The Rudolf Steiner Archive

From our considerations of yesterday and the day before, we have been able to see how Goethe's creative work is steeped through by a certain outlook suggestive of that of spiritual science—although this outlook may be but dimly foreshadowed. And it is indeed very important that we should make ourselves thoroughly acquainted with the character of Goethe's spiritual life. It is only by shedding before the soul the light of a deepened observation upon all that such a life of spirit contains that this life appears in the right connection with the whole evolution of mankind. But I wish to add something here to all that has been said. I should like, that is, to point out how really it is only possible rightly to comprehend the whole structure, the whole manner, of Goethe's spiritual life if this is done from the standpoint of spiritual science. It is not merely that from an unspiritual standpoint we can naturally never find in Goethe's work all that yesterday and the previous day we were able to discover by considering it anthroposiphically, but also it only becomes clear how such a life of soul is possible within the course of human development, when we look at it from the point of view of spiritual Science.

In various connections I have called your attention to other manifestations of Goethe's soul-life, manifestations that, for ordinary human life, may perhaps seem—but only seem—to be more remote than what is represented in the all-embracing Faust poem,that should indeed be of the greatest interest to every man. I have spoken to you of the special mind of natural science which Goethe cultivated. And it is particularly important and significant that he should have done so. It may be said that Goethe's individual way of thinking where natural science is concerned is precisely what in most spheres at present still meets with complete lack of understanding. Nevertheless, it appears to me of quite special importance for the various branches of present day spiritual life—and not least for the religious life—that an insight should be gained into this particular form, this individual way, in which Goethe looked upon nature. You know how he sought to establish for the inanimate world a natural science founded on his own interpretation of the primal phenomena, and how he built up a botany on the basis of metamorphoses.

So far as all this is a matter of general knowledge I should like today to give you a brief description of the primal phenomena and metamorphoses.

What was Goethe's intention when he turned not to hypotheses and theories but to the so-called primal phenomena for his explanation of nature? Since the eighties of the last century I have been doing my best to give mankind, from various aspects, an idea of the true basic character of the primal phenomenon. But it cannot be claimed that so far there has really been a very wide understanding of the matter. Perhaps we can get the best view of what Goethe understood by the primal phenomenon in inanimate nature when we consider how he came to build up his special Theory of Colors. He tells of this himself. I know that what I now have to say is an abomination and a heresy for the present day scientific conception of physics. That, however, is of no consequence. What physics does not recognize today, my dear firends, the physics of tomorrow will find itself obliged to accept. In reality, present day physics is not yet ripe for Goethe's theory of colors.

As I said, Goethe himself tells us that up to the beginning of the nineties of the eighteenth century he believed, as did other men, in the so-called Newtonian theory of colors—in that theory built up by Newton on a certain hypothesis. This theory declared that something imperceptible lay at the basis of light—we need not go into that now. In essentials it is immaterial whether it is represented, as it was by Newton himself; as currents of matter, or as oscillations, or as some kind of electrical impulse. The arising of colors was conceived as follows—that the light in some way contains the various colors unseparated as if naturalized in a kind of supersensible entity, and that by means of the prism or other devices, the colors were made to issue forth from the unified white light.

One day Goethe found himself obliged to abandon this conception that he shared with others, and he did so in a way that, naturally, must appear to modern physics both primitive and foolish. He studied this Newtonian physics, this Newtonian optics, and accepted it as one does as a matter of course when knowing of nothing better. But he found that when wishing to apply this optics, this theory of colors, in order to think out anything that had to do with art, with painting, he could do nothing with it. This Newtonian physics serves for a materialistic physical representation, but is useless when it comes to art. This increasingly disturbed Goethe and incited him at least to look into what happens in the appearance of colors from the point of view of physics. So, from Councillor Buttner who was a professor at Jena, he managed to procure the apparatus to see, through his own investigations and experiements, what views he could form concerning the appearance of colors. It goes without saying that Professer Buttner promptly placed all the apparatus at the disposal of His Excellency von Goethe. But, once in his house, it served, to begin with, only to collect the dust. It was long before he made his investigations—not indeed until Councillor Buttner expressed his need of the apparatus, and the desire for its return. Goethe put the things together for dispatch. However, he thought he would first have a quick glance through a prism, believing that if he looked through it at the white of the wall, so this white would then be broken up into seven colors, he would assuredly see them. (This would, as has been said, appear to the modern physicist both foolish and primitive). But—nothing! The wall remained white! This puzzled him. According to customary notions this was foolish but, my dear firends, it was sound thinking. He took a peep through the prism; the wall was still white. That made him appeal to Councillor Buttner to let him keep the instruments, the apparatus, and he then set up his further investigations. And from these investigations there now grew first his science of colors, and, secondly, his whole outlook on physics, that is to say, on inanimate, natural phenomena. It was an outlook that rejected all hypotheses and theories, that never thought out anything about natural phenomena, but traced back one set of natural phenomena to another, traced them merely to primal appearances, primal phenomena.¹

Thus he became clear that, when color is perceived, at the basis of this lies some kind of working together of super imposed lightness and darkness. If darkness laps over lightness, the bright colors appear; if lightness laps over darkenss, then there appear the deep colors, blue, violet and so forth. If over brightness, lightness any form of darkness is projeatd, such as dark material and so forth,or the actual prism, the bright colors appear, red, yellow and so on. Here it is not a matter of any theory. Darkness and lightness are working through immediate perception. It is simply perceived that if darkness and lightness work together, colors arise. No hypothesis is expressed here nor any theory—merely something that is simple fact, something that can be perceived.

Now it did not concern him merely to invent hypotheses like the wave theory perhaps, or the Emission theory, and so on, hypotheses that would say that colors arise in such and such a way; it was simply a putting together, as lightness and darkness had to be put together for yellow or red, blue or violet, to appear. Goethe's way was not to add to phenomena hypotheses and theories in thought, but to keep strictly to letting the phenomena speak for themselves. In this way Goethe brought a theory of colors into existence that led in a wonderfully beautiful way to the grasping of what has to do with color in the realm of art. For the chapter on the effect of color with reference to moral associations, in which are found so many significant indications for the artist, belongs to the most beautiful part of Goethe's theory of colors.

This then was the basis of Goethe's whole understanding of inanimate nature—never to seek for theories or hypotheses. According to him these can be set up as scaffolding. But, as when the building is finished, the scaffolding is not left but removed, so one uses hypotheses merely to show the way in which things may be put together. They are discarded as soon as the primal phenomenon, the simplest phenomenon, is reached.

It was this that Goethe also tried at any rate to outline for the whole of physics. And in the large Weimar edition, in the volume where I have published Goethe's general scientific essays, you will find a chart in which Goethe has detched out a complete scheme for physics from this point of view. In this chart the acoustics of particular interest, that, like his theory of colors, is indeed merely given in outline. Some day it would be interesting, however, to set up an acoustics that would fit in with music in the same way as Goethe's theory of colors does with painting. Naturally this could not be done yet, for modern natural science has taken a different path from that founded on Goethe's world conception and on his conception of nature.

It was this that he was trying to do where inanimate nature is concerned. And he was looking for something of the same kind in the life of the living plant in the theory of metamorphoses, where, without setting up any hypotheses, he followed up how the stem leaf was transformed, metamorphosed, and took on various forms, growing afterwards into the petal, so that the blossom is simply transformed stem leaf. Again this is an outlook that will have nothing to do with hypotheses but keeps to what is offered to the perception. What we need here is not fixed concepts but concepts that are as much on the move as is nature herself while creating; that is, she does not hold fast to forms but in ever transforming them. We must have such concepts, therefore, that the majority of mankind is too lazy to develop, concepts in a state of inward transformation, so that we are able livingly to follow them in their forms that change as they do in nature. But then, free from hypotheses and theories, one confines oneself to pure percept.

This is what is characteristic of Goethe, my dear friends, that he rejects all theory where natural phenomena are concerned, and really is willing to apply thinking only for assembling phenomena in the right way, so that they express themselves according to their essential nature. One can indeed put this in a paradox. I beg you to keep this well in mind. It was precisely through this that, as we have seen in the last two days, Goethe was driven along the right path into the sphere of the spiritual, that, for the phenomena of external nature, he did not destroy their integrity by all kinds of theories and hypotheses but grasped them just as they were offered to the life of the senses.

This, my dear friends, has a further consequence. If we form theories, such as those of Newton or spencer, that is to say, if we cloud by theories and hypotheses what nature herself offers, we may think about nature in the way that is possible during human physical life, but the matter is not then taken up into the etheric body. And they become overdone, all these theories that do not arise from pure nature and from the simple observation of nature; all these theories and hypotheses make indeed a caricature of the human etheric body and also of the astral body, thereby having a disturbing effect on man's life in spiritual worlds.

Goethe's sound nature turned against the destruction of the forms demanded for itself by the etheric body. This is exactly what is so significant about Goethe, and why I tell you he can only be understood anthroposophically—that he had an instinct for what did not originate in immediate reality, and perceived that, when he formed concepts like those of Newton, the etheric body was nipped and tweaked. This did not happen to others because they were less finely organized. Goethe's organization was such that while looking into things thus his etheric body was nipped and tweaked. And neither theory nor the most beautiful hypothesis prevented this, when only the white appears and he has to realize: The wall is still white in spite of the fact that all the seven graded colors are supposed to appear. This has not happened. And Goethe's way of experiencing this is indeed a proof of his thoroughly sound nature and of how he, as microcosm, was in harmony with the macrocosm.

Yet another side of the matter may be brought to your notice. We know, my dear friends, that man is not only the being who lives between birth and death; he is also the being who lives between death and a new birth. Into this life between death and a new birth he takes the sun of inner forces developed by him when in his physical body. Now when, after a few days, he is parted from his etheric body, he looks back upon it; and it is important that this etheric body should have been so used by him that in looking at it thus he is not deluded by a caricature. Now this is what we have particularly to note. If we look at nature in its purely natural aspect, as did Goethe, rejecting theories and hypotheses, and allowing only primal phenomena to have weight, then this understanding and regarding the primal phenomena thus, is of such a nature that it sets free within us sound, healthy experiencec and feelings of the kind that Goethe described in his chapter on the effect of color with reference to moral associations. It goes without saying that the perception of sense phenomena ceases with life. And what remains in our soul and spirit from pure perception, the only thing Goethe allowed to hold good as natural science is thoroughly sound and in harmony to do with the world of soul and spirit. Thus, we may say that Goethe's natural science is in accordance with the spiritual, in spite of his keeping to the phenomenal and physically perceptible. This is because it does not sully through theories the purity of its outlook on nature by influencing the spirit either ahrimanically or luciferically. Theories of this kind darken for the soul and spirit the purity of outlook upon what is earthly.

