of history today. We need to consider historical reality, going back at least as far as the Mystery of Golgotha, and this will be possible if the study of external history is enriched by the study of spiritual science. People will simply have to make the effort to enter into a study of spiritual science. The whole way of thinking, of course, is such nowadays that people often feel everything to be utterly grotesque when they begin to enter into the world of the spirit; people instinctively think that things will look just the same there as they do in the physical world. All they are prepared to accept is that they will find a more refined, subtle form of this world, and they fail to understand that they will find it completely different, so much so that even the smallest detail will come as a surprise.

Let us assume a modern philosopher, your normal kind of university professor, were to have some kind of Inspiration⁷—it would be a small miracle, but let us assume such a miracle were to happen—so that for five minutes he were in a position to ask the world of the spirit if he was a true philosopher with a true inner vocation. What do you think the answer would be? He would be given an image; this would be the right answer, only it would need to be correctly interpreted. This is really true; I am telling you something which has happened innumerable times. The answer would be that the philosopher is given ass's ears. And the interpretation of this would be: ‘I am indeed a real philosopher.’ This is not a joke. The point is that some ideas mean one thing in the physical world and exactly the opposite in the spiritual world. In the physical world it is not a distinction to have ass's ears; in the spiritual world, having ass's ears as an image is worth much, much more than the highest distinction ever awarded to a professor of philosophy. But imagine someone who is only used to the physical world and who suddenly—as I said, by a miracle—becomes clairvoyant and sees himself wearing ass's ears. He would think he was being made a fool of, that he was being taken in. And he would immediately call this an illusion. Things are different in the world of the spirit, down to the last detail, and it is necessary to translate everything we meet there, in order to find the right correspondence and interpretation in the physical world. I was not simply telling a joke when I spoke of those ass's ears. If you read the writings of ancient times you will find the dreams dreamt by philosophers to convince them of their inner vocation. The dream I have described is quite typical of that kind of thing. Philosophers had to see themselves with ass's ears to be convinced of their vocation.

People will inevitably be surprised and taken aback when they want to get acquainted again with the specific nature of the spiritual world. Reading The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz Anno 1459,⁸ you will sometimes feel that the grotesque things said in it are enough to make you laugh. Yet they are deeply significant, for the path to which the work refers should not be considered in a sentimental way, but with a certain superior humour.

As I have said, later times also have events analogous to Numa Pompilius receiving instruction from Egeria. These things are no longer made known, which is, of course, the reason why history has become mere conventional fiction. Consider, it was as late as the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth century when Jacob Boehme⁹ had his profound Intuitions; truly great, tremendous grand visions which contained Intuitions from an earlier time. His followers included many people who lived in later times. One of the last to be consciously a follower of Jacob Boehme was Saint-Martin.¹⁰ He based himself entirely on Jacob Boehme, especially in his book Des erreurs et de la vrit, though it is a somewhat dematerialized Boehme. Still, he had enough of what had come through from older times to realize: If one wants to have ideas concerning social structures, if one wants to have real, effective political ideas, these must not merely be thought up, they must have come from the spiritual world. In his book, Saint-Martin presents not merely ideas concerning the world of nature and its progress, and of history and its progress, but also quite specific political ideas. Today, when states are the only kind of political structure, one would call them ideas on the political state. His discussions do, however, include one idea of special significance, and it is characteristic that this is in the forefront of his political ideas. Saint-Martin refers to ‘original human adultery’, which he says took place at a time when sexual relations did not yet exist between male and female on earth. He is therefore not referring to adultery in the usual sense. He means something quite different, something he keeps deeply veiled, and to which The Bible refers with the words: ‘The sons of the gods saw how beautiful these daughters were and they took for themselves such women as they chose.’¹¹ This event brought chaos to the world of Atlantis; there is also a mysterious connection between this and the way in which human beings had made their elemental spiritual nature sensual. All one can do is hint at the event which Saint-Martin calls ‘original adultery’; he, too, was merely hinting at it.

It is evident that Saint-Martin realized that to consider politics, one must not merely take account of outer human situations, as people do today, but find a way of going back to earlier times when one had to go beyond the world of the senses and into the world of the spirit if one wanted to know anything about the human being. The principles of political thinking must be evolved out of the world of the spirit. Saint-Martin still knew this at the end of the eighteenth century—he only died in 1804, and what he said in Des erreurs et de la vrit has also been translated into German. It is not without interest to say this, because a certain cleric who is against we who want to serve the life of the spirit here in Dornach—he lives quite near to here¹²—has said that in the face of all this folly people should remember plain, simple Matthias Claudius, and he quoted a verse by Claudius in his support.¹³ It was Matthias Claudius, however, who translated Saint-Martin's Des erreurs et de la vrit in order to make the spiritual science of that time accessible to his people. The gentleman in question therefore demonstrated his colossal ignorance where Matthias Claudius is concerned, quite apart from the fact that he quoted only one verse; if he had quoted the preceding verse he would have contradicted himself. Still, he was satisfied with the one verse which he thought suited his purpose, which was to quote something against anthroposophy.