Now I told you yesterday that man has not lived only on the earth, but before he trod the earth he went through successive developments on Saturn, Sun and Moon. After he will have left the earth, or rather when the earth has left him, he will continue his development on Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan. But I told you that scientific concepts are possible only in relation to the earth evolution. In actual fact, if we cultivate a sound natural science, we then have the impulse not to represent the earth evolution so that everything is mixed up in it that is in keeping with Saturn, Sun and Moon—though naturally this is in reality connected with the earth evolution—but a sound natural science will take the earth as earth and represent it in its conformity with law. This is what Goethe did. And, why man is so little able to rise to a sound understanding of the Moon, Sun and Saturn evolution, is because his earth evolution is not sound. Even though Goethe himself never arrived at this conception of the evolutions on Moon, Sun and Saturn, anyone going deeply into his natural science—a science free from anything else and concerned merely with the earth—just through this prepares his spirit to separate what is earthly by means of a sound knowledge of the earth, and prepares himself as well to form a sound conception of what can be seen only in the supersensible, that is to say, the evolution of Saturn, Sun and moon, and all that is spiritual. It is possible, therefore, to say that it was just by his outlook being directed so exclusively towards the supersensible, that Goethe had the necessary qualifications to work in his Faust upon all we have been witnessing these last two days. Goethe lived thus in the spirit where spiritual comprehension is concerned, because he did not apply to natural phenomena any confused theories or hypotheses out of the spirit. The one thing determines the other.

What finally I called your attention to yesterday is that Goethe was not idealist on the one side, realist on the other but took the outer phenomena realistically, and in an idealistic way what was to be understood idealistically. He did not, however believe it possible to found a world-conception either through the one or the other, but allowed both to be mirrored in his soul as they are reflected also in external reality. Though Goethe himself did not entirely follow this out, yet it led in a wholesome way—if his ideas are really absorbed—to the possibility of a right representation of the two kinds of life that man has to experience. And it may be asked why then is it that mankind's usual outlook today is so little inclined towards the spiritual, and, although concepts of the spiritual world are formed, they are so abstract that with them external nature cannot be understood? How is it that for present day man idealism and realism so fall apart that, either they found a half-hearted monism of little significance, or they do not arrive at any world outlook at all—how is this? This comes about because man wishes today to found his world outlook in a quite definite way. He either becomes a scientist, learning to know nature and trying to instill into her all manner of theories and hpotheses—for in the realm of thinking today the heritage of the natural scientist is not primal phenomena but theories and hypotheses—and seeking to permeate natural phenomena with these; or, he becomes a theologian or philosopher, trying to acquire from tradition certain concepts, ideas, about the spiritual. These are so thin, so shadowy, that with their inadequate power it is impossible to comprehend nature.

Just look around at what is given out by the theologians and phiolsophers today; where do you find any firm ground from which rightly to throw light on nature? And among the real adherents of modern natural science, when they are not monistic garbage, where do you find any serious possibility of rising from natural science to the reality of divine spiritual forms and realms of existence? Even if sound thinking is developed, it is not possible today to unite the two spheres in their present guise. The two spheres are only united when we have the faculty of devoting ourselves in Goethe's way to science and the observation of nature. That means directing the gaze to the phenomenon to what appears, without intermixing useless theories unless these build up the phenomena; it means making merely a useful servant of thinking, but not letting it interfere in results. Where nature is concerned we have to allow her the power of interpreting herself. Not to weave fantastic ideas about nature, but to be completely materialistic, letting the material phenomena speak for themselves—that is our task when it comes to sound natural science. Should we really come to a natural science of this kind, we shall then understand human life between birth—or shall we say conception—and death. And by looking on one side into nature thus, we must also be able to look into the spirit without the light of impossible theories and hypotheses. We shall not then be confined to abstract theologies or philophies but give ourselves up to spiritual perceptions. And it is precisely through the power that sets free in us a direct observation of nature—Goethe's observation—that spiritual perception, perception of the pure spirit, can be induced. Upon the man who confusedly mixes his concepts and ideas about natural phenomena, these concepts take their revenge, preventing his perceiving the spirit. He who looks simply at nature sees her in his own soul in such a way that he can look upon the spirit too with reality. In this respect, Goethe's world outlook can be a good educator for modern humanity.

But in this case, outlook on nature and outlook on spirit must be independent of one another. We must, however, be conscious that we can do nothing with either by itself. If you wish to remain pure theologian or pure phiksopher, my dear friends, then it is exactly as if you had something with two different sides and chose to photograph the one side only; and it is the same if you want to be purely a scientist. You should be able to make the two into one whole, letting the one be reflected in the other; that is to say, instead of seeking to unite them through abstract concepts, having first developed pure perception in each separate sphere, you let the things unite themselves. They are then mirrored in one another. And then too, my dear friends, by means of what this reflection is able to do, you get a sound outlook upon human life as a whole. Then you see natural phenomena external to man according to the way of Goethe's natural science. But when you observe man you see that what exists for external nature does not go far enough to explain him. For that way you only come to a ‘Homunculus’ not to a ‘Homo’.

You see how, for the understanding of man, it is necessary to approach him from two opposite directions; with natural science and with spiritual science, letting the two reflect one another. Thus, they may be suitably applied to man. Then in the human being the life between birth, or conception, and death, is reflected in what appears to one as life between death and a new birth; and vice versa, the life between death and a new birth is reflected in the life between birth and death. We are not here inventing any theory supposed to explain the one or the other, but we let not theories but two perceptions, two things perceived and not united by concepts be mutually reflected in the perception.

It proves that Goethe was definitely on the way to the new spiritual science that, through the sound development of his soul, he should have come to such perception of the mutual reflection of what was essential in external reality. And if Goethe was still to some extent uncertain, even for his own time, because, as I am always having to emphasize, his knowledge of Spiritual Science was but a premonition, nevertheless his judgment was sound in much concerning the spiritual life—and this can be followed in our time up to the regions where Goethe never actually arrived but for which he had prepared.

It is regrettable that everything in connection with Goethe is so little understood. I am not finding fault, my dear friends, for everyone able to look right into things neither blames nor criticises, realizing he must speak only positiviely; I do not find fault with what has happened, I only set forth what is demanded for the future. And the demand for the future is that mankind should go more deeply into the ideas that were already being prepared in Goethe's way of thinking—whatever name you give all this. And Goethe's way of thinking works with tremendous reality and in accordance with reality. It is of great importance to take heed of this.

I have to draw your attention to this so as to point you to a right understanding of man's usual procedure when he wants to explain some phenomena of nature or of life. Let us look at a perfectly average man who is clever—nowadays the clever man is average—thus, we are going to observe an average man. The average man lives, does he not, from birth to death.

BIRTH--------------------- DEATH
EARTH LIFE

In his 35th year, let us say, or 45th or 42nd—in some year of his life perhaps even earlier—he wants to discover something, possibly to form a world-outlook, enlighten himself about some matter; what does he do? He ferrets among the stock of ideas that we may take it he has when 42 years old. Let us assume he wishes to be really clear about, let us say, the Copernican world-outlook; he gathers together, then, all the concepts and ideas he can find. If he looks about in his soul life and can find something that suits him, when he has assembled a whole series of the kind of concepts in which he finds nothing contradictory, then he has finished, and understands the whole matter. This is the way with the average man. Not so with Goethe, my dear friends. Goethe's soul worked in a completely different fashion. Those who are ready to write his biography never take this into consideration, and some kind of person makes his appearance who was born in Frankfurt in 1749 and died in 1832 in Weimar—but it is not Goethe. For his soul worked differently. If in his 42nd year any phenomenon confronted him, there did not work in him merely the abstract image arising from the gathering up of all kinds of concepts into a suitable outlook. When Goethe in his 42nd year contemplated a plant, or anything else about which he sought enlightenment, there worked in him with reality the whole of his soul-life, not merely abstract concepts but all his real life of soul. Thus, at the age of 42, when Goethe wished to reflect upon the life of a plant, there worked in him in part unconsciously those impulses that he had not merely gathered together but which had been working in him since his childhood. It was always his entire life of soul that was active. That is what never happens in modern man; he wants to arrive at an unprejudcied conception, but this does not go tyond snatching up a few concepts that can be perceived easily and with little effort. This is exactly the reason why we can make such great discoveries about Goethe when we reconsider the various phases of his life all together.

For example, I have tried to understand what comes latest in Goethe's point of view by always returning to Nature, the hymn in prose that he wrote during the eighties of the 18th century, in which is contained in embryo what belongs to a later period. What at that time existed in an unripe state was nevertheless active. And I have often referred before to how Goethe as a seven year old, collected minerals, piled them up on a reading desk he took of his father's, placed a candle on top, and then went through a kind of divine service in which, however, he sought to make a sacrifice to the ‘Great God’ who worked through natural phenomena. In the morning—fancy! a lad of seven he caught a ray of the sun with a burning glass, making it light his candle. He kindled nature's fire above his minerals. Here in childish fashion is already pictured forth all that afterwards worked in his most mature conceptions. We understand Goethe only when we are in a position to grasp him rightly in this way, out of his being as a whole. Also, when he is thus understood, we first arrive at a notion of the spiritual world that we are able to discover in the light of Goethe's world outlook, which then, however, with the ideas of his time he himself could but slightly develop. For consider, if we think, really think, about nature in Goethe's way, in the sense of the theory of phenomena, primal phenomena, and in the sense of the theory of metamorphoses through thinking of this kind we cannot help releasing in our souls forces that lead to perception of the spiritual world. And at length they lead us also to the perception of man's life after he has passed the gate of death. It is just with such a concentrated perception of nature, of pure nature, as Goethe's that a true and comprehensible idea of immortality is established.

It is precisely through this that power is gathered for these opposite representations needed for perceiving the supersensible that man experiences between death and a new birth. Man gains the power for this perception by first developing a keener insight into pure nature, nature unspoilt by theories and hypotheses. Where the external world is concerned man makes the greatest mistake in believing that everything must go in one line, in one stream. If any man speaks thus of Monism to one who sees right into the matter—as, having founded an abstract Monism, many speak today—when an abstract Monism of this kind is put before one who can see into things, it seems just as though a man were standing there with left and right side properly developed and another were to tell him that it was an illusion, a false dualism, and that man has to be built monistically. It is not the proper thing he would say, to have a right and a left side, something here is wrong.

Our world outlook must be just like that. And as there is nothing wrong about our having two hands, and the right one be aided by the left, there is nothing wrong either in having two world outlooks that reciprocally reflect and enlighten each other. And those who declare it a mistake when two world outlooks are demanded, should also declare that some sort of artificial arrangement ought to be devised so that the right and left hands and the right and left legs would not move and be active in the world in such a shockingly separate fashion and that right and left should be forcibly dovetailed into one another and man should be a monism and, thus handicapped, continue his way through life.

For those who have penetration and see the reality instead of distorted abstract theories, the striving for an abstract idealism on the one side and a material realism on the other, as Monism, is as onesided as the grotesque comparison I have just made. And it is really in the spirit of Goethe's world outlook that I have pointed again and again, in a way that today arouses much antagonism, on the one hand to a pure and direct perception of nature, free from hypotheses, a perception that is alive and not thought out, thinking being applied simply to introduce the perception; and on the other hand to a phenomenon of the spirit where again thinking is applied merely as introduction to the perception, the spiritual perception, that leads us into the realm where we have to seek man on the other side of his life, that is between death and a new birth.

Now, if among people today you put forward the outlook of Spiritual Science, you are met with theories to refute it that sound really logical, clever theories. I have often said that it is very easy to think out arguments against Spiritual Science. In two successive public lectures in Prague² made the attempt to oppose Spiritual Science in one, in the other to show its foundations—lectures not too well received in some quarters. But at least I made the attempt to hold them. It goes without saying that one can quite easily find counter arguments to Spiritual Science; this is possible. How should it be otherwise? Whoever believes that it is not possible takes approximately the same view as anyone who says he cannot prick his left hand with the needle he holds in his right. Of course it is possible, but it does not get us anywhere. It may be said that at the basis of this opposition, that works with such apparently perfectly logical theories, right within it, there lies something entirely different. One speaks indeed, my dear friends, of the unconscious and the sub-conscious. What really is significant for man in the sub-conscious soul life, the sub-conscious spiritual life, is misunderstood, particularly by the psycho-analysts, but also in other quarters. I have often spoken of this here. In reality the analytical psychologist of today speaks of the unconscious life of the spirit in the same way as the blind speak of color. They are forced to do so by the requirements of modern science, but their science has not sufficient to go upon—it works with inadequate means. (I referred to this last year in Zurich and also here).³ For the capacity must really be there always to discover rightly what is in the subconscious beneath what is going on in the conscious.

You see, we may say the matter stands thus. The conscious is here, the subconscious lies beneath it (see diagram). Now how stands the matter today? since about the 16th century very strong ahrimanic influences have made themselves felt in man and in man's whole thinking. This has its good and bad sides. Above all it has the effect that natural science has developed in a particularly ahrimanic way. To this ahrimanic science Goethe opposed his science that I have described to you. And from the lectures I gave you a week ago you can gather that nothing takes place in the human soul nor in be human spirit without something happening in the subconscious also. By evolving the present form of thinking about nature, two quite distinct feelings have been developed in the subconscious—fear of and lack of interest in the spiritual. If Goethe's natural science is not developed, natural science cannot be cultivated at all in the sense of modern thinking without there developing at the same time subconscious fear and indifference towards the spiritual world. People are afraid of the spiritual; that is the necessary consequence of the impression made by modern natural science. But it is a subconscious fear of which men know nothing and this subconscious fear dresses itself up, and in all kinds of bespangled theatrical garments appears in man's consciousness. It clothes itself, for instance, in logical reasons. Fear transforms itself into logical reasons, with which logical reasons men are now going around.

Those with penetration note what clever logical reasons man brings forward; however, they know also how beneath, in the subconscious, there sits fear of the spiritual—as the unknown always brings fear in its train, the hydrophobia of dogs can be traced to it. And lack of interest in the spiritual is also there, and this is particularly evident, because when man develops a right knowledge to nature, the spiritual can be quite palpable to him. For I should like to challenge any man wanting exhaustive knowledge to say out of what earthly natural phenomena, without recourse to the spiritual, he can explain the shape of the human head. The obvious correct scientific explanation of the human head leads back to what is known only scientifically as I have made clear. If we take interest in what is actually there in the nature of man, this leads naturally and of necessity to the spirit. It is mere lack of interest that induces us to say: nothing here points to the spirit! This is only when it has been excluded. We pay no attention to it but begin by building for ourselves empty theories, well prepared hypotheses and theories which soon fail us when put to the test, however carefully they have been prepared. In the main, the modern natural scientist behaves like someone who carefully cleans the scales from a fish, afterwards declaring it has none. So the modern scientist cleans phenomena of all that points to the spirit, because it does not interest him. But he is as ignorant of his lack of interest as he is of his fear. Therefore the lack of interest, too, dons disguising garments, and these are beliefs in limits to knowledge, quite consciously these limits are spoken of—ignorabimus. But what is referred to here is really immaterial; we could at will invent a quite different collection of words for what du Bois-Reymond, for instance, spoke of in his lecture about the limits to knowledge of nature, and they would be worth just as much. For what we wish is completely immaterial. It would be caused by our lack of interest, like the fish bereftaf its scales with which we have just compared it.

In an article called “Der Internationale Kitt” (International Cement) are found the-following: “It is one of the greatest disillusionments of world history that even this spiritual power—the spiritual power of Christianity—has failed where war is concerned, and has set up no dam against the onsweeping tide of hatred and destruction. Indeed, during this division between the peoples, in Christianity itself particularly ugly phenomena have come to light as, for example, the way theology with its attempt to drag down the highest absolute values into the relativity of world events. By trying to rationalize this and bring it into some kind of formula man has even gone so far as to try to justify through the ethical God of Love, what is dreadful and profoundly evil. This is instead of humbly remaining, in face of the frightful submergence of love and life, by Luther's ‘Deus absconditus’, the hidden God, that also comes to appearance in the world dynamics that is indifferent to ethics. Through this ethical and religious glorification of war, political aims were thrust upon the God of Love—aims that appear depressingly like those of rulers and cabinet ministers.”

Those who follow contemporary literature will know that this is perfectly correct—that on all sides the intentions of those in power are foisted as divine intentions upon God. So that this man is justified in thus describing many of the regrettable things happening today.

He goes on to say: “This is not all. Even the mutual tension among the Christian Churches has become accentuated. The historical opposition has been re-revived between the followers of Luther and those of Calvin. The extreme Anglicans have become alienated from continental Protestantism to such a degree that they will hardly allow it the name of Christianity; not to mention the breach among the international Christians in the mission field. Thus, a popular ideal limited by national feeling again to have gained the day over the international, communal ideal of Christianity.

“But where that has happened Christianity has shown itself a traitor to the Gospels—a Judas who betrayed Christ. For the true being of Christianity points to an all-embracing human society, and only in this form can it develop.”

And so on.

My dear friends, this man says a great deal that is clever, but he does not go so far as to ask: If Christianity has been followed for nearly two thousand years, how is it that although by its nature it should make the conditions we have at present an impossibility, it has not done so? It means nothing, my dear friends, just to say that men are bad Christians and should be better ones, if what is meant by this is that they should live up to the Christian example. I could give you hundreds of quotations from what has been said recently by seriously minded men, from which you could see that already in various places there is arising a definite but subconscious impulse that something like a new world outlook is needed. But the moment men should really come to what is necessary, that is, to a world outlook that is anthroposophical, they obscure their own concepts and these concepts immediately degenerate into fear and lack of interest. Men are afraid of Spiritual Science. This may be seen very clearly in individual personalities and in what they say and how they live. Or they show indifference to Spiritual Science; they are not capable of it in any way; it does not appeal to them. One then comes to astonishing contradictions, naturally not seen by the modern reader, for modern reading is done in the way I pictured yesterday and on other occasions. This writer of the article, a man who as we said is to be taken seriously, is justified in writing as he did. But, listen to this; he says something else must happen for Christianity to be able to develop its international significance and activity. He then makes all kinds of suggestions, for instance: Why should it not be possible for Christianity to encourage the international impulse to prevent hate and destruction? And he then goes on: in August, 1914, the Free Chuches in Britain could still write to Professor Harnack—“With the exception of the English—speaking peoples, no people stand so high in our affections and esteem as the Germans. We are all immeasurably indebted to German theology, philosophy and literature.”

There we have something—he continues—that is quite delightful. We have British theologians paying compliments to German theologians in the most wonderful way; could it not be like this in future?—

That is all very well, my dear friends, but when your thinking accords with reality you notice that this is written in August 1914, at the very moment of the outbreak of hostilities. In the light of facts the conclusion would be that inspite of British theologians writing this, it could do nothing to prevent the holocaust. You see, therefore, instead of from left to right man thinks from right to left, or the other way round, according to how the matter stands. Whereas the result of thinking according to reality is that we must investigate what, in spite of people making each other polite speeches, is really wrong and what is lacking. The writer says that if we but do what was done in August, 1914, we shall go forward. But we can begin all over again for, as the reality proved, that did nothing to help. Correct thinking would run like this—something is not right, Christianity must have been out of its calculations. What it failed to take into consideration was that Christianity has no part in what the times of necessity demand. It is this that such men lack - willingness to enter into what is demanded by the impulse of the age. Thus,it can be seen that people are recognizing that the old way of looking at the world has come to grief. But they do not want anything new, they want the old again, once more to be able to suffer disaster. That however, naturally remains in their subconscious. They wish for the best as a matter of course, but they are too fond of comfort seriously to look for what is necessary.

This, my dear friends, is what is ever and again in the background when we have to speak of the significance for the present time of all that is connected with the name of Goethe, or also of what is naturally greater than this, of the whole spiritual world and the knowledge of it. There too one need not be critical. We do not need to say how thoroughly bad those men are who neglect to do what should now be done, but confine ourselves to finding out what ought to happen. We should look to what is positive. Perhaps then we may say: “If only there were not so dreadfully little that I can do—I can do so terribly little, what indeed can be done by one person alone.” my dear friends, such questions are often asked under the impression that it would be possible in my lectures to give a definite concrete programme for individual people; but by being given in a general way this would naturally become abstract and empty. Today it is our common concern that many people should realize how, among those to whom control is given in some particular sphere, there will be many failures. This is because the leaders of our time are striving against something they ought not to resist. And it is important that we should not be eaten up by a false feeling towards authority, nor stand in great awe of anything because we have no real knowledge of it. For as today it is not a matter of accepting historical authority without question. But there is need for observation and attention, and the ability to form a judgment concerning how, in the various spheres of life today, this life is often given a wrong lead by those in authority. This is done with insufficient insight, above all, often with insufficient thought. For it should be the result of reflection, not of the lack of reflection. It is tremendously important to examine in our subconscious how much perverted belief in authority we still carry in us—to realize also that it is Spiritual Science itself that actually leads us away from belief in authority, and if its judgments are allowed livingly to permeate us has the power to make us free men with independent judgment. It is always thought that the world must run its course as if it had but one meaning and ran on one track. Then we accustom ourselves to look upon nature in the way of science, then we shall look upon everything in the same manner; when we accustom ourselves to look upon the world in accordance with abstract theories—or, as we often say, idealistically—we shall see everything in that light. But life does not take its course with only one meaning and on only one track; it demands of us in our thinking flexibility, change of form, multiplicity. This is something that fundamentally we can make our own only by cultivating Spiritual Science aright, something that is at present of great importance for finding our right path. For that reason I should like in this lecture to enlarge upon something in connection with Goethe. It is nothing very special I want to say about him—that as you have seen has appeared as though of itself—but I just want to touch on important truths of Spiritual Science that may fitly be connected with what we find treated artistically by Goethe in the actual scene to be represented. Many turn away from Goethe in scorn because they find him unscientific, just as they find Spiritual Science. But many would profit if only they would go deeply into such a spirit, such a soul, as Goethe's. For it frees us from the false belief—really a superstition—that we can make progress with concepts having only one meaning, with life that has only one meaning. There is no development, my dear friends, without its reverse, an opposite development and where there is reversed development there will also be development. When you direct your mind whole heartedly to the primal phenomena and metamorphoses in nature, without obscuring your vision by theories, this leads not to a mere onesided conception of nature, but to a development in the soul of that other conception which turns towards the spirit. And when you develop this conception correctly, you can no longer approach nature with false theories but are induced to let nature, through her material phenomena, be her own and only interpreter.