As late as the eighteenth century, Saint-Martin knew that if we are to have fruitful political ideas there has to be a bridge between human thoughts and the spiritual influences which come from higher worlds. No previous century has been as godforsaken, really, as the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. It is important to realize this. Nor was any earlier century so vain and so proud of being godforsaken. Still, if people were to read about the statesmanship advocated by Saint-Martin—I think all those clever people who now get together and want to guide the destinies of the world would feel their stomachs turn. For it is the tendency today to get to know as little as possible about the real world around us. It is, of course, possible to erase from our minds the thoughts which come from the living spirit, and we can decide to work only with thought-corpses. People's actions do not relate to this, however, but become part of a web of living thought. And when people with thought-corpses refuse to enter into those living thoughts, the outcome will be chaos. This chaos has to be overcome, which calls for the clear insights of which I have spoken before, as well as in these lectures. It does, however, require a complete change of direction from what is considered to be right today and the absolute ideal.

Above all, this change of direction will have to come soon. And it would be best if it were to come right now and be as widespread as possible in the field where educators are appointed for both young and old. There is no other field where humanity has entered as deeply into materialism as it has in education.

Let me conclude by presenting a thought which will be occupying us in the days ahead, for it is very interesting and very important for all humanity. I would like to present it in such a way, however, that you will be able to turn it over in your own inner mind for a few days. You will then be better prepared to consider this thought.

The children who are born today—we must consider them in the knowledge that the outer form is withering and splitting up, as I have shown in these days. But deep inside is the true human being. This no longer comes to outward expression in the way it did until the fifteenth century. We will have to get more and more used to the thought that, especially in the case of children, the inward human being cannot be fully revealed by the way people present themselves, nor by the way they think and the gestures they make. In many respects these children are something quite different from what comes to outward expression. We even know extreme cases. Children may appear to be the worst of rascals and yet there is so much good in them that they will later be the most valuable of human beings. But you will also find many children who are very good and not the least bit bad, never putting a finger in their mouths nor thumbing their noses at people. They will study well, perhaps be good bank managers one day, or good schoolteachers according to present-day ideas, and indeed good lawyers. But—forgive these harsh words—they will not be good people, because they cannot achieve inner harmony between themselves and the true world around them. It is specifically in the field of education and training where the principle must be established that people are very different inside today from what they appear to be. It will therefore be necessary in future to appoint teachers on entirely different principles. To be able to see into something which is inside and does not come to expression on the outside requires something of a prophetic gift. Examinations for prospective teachers must therefore be organized in such a way that candidates with intuitive and prophetic gifts do particularly well. Candidates who do not have such gifts must be made to fail their exams, however great their knowledge.

The last thing we do today is to consider the prophetic gifts of people who are to become teachers. We still have a long way to go with regard to many things that will have to be done. Yet the course of human evolution will eventually force people to accept such principles. Many of the materialists of our age would, of course, consider it a crazy notion to say that teachers should be prophets. But it will not be for ever. Humanity will be forced to recognize these things.

• 1. Riddles of the Soul. See Note 1 of lecture 5.
• 2. In a lecture given in Dornach on 21 October 1916, for example. (GA 171. Not available in English.)
• 3. Plutarch also teils the story in his Life of Cimon.
• 4. For example, Rudolf Steiner's library in Dornach includes a book by Max Kernmerich called Prophezeiungen, alter Aberglaube oder neue Wahrheit (translates as: “Prophesies, an old superstition or a new truth”), Munich 1911; it includes prophesies which have since come true.
• 5. Numa Pompilius (probably 715–673 BC) succeeded Romulus as King of Rome. See Livy's History of Rome, Book 1, Chapter 19.
• 6. Peter Rosegger (1843–1918), Austrian poet and novelist. Some of his works were in the Styrian dialect, which also applies to the quoted sentences.
• 7. Rudolf Steiner generally made careful distinction between ‘imagination’ in the ordinary sense, using the ordinary German terms for this, and ‘Imagination’ as the ability to see images of spiritual realities, which is generally achieved in the course of initiation. The same applies to the terms ‘Intuition’ and ‘Inspiration’. The three should be treated as technical terms in the field of anthroposophy. The convention in English versions of his works has become to use capitals for the higher faculties described by these words.
  
  In this text, capital first letters are put where Steiner is using them as technical terms.
• 8. See Note 3, lecture 3.
• 9. See Note 2, lecture 3.
• 10. Louis Claude de Saint-Martin (1743–1803) took up German at the age of 49 so that he might translate Jacob Boehme's writings into French. His Des erreurs et de la vrit ou les hommes rappels au principe universel de la science par un Ph(ilosophe) inc(onnu) of 1775 was translated into German by Matthias Claudius in 1782. A new edition of the translation was published by Der Kommende Tag in Stuttgart in 1925.
• 11. Genesis 6:2. Revised English Bible.
• 12. This was the parish priest at Arlesheim, which is next to Dornach. For further details see Necessity and Freedom (GA 166), translated by P. Wehrte, the lecture given in Berlin on 25 January 1916, Anthroposophic Press N.Y.; and ‘Things of the Present and of the Past in the Spirit of Man’ (GA 167), MS translation C42, Rudolf Steiner House Library, London.
• 13. Matthias Claudius (1740–1815), German poet and writer. The ‘verses’ in question are the third and fourth verses of his evening hymn Der Mond ist aufgegangen.