Thus it is, too, when in the sphere of Spiritual Science, one has to express in words anything as serious as what was put before you yesterday concerning the evil connected with the appearance of the Phorkyades; or what it was necessary to say about man having in his subsconscious much that does not enter his consciousness. Through misunderstanding such things are often taken ill. Just think! when with real knowledge it is said that certain things are in the subconscious how the hearer jumps to the conclusion: this man is no friend of mine, even though he allows that these things are unconscious; he imagines that in my subconscious I am doing all kinds of things sub rosa. So also may our contemporaries think: This anthroposophist insults us by saying we have subconscious fear and apathy—he is running us down. But, my dear friends, the world has not only one meaning. I do not confine myself to saying people have fear and apathy in their subconscious. I say also that in your subconsicies you have the whole spiritual world—but you have to realize it. That, too, is in the subconscious; it is the reverse side. In Spiritual Science one does not make any assertion that does not involve a second. And those to who I say: You have subconscious fear, subconscious lack of interest, should remember that I also say: It is true that you are not conscious of your fear and apathy; you disguise them by all kinds of untruth and by your belief in limits to knowledge. You have, however, the whole world of your subconscious about which to make discoveries if you will only take the plunge. I am not only accusing these people as they think, but telling them besides something good about their subconscious. This is what can make you see that life is not one-sided, nor can it be so represented in Spiritual Science.

Thus indeed, on the one side, we speak in the way we often have to speak. When we have to show aversion, fear and apathy as having been instilled into man, we have also to warn him of the dangers he has to overcome if he wants to make his way to the spiritual world—how he must overcome certain disagreeable things—that is certainly one side we have to make clear. But, my dear friends, just consider what a fund of experiences that give happiness to the soul lie in the conceptions of Spiritual Science being able to open our eyes to the life among our fellows which we lead here between birth and death; what experiences that bring joy to the world are opened out to,us when we know we can live more intimately ith those who have passed through the gate of death. And imagine, when once this idea of two-sidedness is really grasped, when once the world is looked upon rightly in the sense of Spiritual Science, what Spiritual Science has to say will not demand of us only a hard struggle to enter the worlds of the spirit, but over the hearts of men it will be able to pour a whole host of experiences that give comfort. It will have a whole host of other experiences that bring joy to the soul of man so that it grasps that it will become increasingly capable of living not only with those who surround man in the perceptible world, but also to lie with all those with whom he has entered into some kind of connection in this life, after they have passed through the gate of death. My dear friends, could we with reason even desire that the knowledge carrying our souls in full consciousness beyond the gate of death should be easily acquired? No, indeed; if we are intelligent and reasonable, that is something for which we could not even ask. men of the future will be obliged to undergo hardship to find their world happiness. To this end they will have to make up their minds to seek knowledge of the spiritual worlds.

This is what I wished to say to you today.

• 1. In Man or Matter by Dr. Ernst Lehrs the words “light” and “dark” have been reserved for referring to the primary polarity, “lightness” and “darkness” being used to express their visible effects. The same principle has been followed here.
• 2. Given 19.3.11 and 25.3.11
• 3. Given 5.11.17

Yesterday I spoke to you of the scene from Part II of Goethe's Faust that had just been performed, and I should like to run over again the main thoughts then under consideration. For in this scene we are dealing with one of the most significant of Goethe's creation, with a scene he added to his Faust after having wrestled with the problem of Faust for about sixty years. Moreover, we have to do here with a scene through which we can look deep into Goethe's soul, in so far as it was dominated by the urge for knowledge—dominated above all by the great seriousness of this urge. While grasping all the knowledge in this poem of Faust we must never forget, however, that everything revealed in it with such lofty wisdom in no way prejudices—as is frequently the case with lesser poets who attempt anything of the same kind—in no way prejudices the purely artistic force of its construction. I have drawn your attention before to what Goethe stressed to Eckermann, namely, that there is much concealed in his Faust, many riddles of man to be recognised by Initiates, but that he had taken trouble to put it all into a form that, regarded merely from the theatrical standpoint, can with its pictorial quality impress even the simplest natured minds. Now let us bring again before our souls just the main points of what was said yesterday about all that is thus concealed, and afterwards go on to what we could not then touch upon. I mean, the conclusion of the scene.

I said yesterday that this scene shows clearly how Goethe was following up the problem of man's self-knowledge, man's comprehension of himself. For Goethe, knowledge was never something merely abstract and theoretical; to grasp the truth was for him a scientific urge. Also, for him—as it will increasingly be for future human evolution—what he sought in his soul as knowledge was something that has to be an impulse to experience life in all its fullness, to experience all that life can bring to man in the way of fortune and misfortune, of joy and sorrow, of blows of fate and opportunities of development. But, in addition to this, the urge for knowledge must be related to all the claims life makes on a man, as regards his behaviour towards society as a whole, as regards what he does and creates. Faust is not meant to be represented merely as a man striving after the highest knowledge, but as one bound up in his innermost being with all that life demands and brings. To this end, Goethe seeks knowledge for his Faust, that is, knowledge of man, comprehension of the self, comprehension of the forces at present latent in mankind. But Goethe sees clearly that ordinary knowledge, dependent on the senses and conditioned by the understanding, cannot lead to this self-knowledge. For this reason he introduces into the Classical Walpurgis-Night Homunculus, the product that was supposed to be, for mediaeval research, the copy of a human being that, within external nature, the physical understanding was able to put together out of natural forces and natural laws. All this comes into the idea of Homunculus. Yesterday I went more deeply into what Goethe meant to convey in his Homunculus, apart from any superstition connected with him; but now let us consider his more obvious meaning. In his Homunculus-idea he wished to represent what a man, here in the physical world, can recognise in himself. Whoever makes use only of the knowledge offered him by science, or by the study of physical life, can never gain knowledge and comprehension of man in accordance with Goethe's conception. He will never know Homo, the human being; he will be able to picture in his soul only Homunculus, an elemental spirit who has come to a standstill on the path to becoming man. Goethe wrestles with this as with a problem of knowledge: How can the idea of Homo grow out of the idea of Homunculus?

The whole mood and tenor, the whole artistic structure of the Classical Walpurgis-Night shows how clearly Goethe saw that the problem of human nature con only be solved by a knowledge based on investigation pursued, outside the body, by man's soul and spirit.What he wishes to ray forth from his Faust is his conviction that information concerning man can be given only by those who admit the validity of knowledge acquired outside the instrument of the physical body. Hence, true Spiritual Science, true Anthroposophy, alone can lead to the knowledge of man, of Homo; while all the other knowledge dealing with the physical world, can only lead to the idea of Homunculus. As far as possible, during the whole of his life, Goethe was ceaselessly occupied in striving towards this supersensible knowledge. He sought it on various paths, and those paths that opened out to him he endeavoured to portray artistically in his Faust. Faust was to represent for him a man who at last arrives at a real knowledge and comprehension of mankind.

Now, in Goethe's time Anthroposophy was not yet, and could not have been, in existence. Hence Goethe tried to associate himself with his contemporary culture, in which thee were still echoes of atavistic spiritual vision. And after showing all that is in the Romantic Walpurgis-Night of the first part of Faust to be inadequate for knowledge of man, his great desire was then to take refute in the Imaginations of the Grecian myths. We have so often spoken of Goethe that we can easily see what lay beneath this idea of his.—Goethe felt and experienced that man is not to be grasped through the concepts of physical understanding. But he had no wish, as yet, to supersede these by his own Imaginations; therefore he sought to give a new form to those of ancient Greece. Thus, if we wish to give a more exact description of the scene just presented, we may say: Goethe wanted to show how a man, Faust, has been approached (from outside, but that is of no importance) by the idea of Homunculus, the only idea to be obtained in this respect in the physical world. He wanted to show how such a man, by his state of consciousness undergoing a change through his leaving the body, will then behave differently. He will behave like a man who, asleep at night outside his body, becomes able to perceive what is around him, all that surrounds him of a soul and spirit nature. Then, if he goes to sleep consciously, as it were, retaining his consciousness in sleep, if, sleeping on, he can take with him into his sleep-knowledge the idea of Homunculus acquired in his physical life, he can so transform it that it seizes hold of human reality. This is what Goethe wished to represent; and to help in the task, he took the pictures of the Grecian myths. He shows often in this scent how far in his feeling he was removed at least form the superstition of the pedant, who sees nothing more in such myths than poetic fiction and creations of fantasy. And I have often told you that, as a result of this superstition, it is claimed that legends, traditions, myths, persisting among simple peoples, are conceptions of nature transformed by fantasy. These superstitious pedants have really no idea how small a part fantasy plays in the creations of simple minds, not how prevalent among them is a certain atavistic power of beholding reality in dreams.

Now in the myths developed by the Greek spirit, there is not merely poetry, there is a true vision of reality. And the element Goethe first presented was the one in which all ancient peoples have seen the impulse in the soul that brings about its separation from the body. Connection with the outside world was much closer for the men of old than for the present-day abstract rationalistic man. In olden days when men climbed a mountain, for instance, they did not merely experience a physical, barely perceptible difference in the breathing, a densification of the atmosphere, or a change to the eye in perspective; for them it was a passing from one condition of the soul to another. For a man of those days the ascent of a mountain was a far more living experience than for modern man who has become so abstract. They felt with special vividness, what some sea-farers still experience today in a primitive, less delicate way, that, to a certain degree, soul and spirit actually free themselves from their instrument, the body. The more sensitive sea-faring folk still have this experience. But the men of old felt as a matter of course: “When I sail out on the open sea, and am no longer connected with the solid earth and its definite forms, then my soul frees itself from the body, and I see more of the supersensible than when I am surrounded by earth's rigid outlines.”—This is why, when Homunculus is to be changed into Homo, Goethe introduces a gay festival of the sea, and it is Thales, the man of natural philosophy, who conducts Homunculus thither.

And we see the Sirens. I spoke of this yesterday so today I shall not dwell upon the dramatic an pictorial way in which everything here is put into external form. I will, however, point out that the deeper mystery that Goethe would also have us see, the mystery of the Sirens' song, lies in these demonic beings belonging on the one side to the sea, but being able to become living, as demonic beings of the sea, only when the moon shines upon it. The moonlit sea lures forth the Sirens who, in their turn, lure forth man's soul from within him. The state of consciousness in which the supersensible world can be perceived in Imaginations, in pictures, is therefore brought about by the Sirens. Above all they practise their wiles on the Nereids and Tritons, who are on their way to Samothrace, to the sacred Mysteries of the Kabiri.

Precisely why does Goethe introduce the Kabiri? This is because his Homunculus is to become Homo, to become man, and because the Initiates of the holy Mysteries of the Kabiri in Samothrace were above all destined to learn the secret of man's becoming. It was this secret that was represented in the Kabiri. Here in the physical world is accomplished physical becoming, but this has its counterpart in the sphere of spirit and soul, a counterpart only to be seen outside the body in Imaginations. Unless the abstract idea of Homunculus is brought into connection with what can be seen here, Homunculus can never become Homo. Thus Goethe believes in all that the Greek felt when thinking of his Kabiri in Samothrace; he believed something was to be found there over and above the abstract idea of Homunculus, through which it might grow to the idea of Homo.

Let us without prejudice speak of what this really involves. In what man can experience of himself through ordinary knowledge, that amounts only to what he is as Homunculus, Goethe saw something to be compared with the unfertilised human germ-cell. Considering the unfertilised germ-cell in the human mother, we recognise it as something from which no physical human being can arise. It must first be fertilised; only then can there be a physical human being. And when we think with physical understanding alone, in these thoughts the inner being of man can never be lit up, for this is only what can be produced one-sidedly, and may be compared with what can be produced by the woman one-sidedly. All it is possible to grasp with out physical understanding, must be fertilised by knowledge gained outside the physical body. Half the riddle on man is hidden from the mere physical power of understanding. The atavistic clairvoyance adapted to ancient times wished to point, in the Mystery of the Kabiri, to what, in the spiritual connection of nature, is the other half of man's becoming which in its turn points to the immortal in man. That is why Goethe thought that possible through the impulse of the Kabiri the developing of Homunculus into Homo might be represented.

But Goethe, as one who sought knowledge, was not only to a high degree a serious seeker, but, at the same time, something which, my dear friends, is very much rarer in the sphere of knowledge than one might think—a deeply honest soul. He wished to test how far he would get by breathing new life into such a mystery as that of the Kabiri. Those who seek knowledge with less honesty make a few antiquarian studies, perhaps adding a few fantasies founded upon these, and then consider they know something of what is expressed in the Kabiri Mystery. Yes, my dear friends, the honest seeker after knowledge never knows as much as the seeker who is less honest, for he always considers himself more stupid than those who light-heartedly piece together information from here and there, which, easily acquired, is then said to be absolutely complete. Goethe was not one of those who took knowledge thus light-heartedly. He knew that, even if he had striven for it from the year 1749 to the year 1829, in which he wrote this scene just witnessed (a scene written in the most difficult circumstances about two years before his death) even if he has grown old in this striving and has never relaxed, nevertheless, for the honest searcher after knowledge there is always a remaining sting. Perhaps in some direction one ought to have done better.—This is what worked so intensively out of Goethe's very nature—this absolute honesty. This made him recognise, where the riddle of the Kabiri is concerned: As a modern man who can no longer call upon clairvoyance, I cannot know what the Greeks thought about the Kabiri—I cannot know this for certain!—But perhaps that is not of most importance, for Goethe had the feeling that there was a kind of knowledge of the Kabiri Mystery within him, which, however, he could not wholly grasp. It was like a dream that not only immediately fades, but of which one knows that, although it passes away so quickly, it contains something most profound; it hovers so lightly that the understanding, the intellect, does not suffice, the soul-forces do not suffice to give it clear and definite outline. It is precisely in this intimate inner development that there lies the significance of this scene. We do not understand it at all if we wish to explain every detail. For Goethe has called up pictures for the very purpose of showing—“Here I am close to my goal yet cannot reach it.”

Thus, he introduces the Kabiri to show how, perhaps not he but someone who fully grasps the Kabiri Mystery, may find the bridge for Homunculus, with the help of that Mystery, to come to Homo. He himself cannot yet succeed in this, and has therefore chosen other paths in the imaginative world. That is why he makes the philosopher Thales conduct Homunculus into the presence of Nereus. Now Goethe thought very highly of Thales, though not to the point of giving him credit for being able to show Homunculus how to become Homo. This Nereus has a great gift of human understanding and knows how to transform the divine into the demonic, thus foreseeing the future, so that it may be supposed he knows something about changing Homunculus into Homo. But here again Goethe wishes to show that this is not the path. For on this path we come to a one-sided development, raising the human critical understanding to a demonic height that not only runs to dull criticism but to actual prophetic criticism holding in mind the good side of human criticism. Nereus, however, a kind of priest among the demons, is not in a position, either, to approach the Homunculus-problem. He does not even want to do so. Goethe has the feeling that, should human understanding be developed to the demonic, should the critical faculty of investigation possessed by man be—shall we say—demonised, he would then lose all interest in this most profound human problem of raising Homunculus to man. Thus nothing is to be gained from Nereus. But he does at least draw attention to the imminent approach of his daughters, the Dorides, sisters of the Nereids, and among them, the most outstanding of them all, Galatea. Yesterday I tried to indicate what is represented in this picture of Galatea.

You see, my dear friends, the modern man of research sees everything telescoped into a single moment of life. In the Greek world-conception—by no means confined to what is generally known as classical Philology—what live in the human being was still closely connected with all that lives in the whole of external nature. All that contributes to the becoming of man exists in another form, weaving and pulsing through every process of nature. But we have to be able to discover it. Our present capacity for knowledge is not sensitive enough to penetrate into the regions through which we participate in external nature, in the experiences of the great universe. These experiences are, indeed, concealed in man, in his development from the human germ-cell, from conception, fertilisation, to birth and his appearing as a human being. The same processes that then take place, in concealment within the human being, are going on continuously all around us. It was precisely this which, in the Kabiri Mystery was disclosed to the candidate for initiation—how in nature conception and birth are living. We see the moon rise and set, we see the sun rise and set, feel the warmth the sun sheds around, receive the light it radiates; we see the clouds moving, look upon their changing forms. Within all this weaving and pulsing through the world lies the impulse of becoming. But modern man no longer perceives this; he will perceive it, however, if he develops himself further through Spiritual Science. And formerly he perceived it with an atavistic sense of cognition, with the atavistic perception and conception of olden times.

Here we must have recourse to that finer capacity for perception still existing in days of yore. It might be said that what happens when, instead of direct sunlight, moonlight is on the sea, moonlight is reflected on the waves, is experienced half consciously as dreamy presentiment, as the foreshadowing of a dream. Man today looks at the way moonlight is reflected on the waves; and all the physicist can say is that moonlight is polarised light. That is an abstraction that says very little; and the physicist experiences nothing of what is actually happening. We experience it today if someone burns us with red-hot tongs; our capacity for sensitive feeling takes us that far. But in the Greek world-conception it was recognised that something of soul and spirit lives in the rays of the sun, something similar, yet distinct, is living in the rays of the moon, and that something actually happens when the moonlight—that borrowed sunlight—is wedded to the waves of the sea. It knew what was surging there when the pulse of the moonlight throbbed in tune with the waves of the sea. When the moon was thus wedded to the waves, the Greeks perceived in this light-enchanted weaving the impulse surging, pulsing, through the external world which, from conception the birth, pulses and surges in man. Outside in nature the Greek perceived in another form what is present in man when, in the physical sense, the mystery of human becoming is being accomplished.

Goethe, by putting into new and artistic form what intimately and delicately the Greeks might have felt, shows clearly how it echoed in his own feeling. He expresses all this by making Thales point to the retinue of the moon approaching on little clouds, accompanying Galatea's shell-chariot. This shell-chariot is the generating force in external nature pulsing through the sea. Goethe associates it with Luna, the Moon-force, the Moon-impulse. Thus, once again he evokes a significant Imagination from the Greek world-conception, in order to draw nearer the process by which, in man's conception, the abstract Homunculus-idea can become that of the Homo. Only when we can with feeling experience the intimate details weaving and surging in Goethe's wonderful pictures, do we really enter into what in this scene was living in Goethe's soul. We shall never go deep into all this scene contains if we try to grasp it with our bald, abstract concepts, and without arousing in ourselves an intimate sympathy with what Goethe was able to experience.

Thus, if I may express myself in dull, theoretical fashion, we shall come nearer the solution of the Homunculus-Homo problem if this idea, seen from outside the physical body, is planted into the generative impulse weaving, throbbing, through nature. Even before he brought Homunculus into contact with this generative impulse, Goethe had called in Proteus, the demonic being whose inner bent of soul Goethe regarded as most closely allied to his theory of metamorphosis. He has endeavored in this theory of metamorphosis, to follow up the changes in the living form, from the lowest order of beings up to man, hoping in this way to come nearer the riddle of man's becoming, the riddle of Homunculus-Homo. We know that Goethe had far to go before being able to arrive at the solution. He thought to recognise that the foliage leaf changes into the petal of the flower that, in its turn, becomes the stamen and pistil of the flower. He also believed that the bones of the spinal column are transformed into the skull bones. There he stopped, for he could not press on to the crown of this metamorphosis-idea, that appears for us when we know that a metamorphosis takes place in the forces which, from one incarnation, from one earth-life to another, permeate the human body. What today is my head has its form through the metamorphosis of the rest of the body of the previous incarnation; and what is my present body will be, with the exception of the head, transformed till, in the next incarnation, it becomes my next head. This is the crown of Metamorphosis. But Goethe could only give us the elementary stages of the idea of metamorphosis which flows on into Spiritual Science. He came nearer its further stages when trying to grasp and put into poetic form the problem of Homunculus-Homo.

And he set forth with honest doubt all that could be reached through Proteus as the representative of the metamorphosis-idea. Proteus appears in his various forms that exist, however, side by side. Everything that can lead to the birth, the supersensible birth, of the Homunculus-idea is here brought in by Goethe. Now he again comes to a standstill. Then fresh light flashes in. In contrast to all that is demonic, the elemental beings of a spiritual nature, Nereids, Tritons, Dorides, Nereus, Proteus, and so forth, in contrast to all these, there appear the Telchines. These, the oldest artists, as it were, of the earthly world during the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, remind us that Goethe was trying to approach the riddle of man, not only by the path of physical science, but also by another path of the senses—the path of art. As man, Goethe was neither one-sidedly a scientist, nor one-sidedly an artist; in him scientist and artist were consciously combined. Hence, as he stood before works of art in Italy, he said that he saw something there suggesting that the Greeks, in creating their works of art, worked in accordance with the laws nature applied, the same laws that he himself was tracking down. And if you let Goethe's book on Winckelmann work upon you, you will see how Goethe sought to come nearer knowledge of the riddle of man by way of art, how he sought to follow the course of natural phenomena to the point where, as he so beautifully expresses it in this book, nature becomes conscious of herself in man. What can be done here by the artistic conception of nature—seen from the other side, from the standpoint of supersensible knowledge—is made evident to us with the appearance of the Telchines, those ancient artists who first depicted Gods in human form.

Goethe intimates that, whereas he generally leads the human consciousness away from the physical to the superphysical, here he is making one look back from the superphysical to the physical; the Telchines are in the superphysical, but what they mean, what they stand for, passes over into the physical. They are portrayed as being in contrast with all the other figures—those dedicated wholly to Luna, to the Moon, and referred to by the Sirens as follows:

“Helios' initiated
Ye to bright day consecrated
Greet us in this stirring hour,
When we worship Luna's power.”

Thus they actually belong to the Sun. On the island of Rhodes they erected statue after statue to Apollo. The attempt has been made to solve the Homunculus-Homo problem by looking across to the supersensible world; but that too has been unsuccessful. And Proteus himself energetically denies that anything is to be gained from the Telchines for the transformation of Homunculus into Homo.

And what happens next? There now appear the Psylli and the Marsi, kinds of snake-demons, who bring with them the previously described shell-chariots of Galatea. The Psylli and Marsi are demonic snakes, who draw into the spiritual the souls of human beings; at the same time they are servants in the world man inters on leaving his physical body. In that world there is no separation between the purely animal and the purely human, the animal from passes over, merges, into the human.

Now after being shown by means of the sailor boys, and the Dorides who represent that world, how difficult it is to put before man the relation of the spiritual world to the world of the senses, we then see the shattering of Homunculus against the shell-chariot of Galatea. There is deep meaning in the Dorides thus ushering in the sailor lads in this scene. The Dorides are demonic beings of the sea, the sailors, human beings. Goethe is wishing to show how man is abel to approach spiritual beings from the other side of existence, and how destiny (we are distinctly told the sailor lads have been saved by the Dorides) brings man into connection with the Gods. But here in physical life this relation is immediately broken down; there is no continuous connection when the superphysical and physical wish to unite—the Gods will not suffer it.

Then at the end of this scene we ar confronted by this wonderful picture. After everything ha been tried through majestic Imaginations to turn Homunculus into Homo, there follows, as the highest, nearest, most significant approach to the solution of the riddle of man, the actual plunging of Homunculus into the generative force of nature in so far as it shows itself through the moonlit, moon-enchanted ocean waves. Into these waves Homunculus now plunges. And what do we see at the end of the scene? A flashing-up, a flaming forth, a manifestation of all the elements—earth, water, fire, air, all these elements overpower what is here taking place. And it almost seems to us that sunk with our cognition into sleep, we ourselves learn to know the Imaginations which, in the other side of existence, can alone interpret the riddle of humanity—it seems then, that through the rolling on of the generative forces we are called back into the life we must live out in the body. I told you yesterday that the force underlying impregnation, conception, pregnancy, embryonic life and birth, is only a more extended, more intensive form of the same force as that which lures us back from our nightly sleep, or from the sleep of cognition, to physical waking existence. These forces are identical. Every morning when we wake, the force that wakes us is, though different in intensity, the same as that by which a human being is conceived, carried as embryo, and born. One only of these is seen here on earth, and that merely in its external, not in its deeply mysterious, inner aspect. The other passes over us unperceived. The holy mystery of waking is unperceived in its passing. We sink down into a spiritual world, we are submerged in a spiritual world; we wake up, take possession of our body, and are in the physical world of the senses.

There are, nevertheless, even among those who are not clairvoyant, some men who when they are asleep know quite well what is actually living above, and through their sleep dreamily experience the spiritual world in its reality. Then they wake through the same force as the one living in Galatea's shell-chariot—the generative force of nature with which Homo-Homunculus unites himself on his way to becoming man. Some men know this even when not clairvoyant. There is, however, in clairvoyance, a knowledge that is perfectly clear concerning this waking. It may be understood in imagination only as a diving out of the spiritual world, down into the physical world of the senses, the world that lives in the elements of fire, water, earth, air. And on returning to this reality, all we think to have gained above in the other world, towards making a Homo of Homunculus, is dashed to pieces.

Faust is to plunge into the reality of ancient Greece; he is to meet Helen in person. And when you turn the page from the mighty finale of this scene where it runs:

“Hail the ocean! Hail the surge!
Girt with holy fire its verge,
Hail the water! Hail the fire!
Hail the chance that all admire!
Hail the breeze that softly swelleth!
Hail the grot where mystery dwelleth!
All we festally adore
Hail ye elements, all four!”

When you turn the page, you come to the third act:

“Admired much and much reviled Helena,
Leaving the shore where we but now did land, I come
Still drunken with the unrestful hallows' tumultuous
Commotion, that from Phrygian lowlands ...” and so on,

Faust is to enter Greek reality, he is to be wakened out of spiritual perception, highest spiritual perception, of the Homunculus-Homo problem, wakened into the Greek world. He is to wake there consciously, as Goethe wished to do; the moment of waking has to be brought about so as to show that what has been perceived in the spiritual world, in the supersensible, concerning the riddle of man, is shattered when the descent is made again into the external, physical reality of the body. That is an external process in nature, when the moon disappears and dawn breaks. But man today experiences this relation at best as something allegorical, symbolic or poetic. The reality underlying it is little recognised. We meet it here in something that is at the same time an embodiment of the problem of knowledge and also of true poetry. Goethe has indeed succeeded in leading Faust into the supersensible world in a noble way, and in making him wake to life in Greek reality.

We might remind ourselves here that it was during the eighties of the eighteenth century that Goethe took flight to Italy—for it was indeed a flight. Having studied nature in the north, he then wished to discover, for the benefit of his conception of the riddle of the world, what he believed that art of the south alone could give him. He gained much for we know what Goethe had become by the nineties of the eighteenth century. By then he had grown older, and that means younger in soul, for as a man outwardly ages, in his soul he grows young—youngest of all when he comes to dying. The life of the soul runs backward.—And so we come to about the year 1829. We may trace and experience what Goethe may then have felt: If, when I had the opportunity of really penetrating the art of the south, of making the spirit of Greece alive before my soul, if at that time I had only been able to take the plunge into the spiritual world that I now merely divine, how much richer, more intensive, all my experience would have been.—The characteristic mood of this second part of Goethe's Faust depends on our recognising in it an artistic representation of what has been experienced in life by a soul grown young again, a soul who in thus growing young has been enriched to a very high degree. That is why no philistine will be able to make much of this second part of Faust. And I can perfectly understand it when Schwaben-Vischer, the so-called V-Vischer, in many ways so spiritually minded, and who has said so much that is good about Goethe's Faust, has found that this kind of thing is tedious—the cobbled together patchwork of an old man. But philistinism, my dear friends, however learned and intelligent, can never penetrate into all the poetry, the lofty poetry, of the second part of Faust. No one can enter into this who does not allow his poetic sense to be warmed through, fired, by what spiritual vision gives.

Tomorrow, after the performance, we will say more about this scene, in connection with Goethe shown there concerning his own impulses.

In the two lectures following the performance of the later Walpurgis-night scene, from the second part of Faust, I hoped to evoke the feeling that, in the whole of his inner life, Goethe was in reality on the path to the supersensible world. I wanted you to feel that he succeeded, as perhaps no other artist, no other poet, has ever done, in developing an artistic creation out of this spiritual life, so that in this creation neither the art not the wisdom falls short and, in its own place, each of the spheres—of striving and wisdom—achieves harmonic expression.

I should not like you to think that in what has been said I have been wishing to give an interpretation of this poem; that was not at all my aim. For in this sphere I consider interpretation to be utterly useless. All that was attempted in these studies was to create the possibility for you to absorb and enjoy a poem, a work of art, in the same element in which it was created. Such studies should simply teach the language, as it were, the spiritual language, in which such a work is written, and should not expound or interpret, for as a rule that too often results in misconstruction and misinterpretation.

Now, if we keep to this mood in the matter, the following may perhaps be of use. You see, there are two fundamental feelings at the base of all striving for knowledge, of every kind of striving towards spiritual experience. One of these feelings comes from man having to think, having to form ideas, as he lives his life between birth and death in the physical body. I think you will agree that we should not be complete human beings, were we not to think about things and about ourselves. Then, too, if we wish to make our lives fuller in the physical body, between birth and death, we have not only to think but also to will. And feeling lies midway between thinking and willing; sometimes it partakes more of thinking and forming ideas, sometimes more of willing. Hence, for the purpose of our proposed study, we may ignore feeling, and consider the one pole of forming ideas, thinking, and then turn to the other pole of human activity, the willing. Man is a thinking and a willing being. But there are special features about this thinking and willing. The trivially-minded, average man looks upon what can be attained as the attainment of a goal if, on the one hand, he thinks as clearly and forcibly as possible, in his own opinion, at least, and if he wills in accordance with his needs. What distinguishes the man of learning who is fundamentally honest, is that he finally admits, when he tries to advance on the path of thinking, that with his thinking in the physical body he still only goes a certain distance towards his goal.

With this thinking, my dear friends, it is exactly as if a man were striving towards a goal; he cannot see it though knowing in what direction it lies. He wants to hasten towards it, but although he knows where the goal must be, it is wrapped in darkness. He imagines it will only become clear when he reaches it. And while he is feeling that he is still nowhere near the goal but a considerable distance from it, some being seems to seize from from behind, and to stop him going farther. And he says: Thinking, the forming of ideas, drives me in a certain direction, then I am stopped; were I to pursue the path of thought in this direction, I should never be able to reach the goal thinking itself has indicated.—Thus he comes to one of the boundaries to which he is by nature subject in the life between birth and death. And it may be said that whoever has never experienced the suffering and blows of fate arising from the goal of thought, has certainly no very deep cognitional life. If, by the inner constitution of his soul, a man can fancy he is able to reach the goal of thought by thinking, he is doomed to superficiality. We can be preserved from superficiality only when by trying to think as deeply and clearly as possible, we begin to feel harassed by the hindrances to thought. This feeling of being frustrated in thought is a profound human experience, without which we cannot pass beyond superficiality into a really deep comprehension of life.

And this is not the only boundary set to the human being's full experience between birth and death; the other is encountered where the will is unfolded. This is the sphere in which there germinate men's desires arising out of the life of instinct. Man is driven to willing in the crudest sense through hunger and thirst and other instincts; and there is then a rising scale from instinct up to the purest spiritual ideals. In all these impulses, from grossest instincts up to spiritual ideals, willing is deployed. But now, if we are to try and establish ourselves in life with our will that passes over into action, we again come to a boundary. Fundamentally, Goethe's aim in Faust was to establish Faust in life by means of his will, so that he should be able to experience all that makes life happy, all that shatters life, all that gives freedom and all that is sinful. And if we try to take our stand in life with the will that passes over into action, the will translated into deed, we again find ourselves up against a boundary. But now it is a different feeling that arises. It is not so much that in our thinking we are stopped and hindered from reaching our goal, but rather that, while we are willing, we are seized upon, and our willing goes on no longer in accordance with our own wishes. In the act of willing one is snatched away. Someone else arises in our willing, who carries us off.

This then is the second feeling which, when experienced by man, leads him out of superficiality into a profound conception of life. Self-satisfied philistines, it is true, are of the opinion that a man reaches his goal by sufficiently developing his thinking and willing. But it is on these paths of complacency and self-satisfaction that the superficiality of life lies. There does not lie here what makes it possible in life's testing, after suitable probation and the crossing of an abyss, to enter another world, a world that cannot be lived through with the consciousness developed in the life between birth and death. A man is tested when, with suitable intensity, he realises in his soul the two boundary lines already referred to. Men must understand precisely from what Goethe has given, that it is not merely the bliss of endeavor—often imaginary and based on pure illusion—that can be experienced, but rather what leads a man to his goal over all hindrances, disappointments and disillusions. And whoever strives to avoid disillusionment, and refuses to transform, to metamorphose, the whole human being in certain moments of life, cannot press forward to knowledge of man, to the understanding of man.

We need not realise, my dear friends, that in this connection the Christ-permeated conception of the world and of life must, in the near future, experience a significant change. Hitherto, Christianity through the way it has developed in the different religious denominations is, usually, only at its initial stage. If we want to describe this development, we might say that it has created the feeling in man that Christ did once exist. And even this feeling that Christ once existed has been lost again in the materialistic research of the nineteenth century. What Christ brought into the world, Christ's connection with the striving of the human soul, into all this life will first pour in future through the researches of Spiritual Science, and through a spiritual kind of cosmic feeling—a supersensible experience. This will be seen if, to begin with, in this intellectual age, the majority of mankind can only have the experience in Imaginations, in imaginative pictures.

But these two basic feelings of which I have just spoken as arising from the two boundaries of self-knowledge and self-comprehension, these two feelings must find a crossing-point from a passive to an active Christianity. Just think how, for many people in the past, Christ has been nothing more than a helper in straits where a man is unable to help himself. Think of the strange way in which the Roman Catholic Church took on, at a certain time, the forgiveness of sins; anyone might sin as much as he liked, provided he repented and did due penance afterwards, he was forgiven. In short, Christ was there to help in time of need, to make good what men as a whole had no intention themselves of making good. And then look at the other, more Protestant error, where a man remains passive too, arranging his worldly life, his worldly activities, to suit himself, and then perhaps expecting that merely by belief in Christ, by a passive feeling of being united with Christ, he will be saved. This twofold passive relation to Christ belongs, and must belong, to the past. And what is to take its place must be a relation to Christ that is an active force, a going to meet Him, so that Christ does not do for a man what the man does not want to do, but gives him power through His being to do it himself. An active Christianity—or rather a Christianity that comes to activity—is what must take the place of passive Christianity in which actually (forgive the trivial mode of expression) a man does what he pleases on the physical plane, making God into a kindly friend who pardons everything if only man turns to Him at the right moment.

This my dear friends, will at the same time mark the dividing line between the age which must now belong to the past, the age that has led to so terrible a human catastrophe, and the age that must come. It is only when this coming age has passed over from a Christianity that is passive to one that is active, that it will be qualified to heal those evils that have already shown themselves and will continue to do so increasingly so long as the principles of the past prevail. These evils are rooted deep in human hearts and souls; and they must be healed if earth-evolution is to proceed.

The two basic feelings of the boundaries to thinking and willing may also be described by saying: The one boundary makes it clear that a man cannot arrive at knowledge of his own nature. As human beings we are so constituted that we cannot, on the one hand, arrive at our own human nature, cannot with our thinking reach ourselves. In willing we do this, for willing actually proceeds form ourselves; in willing we lose ourselves; but here another seizes us—another cosmic being is formed simply according to the principle of this duality. He is a dual being, not a monad, but a dual being. The one member of this twofold being cannot reach itself, the other loses itself.

Hence man is never correctly represented when shown as a mere monad, but only when an effort is made to show him as standing midway between being unable to reach himself, and losing himself. And when it is possible for men to feel both at the same time with all intensity, then he feels himself rightly as a man on earth. When he feels a kind of oscillation between the two, then he feels himself man on earth. In spite of this oscillation, what must be arrived at is repose of being. This repose of being is attained in the physical sphere by the pendulum, the balance; in the spiritual, moral sphere, man must be able to attain the condition of repose reached by the balance and the pendulum. He must not aspire to a position of absolute rest; that would make him indolent and corrupt. He should strive for the state of repose midway between the beats, midway between the not-reaching and the losing himself.

In order to develop these feelings correctly it is essential that other feelings be added concerning life and reality.

You know, my dear friends, I have often called your attention to the one-sided way in which evolution is understood today. Think how the whole of evolution is now conceived as if what comes after were always the result of what went before. Actually, the man of today thinks of the successive stages of evolution almost like a set of cardboard boxes fitting into one another. And then, as for development, one box represents the human being between birth and the seventh year; then the second is taken out, and that is the human being from seven to fourteen; the third from fourteen to one-and twenty, and so on—one always coming out of another. To modern man the most acceptable idea is evolutionary advance in a straight line.

This is really at the bottom of all the grotesque notions that are learnt at school nowadays, notions which in future will be regarded as scientific lunacy of the enlighted period of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. To imagine thus that there was once a nebular condition (the Kant-Laplace theory) and that then, one after another, cardboard box out of cardboard box, the successive stages always proceeded out of the earlier—this is an abnormal idea of present-day science. For things are not like that. Just think how evolution in the individual man between birth and death appears, to even a moderately unprejudiced observation! The actual limit of the first period in life is the change of teeth, as we know—the cutting of the second teeth. I have often drawn attention to this. How what is this second cutting of teeth at about the seventh year, at the close of the first life-period? It is a consolidation, a hardening, of the human being, when a hardening process takes place in men. It is like a drawing together of all the life-forces, so that eventually the densest, most mineralised part, the second teeth, can appear. It is a real concentration and densification of all the forces of life.

The second period in life ends at puberty. And the case here is exactly the reverse. Here there is no concentration of life-forces but, on the contrary, a rarefication of them all, a dispersal, an overflowing. An opposite condition pulses in the organism. And then again, only in a more refined way, in the twenty-first year when the third life-period ends, consolidation takes place in man, the forces of life are once more drawn together. With the twenty-eighth year there is again expansion. The twenty-first year has more to do with the placing of what is within man,the twenty-eighth more with his attitude to the whole wide universe. Approximately at the thirty-fifth year there is again a kind of contraction. That is the middle life—the thirty-fifth year.

Thus, evolution does not go in a straight line but, rather, in waves: contraction, hardening; softening, expansion. That is essentially the life of man as a whole. By being born here in the physical world, we contract into our individual skins; while we are living our life between death and a new birth, we are increasingly expanding.

What follows from all this, my dear friends? It follows that the idea of evolution going in a straight line is of no help at all; it leads mankind astray, and we must reject it. All evolution proceeds rhythmically; all evolution goes with the rise and fall of waves—expanding, contracting.

Contraction, expansion. Goethe sensed this in its elementary stages. Read his Metamorphosis of Plants; read his poem The Metamorphosis of Plants, and you will see how he follows the particular formation from foliage leaf to foliage leaf, then to petal, stamen, on to pistil; how he describes it as a continuous expansion, contraction, not only in external forms, the saps also expand with their forces and again contract—expand, concentrate; expand, concentrate. When in the eighties of the last century I wrote my first introduction to Goethe's scientific works, I tried to reconstruct his archetypal plant, tried to bring into a picture this expansion, contraction, expansion, contraction—on and on right up to the blossom. No one can really understand life who does not picture it in rhythm, as a progressive rhythmic process. It must be repeatedly emphasised that to imagine evolution as proceeding in a straight line does not help us to a true understanding of life.

The same applies to the understanding of man's historical life. In the most recent number of the periodical Das Reich (October 1918) where I dealt with Lucifer and Ahriman in life, I pointed out how luciferic and ahrimanic periods alternate rhythmically in historic evolution. Life never proceeds in a straight line; it goes in waves. But while this is so, it is associated also with an external change. And only by looking clear-sightedly into these relations can we arrive at a deeper comprehension of life. Those who think of evolution as proceeding in a straight line, say: First there existed the most undeveloped animals, then more and more perfect ones, up to the apes, and out of these developed man.—If we apply this to what is moral—I have often called your attention to this—if we extend this further, it follows that the genuine, thorough-going Darwinian says: We already see in the human kindliness, and so on. This again is a worthless idea, for it takes no account at all of the rhythm of life. According to this idea evolution goes on in a straight line, one cardboard box coming out of another. In reality the matter is like this. Imagine the most highly developed animals with their proclivities further developed in a straight line—this way you do not arrive at man, you would never come to man. But the more highly developed animals would evolve those very qualities you find attractive in the animal kingdom, in a most unattractive way. What you admire in animals as companionableness, as incipient good-will and social behaviour, when further developed turns to its rhythmic opposite—to the principle of evil. Mad man developed according to Haeckel's idea, then, my dear friends, there would have evolved from the anthropoid apes a human society inevitably destined to develop the war of all against all. For in all these aptitudes, good as they may be in animals, there lies the further evolutionary impulse to clash together in violent and most bloody conflict. That is rhythm, a wave-like rise and fall, and no one finds what is hidden in nature who does not see the possibilities of evolution in rhythm. To look only on the outside of events can never teach us to realise what in reality is there. Man was able to develop only because, in the higher animals, their evolutionary possibilities did not come to anything, for these were met by another wave of cosmic becoming which subdued the tendency to evil, in a way overcame it, by what men were meant to be in the very beginning. So that we have to picture it thus: The animal kingdom rises to a certain height; then comes the other wave to meet it, and this deadens the evil development.

My dear friends, reincarnation can also be regarded from the moral point of view. What would man have become had he just been born, over and over again on the physical plane, and being thus born physically on the physical plane, he had not been met by all that is constantly being taken up into the spiritual world and again sent down; were man not thus ensouled after birth then he would live always at war on earth. They would only with to live in conflict and would develop the most terrible fighting instincts. These fighting instincts rest on the foundation of the human soul; they are rooted in the human organism. But they are paralysed, if I may so express it, by what comes from above out of the supersensible, from those human beings who are constantly taken up into the spiritual world. This is expressed also in the outward form, my dear friends. It is altogether grotesque for those with inner sight when the human head is represented as having gradually evolved from the animal head. It is indeed complete nonsense. The truth is that, were the animal head to develop further, a fearsome monster would emerge in what, in the present incarnation, you evolve out of the lower part of your body. Were that alone to form the head, were it to form the head out of itself, the result would be a real abortion of a head—a horrible animal-monster. For that is where the possibility of such a monstrosity lies. Only because the spiritual comes from above and, as it were, washes up against it, is the human head able to arise. It springs from the relationship of two forces, the one pressing upward from the body, the other coming to meet it from the cosmos. This human head is constructed in a state of equilibrium; and it is because of its equilibrium that we are not able to deal freely with what we bring with us from the spiritual world. We slip into our physical head and cannot there clearly express what we actually are, when we hurry into existence through birth. If we could think as we did before birth, we should not think a Homunculus, we should think a man, a Homo.

You remember in my Christmas lecture at Basle (December 22, 1918) not long ago, I mentioned in passing that, before his birth, Nikolaus von der Flüe saw scenes that he lived through as a man after his birth. But when a man is born, and does not overcome being asleep in his cognition—that is, when he cannot develop waking existence outside his body, but thinks only with his body—then he never thinks a man but only a Homunculus. A man never reaches the real man by seeking to enter into himself through the head. It is really a fact thgat he seeks to enter in but is held back; somewhere in the middle of man there exists what his is unable to reach. This is within man himself, yet he remains Homunculus and does not come to Homo.

Actually were we in possession of every technical resource, we should put into the phial that represents Homunculus on the stage, only a horrible little monstrosity, small, and therefore not unattractive; and this is really what would come into being were it left to the human body alone, out of itself, to produce something. There would come forth a sort of animal that nevertheless would be no animal but a human abortion; something on the way to becoming human yet not quite succeeding. Neither do we succeed if we do not make the approach by way of this path to becoming men, this path that does not reach man. We do not then succeed for we do not thus enter inside ourselves.

And again, if man grasps himself through his will, he is immediately seized upon by another being. Then he loses himself, then all kinds of strange motives and impulses surge up into his willing. Only when a man endeavours to bring the inner forces into equilibrium does he succeed in becoming complete man.

Now, my dear friends, with what I have said compare three different passages in the second part of Goethe's Faust that you can now have the opportunity on witnessing. Think of the sublime moment when Faust appears before Manto. Goethe is trying here to shed over the whole incident the inner repose of the human soul called forth by experiencing equilibrium. Faust would like, on the one hand, to avoid the sentimentality of the abstract mystic, and one of his last speeches is “O, could I from my path all magic ban”. He did not want external magic, he wanted to find the inner path to the supersensible world. He is near it, and then again far from it. As I explained yesterday Goethe is perfectly honest when Faust is standing before Manto. But Faust, my dear friends, does not hold to this abstract repose; he is tossed from pillar to post. Hence from the one side he is continually thrown to the opposite, where man loses himself through the will. Compare all this with what happens to Faust in the scenes where he is developing his life with Mephistopheles. There you have always the Faust of will, who, however is continually losing himself by his impulses being seized by Mephistopheles. This is where a man goes astray in his willing, where he will lose himself; here you have all the dangers that threaten man's moral impulses. And this is expressed with tremendous depth in Goethe's Faust.

Then take the moment when Mephistopheles joins the Phorkyads, when he himself takes on the form of a Phorkyad, and in all his ugliness goes as far as admitting it. Previously he was lying, but when the Phorkyads surround him he is obliged to admit his ugliness. Read the speech of the Phorkyads again; they too acknowledge their ugliness, and are in a certain way honest in their ugliness. In this moment you have a contrast to that sacred and sublime moment when Faust stands before Manto. What makes us lose ourselves in motives of will is clearly seen when Mephistopheles appears for the last time in the Classical Walpurgis-Night. Faust appears for the last time visibly, in the external drama, precisely in this scene with Manto—Mephistopheles in the scene with the Phorkyads. Goethe wished to indicate from the depths of his profound experience that, fundamentally, what makes us lose ourselves in the motives of will can only be set right if we not merely abhor it morally, but also experience it as something offending our taste. This was at the root of Schiller's feeling too, when he placed what is moral in such close connection with the aesthetic in his Aesthetic Letters.

This is just what is so distressing, my dear friends, that in the recent development of mankind culture has been brought to such a high pitch as, for instance, we see in Schiller's Aesthetic Letters, and this has all been forgotten. Imagine how Schiller believed that in these letters, written in the first place to the Duke of Augustonburg, he had brought about a deed of political significance. Whoever grasps the following two facts in their true depth learns much concerning the evolution of mankind. First he learns that Schiller's Aesthetic Letters were the outcome of his conception of Goethe's urge towards becoming; and, secondly, that this could be forgotten, that this forgetting has largely contributed to the present human catastrophe. Those who keep these two facts before them indeed learn much about the evolution of humanity.

And, from the point of view of drama, how great is the moment when in the terrible scene where Mephistopheles is among the Phorkyads we are shown how what is morally impermissible lives in man like a feeling that is aesthetically offensive. There, shown in all its atrocity, is the impulse, the essential impulse, that drives man to lose himself in the pole of will. Should a man fail to recognise this it will prove his ruin; only by realising it is one freed from it. You will find this expressed in the last scene of my first Mystery Play, The Portal of Initiation. There it is shown how only knowledge, a clear conception of who it is who tempts and seduces us, can save us from being led astray. It is therefore essential in the age of the consciousness-soul now entered that, in order to overcome temptation, we should strive in the right way to come to know the tempter, not allowing ourselves to sink down into a merely external knowledge of nature and a merely abstract mysticism.

In short, my dear friends, abstract mysticism, the ‘easy understanding of the divine within’, from which nothing results but a terrible egotistical abstraction—this abstract mysticism is just as bad as materialism.

As I said, take three moments in Goethe's Faust. Take purely artistically what you can feel as Faust stands before Manto; what you feel when Mephistopheles becomes a Phorkyad among the Phorkyads. And take the third moment when Homunculus crashes against Galatea's shell-chariot—feel what this Homunculus is. We come from the spiritual world seeking through conception and birth for physical existence. In this physical existence we meet with what, out of this physical existence, is given us as our physical body. Every evening we go back into the world that we leave at birth; every morning we, as it were, repeat our birth when we plunge again into our physical body. Then we can feel how, coming in from without, we do not arrive at what man is; we meet only with Homunculus, the manikin, the human being in embryo, and we realise how difficult it is to come to the real man. We might arrive at the real man could we contrive to have a perfectly clear conception just before waking, when all the evolutionary possibilities of the night are exhausted. This clear conception, my dear friends, would be a world-conception, it would be such that we should no longer feel ourselves hemmed in by any boundary, but feel as if poured out over the whole universe, over all cosmic light, all cosmic sound, all cosmic life, and in front of us a kind of abyss. One the far side of this would be a continuation of what we were feeling before we met the abyss on waking—namely, warmth. Warmth flows out over the abyss. Now, however, we cross the abyss by waking, into air, water and earth of which our organism is composed. Certainly we are approaching man, and by letting Homunculus fructify in the spiritual world, we have prepared ourselves to understand man. But in the ordinary course of life we do not do what I have just mentioned. The living conception we develop when sleep should have had its effect upon us before we wake, would have to be brought with us into waking life. This conception would be an experiencing ourselves in light, in cosmic sound, in cosmic life, a meeting with the beings of the higher hierarchies, just as here the physical body comes into connection with the mineral, vegetable and animal kingdoms. This conception, developed concisely just before waking when sleep has done its work upon us, we should have to bring deep down into our physical body; then we should be able to understand what this human body is. But alas “the Gods will not suffer it”. We plunge down; it flashes, flames up, and we hardly notice it. Instead of looking into ourselves, we hear with our external ears; instead of feeling ourselves within our skin, we feel what is outside with our sense of touch. If we did not sink down into what we are able to reach only by the physical eye, the physical ear, through physical sound and physical touch, Homunculus would receive new life and become man, but against the resistance of the elements he is dashed to pieces. The light of the eye flames up instead of cosmic light, we begin to hear physical sound in the ear instead of cosmic sound, the life of the body is aroused instead of cosmic life—Homunculus is shattered. If we experience this consciously, we experience the end of the Classical Walpurgis-night. Thus, this end scene is taken from actual, true life.

These things are not there merely to be spoken of on Sunday afternoons in the Anthroposophical Society. They are there as truth, to become gradually known to mankind, so that as impulses they may with their being penetrate what must be accepted in the future evolution of man, if he is to advance to what can save and not destroy. For men will really find the correct connection with reality only if they adopt new concepts and from now onwards they begin to see what has always been extolled as the great achievement of the nineteenth century is at an end.

You see, my dear friends, it is not surprising that, from a certain point of view, this achievement of the nineteenth century, that continued into the twentieth, should be felt to be perfect. It is not to be wondered at all. Is it not true that before the tree becomes bare in autumn, it is in its fruiting in its most perfect stage of development. This natural science of the nineteenth century, that still haunts the twentieth, al these technical perfections that have reached a certain height, are the tree before it yields its fruit. All from which it has grown has to wither, and it is not enough that the tree should go on growing, a fresh seed must be sown in the field of human culture, a new tree must be planted. It does not suffice to think we understand the evolution of animals, to think of them as having advanced to the stage of man. It is not enough that frequently some spirit arises, who first writs articles of genius about animals, and later, to follow these, a book about the origin of man. Rather is it essential that men should discard the idea of a straight line in evolution, that they should learn to understand the rhythm of life, flowing like the waves of the sea, that they should learn how, in the inner being of man, the way does not go straight on, but across two boundaries. At the one boundary we feel almost suffocated, for someone seizes us and will not allow us to go where our thinking would take us. On the other side we feel as if the powers of Mephistopheles were dragging us to destruction. We must find the balance between what belongs to Homunculus and what belongs to Mephistopheles, between not being able to reach ourselves in Homunculus, and grasping the self only to lose it in Mephistopheles. The understanding of this equilibrium is what modern man must gain. And Goethe, foreseeing this in feeling, lived himself into this understanding when with absolute honesty he tried in his Faust to speak as he did of the riddle of humanity.

Mankind must strive to grow out of what today is the typical point of view of the crowd. Nothing is more resented at present than this striving, and nothing is more injurious to mankind than this hostility against any effort to rise above the commonplace. On the other hand, as long as this resistance is not definitely opposed by those who recognise the necessity of penetrating into the supersensible, there can be no sure human evolution. At the end of the nineteenth century Hamerling, in his Homunculus sought to make what we might call a last appeal to mankind out of the past, by presenting all that is decadent in modern humanity as Homunculism.

We might picture this to ourselves, my dear friends; suppose someone were now to read this Homunculus of Hamerling's which appeared at the end of the eighties of the nineteenth century. I have given many lectures about it, even before the war I actually spoke of it, not without a certain significance. Let us suppose then that someone reads Hamerling's Homunculus and lets work upon him what Hamerling imagines as the evolutionary progress of his Homunculus. He thought it out at that time, when men had already broken away from Goethe and all that he gave, and wished to hear no more of it. Hamerling represented the evolution of his Homunculus, how he was completely under the sway of materialistic thinking, how he lived in a world where people did not enrich themselves with spiritual treasure but became millionaires instead. Homunculus was a millionaire. He pictured the world where men treat even spiritual matters with frivolity, the world in which journalism—with respect be it mentioned—that was already developing, has since sunk yet deeper into the slough. We assume then that someone reads this Homunculus, and he might say: Why, yes, this Hamerling who died in 1889, had, when he wrote his Homunculus, with his physical eyes actually only seen mankind as it then was, hurrying on its chosen path. He might continue: Had people then taken seriously what Hamerling emphasises in his Homunculus, had they let it work upon them a little more deeply and not just as a literary production, but as something to be taken in earnest, then indeed they would not have been surprised to learn that, because of men being as they then were, our present world-catastrophe had of necessity to arise. This is what anyone reading Homunculus today might say to himself. What is there in the development of this world-catastrophe to astonish us, when a writer in the eighties of the last century was able to represent the man Homunculus in this way? But, underlying this representation of man, of Homunculus, is at the same time the appeal not to stop short at the life that can give us only Homunculism, but to cross the abyss where Spiritual Science speaks of the supersensible knowledge that alone can change Homunculus into Homo. And so it might be said: Mankind is placed in the Homunculism which, in the scent we are today presenting, finds itself in a world the man of today is not very eager to enter—in a world leading to the region of the Phorkyads, between Homunculism and Mephistophelianism. Goethe divined this and represented it in his Faust; he also divined that a path must be made that will avoid the crags of fantastic, abstract mysticism, as it avoids the other crags of a phantom-like conception of nature, remote from all reality,a path that leads to supersensible knowledge where fresh social impulses will be found.

This is a very deep layer of consciousness. Let us penetrate it, let us permeate our feeling with it, let us learn to understand the language of this sphere of consciousness, coming as it does from the region where we feel: Through thinking, a man cannot reach himself; through willing he loses himself. To be unable to reach oneself in thinking is Homunculism; losing oneself in willing is Mephistophelianism. And when we feel this then we enter into such profound scenes with a language that makes intelligible what forms the conclusion of the Classical Walpurgis-night. Ultimately, everyone views the universe according to how the forces he has received enable him to represent it. But the present task of mankind consists in raising those forces, so that much of the universe may be seen that, to man's hurt, has not been seen during the last decades.

Thus, going deeply into such a profound scene as the one we are now producing, is a way for men to advance in the direction which mankind at this time should take. What lies in true Goetheanism is what mankind at this time should take. What lies in true Goetheanism is what mankind must seek. This is not the Goetheanism of the professors, not the Goetheanism of the Goethe Society at the head of which is not a Goethe enthusiast at all but a former finance minister bearing the significant name of Kreuzwendedich; neither is it all that men thought they must make out of Goethe's teaching at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. What must be sought will become something good and a good impulse towards man's advancement in the direction he must go—if in the coming age he is to find salvation and not destruction.

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